HEAD FOR THE HILLS AND DALES, Y’ALL

It’s a cool and cloudy Sunday morning and I’m trailing behind daughter Kate and her buddy Sierra up the pink granite shoulder of Enchanted Rock, the most prominent natural landmark in the Texas Hill Country. As we toil upward, the girls spot a rock climber a hundred yards or so to our left. Arms and legs akimbo, he seems plastered to the side of one of the huge boulders scattered like primordial building blocks at the base of the outcropping.

“How’d you get up there?” Sierra shouts.

“I climbed,” the young man shouts back, through what must be gritted teeth.

“Don’t die,” Kate shouts, and the laughter of irrepressible 11-year-olds bounces off the rocks around us.

The girls and I have come to Enchanted Rock--wife Tara has stayed behind at our cozy little B&B; in nearby Fredericksburg--for the same reasons that so many people visit the site: We want to get out of the city, breathe the clean air, take in the soothing natural beauty of the place. As usual, we are not disappointed.

The Texas Hill Country is a swath of deeply wrinkled terrain that stretches westward from the edges of Austin and San Antonio for a hundred miles or so, to the semi-arid Edwards Plateau. North and south, it runs from about a hundred miles northwest of Austin to some 200 miles southwest of San Antonio, almost to the Mexican border near Del Rio. This vast arc of land is unlike any in Texas, distinguished by its rugged limestone hills and shrouded by oak, juniper (Texans call it cedar) and valleys watered by spring-fed streams.

The first Europeans in the Hill Country were 7,000 Germans who came to the area in the 1840s. Their small valley farmsteads and orderly little towns with handsome churches and sturdy limestone buildings also contribute to the Hill Country’s uniqueness. The Anglo-Americans arrived a few years later.

Ask Texans about the Hill Country and chances are you’ll get a smile and a story. They’ll tell you about a wonderful summer-camp experience as a kid, or how great it is to float in an inner tube down one of those cool green streams under the dappled shade of towering bald cypress trees. Or they’ll recall some little country dance hall tucked away in the hills where there’s Lone Star beer and live music on Saturday night. They’ll mention peaches and bluebonnets and how someday they just might retire there.

About the only thing negative you’ll hear about the Hill Country is that it’s been discovered. It wasn’t that long ago that the towns and villages were isolated from the rest of the state, cut off not only by the hills and the lack of roads but also by an inclination on the part of Hill Country residents to keep to themselves. With no economic incentive to tear down and rebuild, an itch that has long characterized much of Texas, the towns and villages in the Hill Country retained their rustic appeal.

My friend Jack Maguire, an 80-year-old writer who lives in Fredericksburg, credits his old friend Lyndon B. Johnson with opening up the Hill Country. It was Johnson who, as a young congressman in the late 1930s, brought electricity to the region, making life easier for the hardscrabble farmers and their families and connecting them via radio to “Fibber McGee and Molly,” Jack Benny and FDR’s fireside chats. And later, as Maguire points out, it was President Johnson who proudly introduced his native haunt to heads of state and mobs of media people, and they shared its charms with the rest of the world. More recently, Hollywood has discovered the Hill Country, not only as a movie location but also as a place to live. Producer Linda Obst and actress Madeleine Stowe, among others, are Hill Country Texans now.

These days, the amoeba-like sprawl of San Antonio and Austin, two of the fastest-growing cities in the nation, is pushing inexorably into the Hill Country, and the little German towns are booming as well. In the countryside, where it gets more and more difficult to wrest a living from the land, old family-owned ranches are being carved into five-acre ranchettes and, as in so many other nature-blessed areas of the nation, the fragile environment is in danger of being loved to death.

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You do have to drive farther these days to escape the subdivision sprawl. We head west out of Austin on Highway 290 and have to go 20 miles out, past the rapidly growing town of Dripping Springs, before we can take a deep breath, reconnect to our surroundings and realize that we’re finally past the housing developments, convenience stores and strip malls gouged out of the limestone hills only last week, it seems.

Twenty miles beyond Dripping Springs, 290 intersects with Highway 281 and the Hill Country visitor has a decision to make. Turning south toward San Antonio, 50 miles away, takes you first to Blanco, a quiet little country town on the banks of the Blanco River. Blanco State Park, in the middle of town, is a pleasant camping and swimming spot. On this Saturday morning, though, we turn north on 281 and head toward Johnson City, 12 miles up the road.

The little town was named for LBJ’s great-grandfather, and it’s obvious that the 36th president is still a presence in the Hill Country 27 years after his death. At 9 in the morning, we pull up in front of his white clapboard, green-shuttered boyhood home, under spreading live oaks in the center of town, and volunteer tour guide Clair Peters greets us on the front porch.

