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by C. Jeanette Tyson
I
did not venture west of the Mississippi until I was in my twenties, but I knew exactly what it would be like for I had read Zane Grey.
There, on flat, sandy ground, pressed low by damp skies and hovering
pines, I fell in love with the West, or my determined vision of it.
The West would, of course, be wide open.
Huge skies where the clouds
rode high and storms charged the air. Life would be simple (one cup,
one tin plate), yet never dull (rattlesnakes in the bedroll). Men would
be men but so would the women, there being little energy for societal
complexities and much need for things like firewood and water. There
would be good guys and bad guys but it’d be easy to tell which was
which and although a few people would get hurt, the bad guys would
never win. The rocks would be red and ragged and the sage purple as
the prose.
Out West, God would remind you on a daily basis who sat taller in the
saddle. But as long as you understood that, you were free to do
whatever you wanted, whatever you could think of. Back then I couldn’t
distinguish Utah from Wyoming from Texas but it didn’t matter. I knew
I’d be home where the antelope roamed.
I don’t know why my father introduced me to Zane Grey. He lived his
entire life within a five- or six-state radius, all original colonies.
But he’d once come close to being an adventurer; he’d joined the army.
And though that career ended for him just after basic training, he was
given a GI bill which opened up other frontiers, which were, perhaps,
enough. Or maybe not.
Flash forward twenty or thirty years. I’ve been northwest, southwest,
I’ve been to California! and now I’m in Austin, Texas, in a restaurant
with its name writ large by a rattlesnake: Ranch 616.
There are horns mounted on the walls and taxidermy. There are news
clippings and faded photographs and one of Bob Wade’s painted
photographs of a 1930’s Western swing band. Flotsam from the Austin
prairie has piled up in the corners over the years.
A few chuckwagon-sized booths line the wall, with smaller tables
huddled in the middle of the floor, although there are fewer tables on
Tuesday and Thursday when Lucas Hudgins and the First Cousins, a
five-piece band that includes pedal steele, rocks the joint with
rollicking Texas honkytonk.
On a Thursday night, the place is full of beautiful people: a
commercial real estate developer entertaining colleagues from San
Diego, a landscape architect scribbling out plans, a bachelor’s party,
an advertising executive and her nephew visiting from Florida, a rich
guy everyone seems to know, his splendid wife and her very blonde
friends. And soon enough, not a cowboy hat in sight, the place
nonetheless becomes a dancehall.
People, of course, also come for the grub. There is beef on the menu
but also plenty of opportunities to order off the ranch: talapia spiced
up with a mango salsa, fish tacos that could have benefited from less
cabbage and more sauce. There are Gulf shrimp wrapped in apple-smoked
bacon, sea bass and duck. But what I recommend most highly is a cold
beer and the best fried oysters I’ve ever put in my mouth; that, my
friend, is the big yeehaa at Ranch 616.
On a recent Saturday night with no music, and with, apparently, most of
the men in town at home watching the Final Four, things were a bit
quieter. We could actually hear ourselves talk in our big corner booth. The conversation revolved around opening up frontiers. There is a new
friend at the table, just in from San Diego. She quit her lucrative and
secure corporate job, her lovely three-bedroom house, saddled up the
car and came to Austin. She’s still formulating what’s next. Others
have more concrete ideas in the works: a book, a business, a change of
neighborhoods. In the past months, in all our lives, ties have been
broken and there is more of that to come. There are trepidations, big
things to work out. But what struck me was the look of calm, peace and
pure excitement in the faces around the table that night, and far
beyond it.
In her book Gifts of the Sea, Anne Morrow Lindbergh speaks of the
restless and troubled state of the adolescent as she anticipates what
her life will become. Lindbergh believed the same state re-occurs when
women get past the acquisition stage, the ambitious, nest-feathering
stage, and begin to distill what’s truly necessary in their lives, to
find what’s real within themselves and to follow that. This period
of
searching isn’t limited to women, of course, and in middle age this
restlessness isn’t tolerated as well. But it should be, as it gives
rise, when the time is right, to new life and fresh ideas, to brave
forgings of snake-infested rivers, to the staking of new territory. It
gives rise to conversations over dinner at Ranch 616 about coming
west -- or east -- and changing your life, then some lively kicking up of
heels.
I believe part of what people like about Austin is that they rarely see
a cowboy hat here. Nevertheless, there are big skies and a charged
atmosphere. Maybe wide-open is just a state of mind.
It’s all so Zane Grey.
____________
C. Jeanette Tyson is a freelance writer blessed with four-year-old
twins and wacky friends willing to re-enact the hustle on local
sidewalks. Maybe it was the oysters. Ranch 616 is at 616 Nueces.
512.479.7616.
