Beefhead Ditch, Founders’ Park and Other Thoughts

Some random thoughts as I try to decide where we’re going to take the kids on Halloween ...

• I was sad to hear of the La Grange city council’s plan to close in Beefhead Ditch (published in our Friday Oct. 16 edition).

To me the big open stone-sided drainage area is rather majestic and some of the area’s uniqueness will be lost if the city goes through with the plan.

I understand there’s structural issues with the ditch, but I wish they could be addressed while still maintaining the character of the area.

I think for anyone who grew up in La Grange, Beefhead Ditch was a sort of intriguing, mysterious place that made a kid’s imagination run wild. My siblings and would stand near the edge and stare down at the 15 foot drop into it when we’d go to HEB with our mom. We wondered if releasing a full shopping cart at just the right moment, at just the right incline, might send a cascade of cereal boxes and canned corn over the cliff.

During school days in the 1980s, Beefhead ditch was where high schoolers would stand during lunch and smoke. Those of us in elementary school would look on through the school windows half scared and half in admiration of the dangerous looking teens.

There’s a walkway under Travis Street halfway down Beefhead Ditch, which is where many a local kid first viewed graffiti.

More recently, after I moved back to town as an adult, our home was less than half a block from where Beefhead Ditch opened up on Jackson Street.

More than once we caught snakes in our backyard and (as gently as possible) released them down onto a landing partway down the ditch.

On rainy days we’d grab umbrellas and walk down to watch the water surge down the ditch. During Hurricane Harvey we went out and wondered if the water was finally going to spill over the top.

• Speaking of a construction decision that will rob the area of some character, I think another unfortunate idea is the county’s plan to close in Founders’ Park on the square and make it into a tourism office. I love the idea of adding public bathrooms to the park, but that can be done without changing the rest of the park.

There’s plenty of vacant spaces for rent on the square if the county really wants a tourism office.

I wonder if a tourism office could actually be put inside the courthouse instead to encourage more people to get inside to see Fayette County’s most beautiful building?

• The family and I attended a wedding a few weeks ago.

The bride, my niece, said it was the happiest day of her life.

Celebrations can still happen amidst a pandemic, and they seem more special now than ever before.

There was no escaping the overtones of the pandemic. Guests could grab a tye-died face mask at the door and then choose one of three different bracelets to wear – red, yellow or green, depending on your personal comfort level with how close you wanted people to get to you.

Most of us chose green bracelets, an invitation for others to come as close as they wanted, but our nine year old went with the yellow, which said people could come relatively close, but not touching, please.

The ceremony itself was held outside, on a beautiful fall evening, five months after it was originally supposed to. The pandemic was supposed to have been gone by now, thus the postponement.

But you can’t wait forever.

The bride was beautiful. The reception was grand.

Back in the summer of 2001, I drove a U-Haul filled with all her stuff helping she and her mom move back to La Grange from California.

Nineteen years later there she was, all grown up.

Time flies.

• Our kindergartener got on the wrong bus the other day. Scared the heck out of his mom and I until the school was very helpful in tracking him down, but he seemed unfazed.

He got a nice tour of Nechanitz.

Jeff Wick is the editor of the Fayette County Record. He has scaled down the rocky side into the bottom of Beefhead Ditch before, but his dream of kayaking down there during a big rainstorm remains unfulfilled.