Ten of us have gathered on the porch, and Peters invites us inside for the free tour. A congenial and knowledgeable guide, he tells us about the president’s boyhood and shows us the bedroom where young Lyndon eavesdropped on his father, a state legislator, talking politics with his cronies. (Because of their snuff dipping, tobacco chewing and swearing, Lyndon’s strong-willed mother confined her husband’s visitors to the one bedroom and the front porch.)

Strolling from room to room in the little house, I’m struck by how close to the frontier the Johnson family was. A marker near the grassy, tree-shaded backyard makes the point graphically, displaying an old photo of the lot when LBJ was a boy. It was all dirt and no grass then, enclosed by an unpainted wooden fence. An inscription reads: “Though Lyndon Johnson always thought fondly of Johnson City, he spent much of his political career trying to lessen for all Americans the hard realities he knew as a youth: no electricity, poor medical care, inadequate education, prejudice.”

Sierra and Kate have had their Saturday morning fill of history so we head west on Highway 290 out of Johnson City. We detour onto Ranch Road 1, the pleasant two-lane road that runs beside the tree-shaded Pedernales River before rejoining 290 just past the LBJ Ranch. (Texans pronounce the river Purd-uh-NAA-lis.) At Stonewall, we pull into the gravel parking lot of the Trinity Lutheran Church, a handsome Gothic Revival structure of pressed metal siding painted gray with tall stained-glass windows and a steeply pitched steeple. Worship services were conducted in German until 1950.

The village of Stonewall is the heart of peach country. The season gloriously announces itself in April with acres and acres of pink-blossomed trees blooming in formation in orchards lining both sides of the highway. In June, when much of the fruit is ripe, Stonewall celebrates with an annual festival, and roadside fruit stands from Stonewall to Fredericksburg offer fresh peaches by the pint or by the bushel. Some farmers allow you to go into the orchards and pick your own. The fruit season lasts from May through September, depending on the crop.

Our favorite peach stop is Stonewall’s Burg’s Corner, a peach warehouse where you can watch workers sorting and packing the golden-red fruit or sit at picnic tables in the store area and enjoy fresh sliced peaches over homemade Blue Bell ice cream. Burg’s Corner also offers fresh tomatoes, watermelons, cantaloupes and other local produce, as well as peach syrup, peach preserves, peach cobbler mix and peach-flavored honey. It’s a wonderful place.

If you visit in April, the fields are awash in wildflowers--bluebonnet, Indian paint brush, poppy, Indian blanket, cone flower, pink evening primrose--swaths of riotous color on a bright green field. At their peak mid-month, the flowers draw almost as many visitors as New England’s fall foliage does. Highway 290 between Johnson City and Fredericksburg is a good place for wildflower viewing, and just west of Stonewall, on the right side of the highway, a working wildflower farm called Wildseed Farms is also worth a visit.

The person responsible for perpetuating the Texas wildflower tradition is, of course, Lady Bird Johnson, whose National Wildflower Research Center on the southwestern edge of Austin conducts research on the conservation and cultivation of wildflowers and other native plants, shrubs and trees. (The NWRC is open to the public.)

The former first lady also has helped shape LBJ State Historical Park at Stonewall, a 700-acre site across the river from the LBJ Ranch. Tara drops the girls and me at the park’s visitor center and drives over to Home Collection at Rocky Hill, a superb store that features antique pine and reproduction furniture. The girls and I check out the park gift shop and bookstore, listen to a tape of the former president telling jokes, and then set off on a trail through the woods to the Sauer-Beckmann farmstead a mile away. As we hike past old, gnarled live oaks and across a dry creek, Kate and Sierra harmonize on the Dixie Chicks hit “Goodbye Earl.”

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The Sauer-Beckmann farmstead is a working historical farm with all the animals, gardens, buildings and equipment common to a Hill Country farm circa 1900. Park employees in period clothes perform the daily chores and show visitors around the place.

Two pompous turkeys, their bright red wattles draped across ample breasts, their black feathers iridescent in the morning sun, greet us at the wooden gate. We pet the garrulous gobblers, wander through the barn, scratch the ears of a horse in the stable and then step up onto the porch of the L-shaped Victorian frame house. It is furnished authentically, down to the period wallpaper.

Park employee Ricky Weinheimer invites us into the warm, cozy kitchen, where he and three other men are sitting at the table having lunch. On the blue enamel wood-burning range are a plate of corn bread and a big pot of beef stew, and on the table are homemade sugar cookies and a pie made from pears put up last fall.

