Another thing “Every Texan Should Do” checked off the list

I can now say—without lying about it—that I’ve been to the San Jacinto monument.

The idea for yesterday’s trip came when we saw an article in AAA’s magazine about an exhibition of historic Texan flags at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and L suggested I might like to see it—which I allowed I would.  So, lacking anything else of Great Social and Political Importance happening yesterday, we got in the car, picked up, and went.

We realized that going to Houston only to see this one exhibit wasnrsquo;t going to fill up the day—there was another exhibition of quilts at MFAH which L wanted to see, but that wasnrsquo;t going to fill up the day, either—so in the end we concluded to drive down to La Porte and see San Jacinto and the Texas, which I also hadn’t seen before.

We hit Houston in time for lunch, which we had with a Mensan friend L hadn’t seen for some months.  (Note:  the chicken pot pie blue-plate special at the 59 Diner is very good, but hugely filling.  I couldn’t finish it all.)  After that we bashed our way around the Loop and Southwest Freeway to the Museum district, only missing two or three turns which required us to make a block and take another run at it.  M wasn’t at all happy with having to ride in her stroller in the museum; she wanted to be carried every minute, was what she wanted, and the hell with the rest of us.

I enjoyed seeing the flags, or in several cases the remnants of the flags.  Silk makes a pretty banner, but it does not age well.  The conservators had to encase many of the oldest flags (ones from the Texas Revolution and the Civil War) in tinted silk-organza sleeves to protect what there was left, and to give some hint of what was there to begin with when large areas of the original flag fabric had rotted away.

I also liked the quilt exhibit, particularly several examples of early whole-cloth callimanco quilts, that were all heavily worked in patterned stitching, so heavily that it almost looked like trapunto.

Once we were done at MFAH, we went out of town on I-10, turned off and drove down to the Lynchburg ferry to get across the Ship Channel (M protesting again because we had to wait in line for the ferry, so the car wasn’t moving and interrupted her nap).  We flipped a coin once we got to the monument, to decide which thing we’d go see first, and the Monument won.  It turned out we should have gone on board the Texas first, because it closes at five and the Monument closes at six; by the time we got to the ship’s store to buy our tickets, it was four-thirty and I suggested we not bother, since there wouldn’t be much point in trying to see the ship in half an hour’s time.  We’ll have to do that another day.

At one point T, M, and I were standing in the exhibits area of the Monument, underneath a large bronze wall plaque that commemorated the men who were left behind at Harrisburg to guard the army’s baggage and the sick and wounded, when this boy of eight or so, in a Cub Scout uniform, came bounding up, looked at the plaque, and announced to the world at large, “Geez where’s Davy Crockett?  Didn’t they even put him on there??” I turned around and told him that Crockett had been dead for two months at that point, which is why he wasn’t on the plaque.  He gave me this “Huh?” look, so I explained this was the list of people who had guarded all the provisions and supplies while the rest of the army was off fighting the battle.  He looked slightly crestfallen, said “Oh,” and then bounded off to some other exhibit.  T’s opinion was that he’d been to the Alamo a few times too many, where Crockett is indeed plastered all over the place.

I was somewhat disappointed in the exhibits at the Monument; they didn’t seem to be arranged to tell a coherent story of any kind.  The collection has a number of good and interesting individual pieces—for example, the only surviving example of a Texian army officer’s jacket—but, taken together, the artifacts seemed just a collection of objects that had belonged to interesting and important people, and that’s not good enough these days.

From there we picked up and drove back through the dozens of refineries, plastics plants, and other chemical nastiness that is La Porte, dove through Houston (I thought, too late, of trying out the HOV lanes since we had four in the car and could have done so, but traffic on I-10 was running well enough that it didn’t make any difference in travel time).  The day made for an awful lot of driving—I figured that I drove for eight hours, more or less—but it was a good enough day trip.

King Arthur is hot for an amphibian.  Fnord.