The neat thing that happened to us in Lorenzo, we found a guy with a garage sale. Yes, he'd bought the contents of a storage locker and he was selling the stuff from his front yard. Actually he lived across the street but his garage was on the other side of the street. He had a couple of cute kids, a boy and a girl, who gave us the tour and their sales pitches were really good. We ended up spending five bucks for a turquoise necklace that seemed to be antique and a few music cds by obscure artists and bands. Not bad stuff. You can find those cds on line but you'd pay about ten times what we did. There was one by Paul McCartney I'd never heard before, or seen before, and he was the only artist I was familiar with.
Frankly, I'm not entirely sure that the first few photos weren't taken in Ralls. I'll have to pay more attention when we are out and about. It's not like towns like this look markedly different.
I wish I knew why my modem needs a reboot every week or so. Had to go through that stupid routine again this morning. Modem off and then on, then restart the computer. Only after that procedure could I get a connection.
I think that might happen because my computer is not always on. My computer is on line only when I need to be on line, and that is not very often.
This group of photos completes our look at Ralls, Texas.
I'm not exactly sure anymore where Ralls leaves off and Lorenzo begins, but I'll at least be approximate. These images are all Ralls.
We could not drive exactly where we wanted to in Ralls or Lorenzo because melting snow had turned many unpaved roads into mush. These small towns can't afford to do much paving. They really can't afford to do much of anything. Small towns like this are perfect places for an Objectivist to live. Every man for himself. My roads, my wells, my way or the highway. A lot of squalor amid tiny islands of wretched excess. For some, a perfect world. In practice, ugly, but ideologically, pure as driven snow.
On and on we go.
Ralls is small but it didn't seem so bad. It was cold and it was a Sunday, so we didn't have a chance to interact with anyone. We didn't see many people around. We saw a surprising number of folks driving around in Ralls but we had no idea where they could have been going because nothing seemed to be open for business. That was sort of a mystery. It was too late to be going to church.
I think the structures below have something to do with the local water supply. It looked to me like a small storage reservoir and a pump building but if that's what it was it was in sad shape.
It's kind of hard to tell which buildings are in use and which ones are ruins.
Residential areas in some of these small towns are tricky too. You see a house in such awful shape, so derelict and neglected, you think it must be abandoned. Surely no one could be living in such a ruin, with holes in the walls, and rotting plywood nailed over windows, and weeds everywhere. But no. Close examination sometimes reveals that somebody indeed lives there, and they drive a new Ford extended cab heavy duty King Ranch edition pick-up that must be worth several times the house, or shack. The truck is usually parked in back. And of course, there are satellite dishes. And you can lay money that these folks enjoy a giant screen plasma TV and have a hundred or more channels to choose from. It's all a matter of priorities.