“These were simple-living folks,” says Bill Coakley, a park volunteer who sold electrical equipment in Chicago before he retired and started coming to Texas for the winter. “They knew where they stood. They didn’t necessarily have money in the bank, but they had food on the table.”

We walk back through the woods, past a wildlife enclosure containing bison, whitetail deer and longhorn cattle, and Tara is waiting at the visitor center, where she rescues the girls from yet another history lesson. With 50 or so other visitors, who have each paid their $3 for the 11/2-hour LBJ Ranch tour, I climb aboard a small double-unit shuttle bus, and National Park Ranger Gary Skrove takes us up the road and across the Pedernales.

Our first stop is a small white-framed house set in a pecan grove; it’s a reconstructed version of the house where LBJ was born in 1908. A herd of whitetail deer is grazing among the tall pecan trees in the distance. Before we board the bus again, we walk over to the Johnson family cemetery, the pink granite grave stones in rows beneath huge old live oaks. It’s a beautiful, peaceful setting.

Skrove, who’s been at the park for nearly nine years, is an engaging guide. He tells us LBJ stories interspersed with a tape of Johnson himself recounting ranch stories in his trademark drawl. We pause in front of the ranch house, acquired while he was a U.S. senator, but don’t go inside as Mrs. Johnson still lives there part of the time. In a garage behind the house are two big white Lincolns that Johnson loved to drive--at breakneck speed--all over the ranch and on Hill Country back roads. Skrove tells a story: It seems a state trooper stopped a speeding white Lincoln one afternoon. “Oh, my God!” the trooper exclaimed when he walked up to the car and recognized the man behind the wheel. “And don’t you forget it, son,” Johnson told him.

Back at the visitor center, Tara and the girls inform me that we will not be staying for the film of Johnson’s life and career, shown on the hour in the auditorium, or for the birdhouse-building demonstration on the lawn. We press on to Fredericksburg, the little town 16 miles to the west founded by Baron Otfried Hans Frelherr von Meusebach and other colonists from Germany in 1846. Visitors to Fredericksburg in April hear about the Easter Fires, the story of how Meusebach and other colonists resolved that the only way to live without fear of the Indians was to make peace with them.

They risked a journey to the winter camp of the Comanches, Apaches and Tonkawas in hopes of signing a peace treaty. While the colonists and the tribal chiefs were meeting, Indian scouts were stationed atop the hills surrounding Fredericksburg, keeping watch on the small community and trasmitting messages to each other via smoke signals. When word finally came confirming the honest intentions of Meusebach and his men, the Indians lit huge bonfires as a sign that all was well.

Down in the valley, a pioneer mother, left alone with her children while her husband accompanied Meusebach, saw the signal fires and attempted to calm her frightened children with a New World version of a German folk tale about fairies dancing around fires in the hills. In the Fredericksburg woman’s version, the Easter rabbit was boiling eggs in large kettles over the fires and coloring the eggs with dyes made from the beautiful wildflowers. “If you’ll go to sleep,” she told her children, “you’ll find the eggs in your Easter nest at the cabin door the next morning.”

Meusebach signed a peace treaty with the Indians, a happy exception to the more belligerent approach favored by most of his fellow Texans, and the people of Fredericksburg still tell the Easter Fires story. On the Saturday evening before Easter Sunday, they hold an Easter Fires Pageant at the Gillespie County Fair Grounds, beginning at dusk.

These days, the handsome town, population still less than 10,000, is prospering as never before. Every day of the week, and particularly on weekends, the sidewalks along Main Street are crowded with visitors. The sturdy old stone buildings now house more than a hundred gift shops, antique stores, craft shops, more gift shops, art galleries, still more gift shops, candy and ice cream parlors and--did I mention?--more gift shops redolent of the cloying smell of scented candles and the dulcimer, harp and keyboard sounds of New Age sentimentality. In Fredericksburg, Tara reminds me, we’re all searching for an imagined past. It’s a pleasant enough search, I suppose, but after a while, our wanting to want something as we stroll along the crowded thoroughfare begins to give me the fantods.

Although many of the shops still peddle a Texas version of country kitsch, most of the wares are noticeably upscale as Fredericksburg gradually becomes a Lone Star Santa Fe. That trend worries some folks, as rents rise and local merchants are forced to sell out, but there’s probably no going back.

Eating establishments also reflect the upward trend, although on Saturday night, friends take us to what they consider an old reliable, Friedhelm’s Bavarian Inn. It’s a large, multi-roomed establishment--crowded on a weekend night--featuring such specialties as schnitzel, dumplings, sauerbraten and numerous brands of beer. The schnitzel are delicious, particularly the jagerschnitzel, covered with sauteed mushrooms and paprika sauce and served by a cheerful waitress with a lilting German accent.

