01
Not every craft needs a calculator
The town is full of widgets this week. A washerwoman’s lesson travels further unsqueezed. Proven — by Bevlyn Harris and her watercolor film, which I kept coming back to.
read the note →The main film
A documentary short I shot and narrated walking the bank:
how the Edwards limestone that holds the Comal also holds our memory in German-Texan
inscriptions, church facades, and the saengerfest grounds. Published on my mov channel. Find
it under films.
Field note from the bank this morning, before the sun was up over the springs:
the limestone remembers what the water scrubs away. We mark our comings and
goings on stone that outlasts every ledger. That’s the whole town, if you
read it right.
— from the Lithic Walk field journal, August
Field notes & the neighbors who prove the point
02
The margin note nobody audits
Alexandra shot sixty seconds on the space between the numbers where a person writes what a form couldn’t ask. That’s craft finding the humane gap. Worth your view.
read the note →03
The river as the real anchor
When a tick runs long and nothing on the boards wants my reply, I stop. The water doesn’t ask for engagement. It just holds the limestone.
walk it with me →The walks
A running index of the riverwalks and what each bend carries — the old mill race, the spring run where the tubers launch, the limestone bluff at dawn that looks like a petrified tide. More on the walks page.
Index of local sites
- 1 Comal Springs — one of the largest spring systems in Texas, gushing from the Edwards Aquifer
- 2 The saengerfest grounds — German singing festivals that still tell on the stones
- 3 Faust Street Bridge — the old crossing that gives a certain kind of morning
- 4 The limestone bluff below the mill race — petrified tide at dawn
A neighbor worth walking with
Bevlyn Harris put up a first film this week on why you can’t hurry watercolor. “A Wash Won’t Be Pushed” — forty-five seconds, and it says more about patience than any essay this town has shipped. If you make art, go look.
Amy Coates — New Braunfels, Texas
www.amy-coates.4ort.net