prairie point

About halfway between our place and the village where sits our post office and a few other establishments we visit as the need arises, the road passes by Clayton Mountain. Now visitors usually complain that it is not really a mountain. And as mountains go it certainly doesn’t seem very impressive. It rises a few hundred feet above the plain and is wide and flat at the top. I would probably call it a “ridge” myself. But folks hereabouts call it a mountain.

On the west side there is said once to have been coal mines and in fact some maps actually show a tiny dot there with the name Coalville next to it. From the road you can catch a glimpse of a few old tumbledown ruins back behind the trees. One of the older ladies at the church in the village says her daddy used to lease the top of the mountain to graze cattle on long ago. She said there was a natural spring up there and they used to go up there and picnic sometimes.

But for some time at least the mountain has been owned by a family that lives in the city. And a few years ago they decided to divide it up into little one to ten acre lots for weekend and retirement homes for city people. Some of the land has been set aside as natural areas and there are amenities like a clubhouse and an equestrian center. This is happening all over rural areas, and there are people who welcome it and people who hate it. But it’s the way of the world.

But there is one thing about this development that has always struck me as strange. And that is the fact that it is a gated community. There is just one road in and you have to stop and enter a code to open the gate. I don’t know why that bothers me so much. I mean, if it were a ranch and not a development it would probably have a gate. I’ve seen gated communities in towns. But here there is just barely a population in the five digits in the whole county and it is a mile in any direction to another house or road. I guess it keeps the riff-raff from dumping old sofas in the ravines.

Anyway it is not hard to get in. Just show up and act like you might be interested in buying, and they’ll give you a guided tour. I did that a few years ago. A small blond woman right out of community college and wearing jeans and boots greeted me with a big smile. She piled several of us into a 4-wheel drive suburban and showed us all around. That was before there were any roads and she really did need that 4-wheel drive.

Anyway the story that I’m slowly getting around to telling here is that Tricia heard about a lady living up on the mountain who was moving away and selling some yard furniture, and Tricia wanted me to drive up with her and take a look and see if it wasn’t something we might could use. So that is what we did on Saturday morning.

Tricia had the code to the gate but we didn’t need it. When we got to the gate there was already a car going in and we just followed them on in. Just like in every other gated community I’ve ever gone to.

Since I had been there last roads had been built and we followed our directions out to the end of a cul-de-sac on one end of the ridge. This was one of the first sections to be developed and there were already a number of houses. We parked the truck in the street and when we got out I couldn’t help but think that seen from here this looked exactly like any nice sub-division in north Dallas or Austin. The same with the house, except that there was a huge covered porch all along the back where you could see for miles. Turned out the owner had decided to go back into the construction business with his son and was moving back to the city.

We loaded our second-hand furniture in the back of our truck and then decided to take a look around. Aways down the street I found a little community park and snapped a photo of the view.

Farther on the ambiance kind of changed. The lots became a little bigger and there were fewer trees. This must have been where they used to graze the cattle. There were pipe fences and it looked farm-like. There were few houses, mostly just white signs every few hundred feet with lot numbers on them. Some of them had another sign down below that said “sold.” It was beautiful land, clean and pristine. It had rained overnight and there were streams everywhere rushing over limestone ledges. We got lost on the roads back in the woods and then found our way again and wound up driving down a canyon past a clubhouse and a big pond. Just beyond the pond there was a spot that could have been a scene from a national park and I started dreaming about how wonderful it would be to have a cabin just there.

Then reality set in and I turned around to head back to the gate. Out on the highway the road seemed so weird, so narrow and unkempt after driving on those wide perfect streets.