The Texas Hills

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Among bigger mammals are coyotes and white-tailed deer. (Gillespie County claims the highest white-tailed deer population in the world, estimated at one deer per four acres.) Nine-banded armadillos rattle across yards and along roadways. Though buffalo roamed the region in the last century, and cotton was once raised here, it's mostly ranching country now. There's grassland for cattle and sheep and foliage for browsing goats. In fact, the area is part of the nation's leading Angora goat- and mohair-producing region, as well as part of a leading sheep and wool area.

The rich soil in Gillespie County nurtures commercial crops of peaches, plums, apples, pecans, blackberries, tomatoes, squash, bell peppers and persimmons. However, in much of the Hill Country, the soil is thin and alkaline, though vineyards and the resulting wineries are a new and vital industry. (Texas wines are amazingly fine, folks!) A long growing season, abundant water, a lot of compost and a strong fence to keep the varmints out can produce a spectacular home garden almost anywhere-that is, if you have the muscle and energy to dig up and remove the ubiquitous rocks, while keeping in mind the rattlesnakes and scorpions that also make the Hills their home.

The Taos of Texas

Aside from birds, bats and tourists, the Texas Hills seem to act as a magnet for art ists and craftspeople. Whether their talents attract the tourists or the tourists attract the talent is a chicken-and-egg question. Probably it's a bit of both. At any rate, the ratio of both nationally recognized and undiscovered artists, illustrators, sculptors, whittlers, writers, weavers, photographers, potters, candlemakers and stained-glass artisans to ordinary citizens is mind-boggling. Take, for instance, the warm, wacky and welcoming town of Wimberley that sits at the confluence of the Blanco River and Cypress Creek about 45 minutes from Austin and an hour from San Antonio.

An overwhelming percentage of Wimberley's local firms are boutiques, restaurants, antiques shops, craft stores and art galleries; the last are so filled with the works of area artists that Wimberley, with ample justification, calls itself "the Taos of Texas."

(While browsing in a Wimberley boutique, I heard the busy owner ask another woman to ring up a sale. "But I'm on vacation," the woman protested. "So what?" the store owner replied. "When you live in Wimberley, you're always on vacation.")

Technically, Wimberley can't even be called a town, because repeated, and probably needed, efforts to incorporate it have always been voted down. Therefore, no one really knows its actual population, and estimates range from 2,500 to 7,000, depending on where you draw the city lines. As a result of the lack of a tax base, services that would normally be handled by city government have been taken over by individuals and volunteer organizations. Major decisions are made at village meetings, and such events as the installation of Wimberley's first traffic light are hotly debated in the letters column of the local paper.

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