Fredericksburg still boasts plenty of other old reliables--the Old German Bakery is one of our favorites for Sunday morning breakfast--but now the little town is also home to a handful of restaurants that can hold their own with the best in Texas. Our favorite is the contemporary-chic Navajo Grill, a small restaurant on Main Street that’s also one of the most beautiful in the state. With dishes inspired by New Orleans, the Southwest and the Caribbean, it’s a long way, baby, from sausage and sauerkraut and a stein of dark German beer with which to wash it down.

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Along with the usual chain motels, Fredericksburg is home to more than 300 bed-and-breakfast establishments, some of them on the upper floors of the old buildings along Main Street, others in the charming little stone buildings called Sunday houses scattered about town. These are miniature houses built by German families who lived in the country, to be used when they came to town on Sundays for church.

Since we didn’t have a reservation when we arrived on a Saturday afternoon, we stopped by the Gstehaus Schmidt reservation service on Main Street. One of several such establishments in town, it offers dozens of guest house and B&B; choices at all price ranges, in town or out in the country. We picked Apple Creek Cottage, a lovely, early-Texas two-bedroom house painted a cheery yellow and located in a residential neighborhood eight blocks east of Main. In a field across the street, cows and sheep grazed.

“No rooster, but I heard two moos,” Kate announces at 8 the next morning as she urges us out of bed. She and Sierra, still singing loud enough about the evil Earl to wake the neighbors, are ready to start the day.

Enchanted Rock, 18 miles north of Fredericksburg, is a 425-foot-high batholith, a gigantic mass of molten rock, or magma, that cooled a billion years ago and hardened into the pink-and-gray granite knob we see today. It is the second-largest rock mountain in the United States, second only to Georgia’s Stone Mountain. For centuries, Indians considered the mountain sacred, and legend has it that once a year they came from great distances to hold their sacred rites on the summit. At the base is a state marker commemorating the victory of Capt. Jack Hays, a legendary Texas Ranger, over a band of Comanches in 1841. Hays was leading a surveying party in the area when he was confronted by the Indians, who resented his intrusion onto the sacred rock. They especially hated surveyors, believing that the white man’s compass was the instrument that stole their land. Well-armed and well-protected among the boulders on Enchanted Rock, Hays managed to make his way to the summit and elude his attackers.

Kate, Sierra and I make our way to the summit--the climb takes less than half an hour--just as the early morning clouds are lifting. While the girls launch prickly pear boats on one of the little vernal pools filled with rainwater, I look to the north at what is still a vast expanse of the Hill Country--no houses or barns, no cultivated fields, no paved roads, only rugged cedar-covered hills. It’s a reminder of what most of the Hill Country used to be a few decades ago, and what much of it still is, despite the stress we’ve placed it under in recent years. My hope is that Kate and Sierra will be able to bring their own children someday to the top of Enchanted Rock and that they too will be able to know the beauty and enchantment of this special place. I wonder, though, if they’ll still be singing Dixie Chicks ditties.

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Guidebook: Hill Country Holiday

Telephone numbers and prices: The area code for the Johnson City/Fredericksburg area is 830. Room rates are for a double for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only, except where otherwise noted.

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Getting there: American and Southwest airlines fly nonstop from Los Angeles to Austin; there is connecting service on American, Delta, America West, Continenal and United. Southwest also flies nonstop from Los Angeles to San Antonio. Austin is slightly closer to the Johnson City/Fredericksburg area; San Antonio is closer to Castroville, Kerrville and Bandera, all interesting in their own right. The best way to explore the Hill Country is by car.

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Where to stay: In Fredericksburg, many historic homes have been converted into gstehauses (guest cottages). The best way to decide what you want is to contact one of several reservation services in town. We used Gstehaus Schmidt, 231 W. Main St., telephone 997-5612, fax 997-8282, https://www.fbglodging.com. Similar services are offered by Bed and Breakfast of Fredericksburg, 240 W. Main St., tel. 997-4712, fax 990-0063, https://www.bandbfbg.com. Prices range from $65 to $165. Apple Creek Cottage: $90. Motels include Comfort Inn, Budget Host Deluxe Inn, the Dietzel Motel, the Country Inn Motel and the Sunset Inn Motel and Suites.

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Where to eat: Friedhelm’s Bavarian Inn, 905 W. Main St., Fredericksburg, tel. 997-6300. Hearty German fare; $30-$35.

The Altdorf Biergarten, 301 W. Main St., Fredericksburg, tel. 997-7865. Another good German eatery; $12-$26.

The Fredericksburg Brewing Co., 245 E. Main St., Fredericksburg, tel. 997-1646. Offers home brews, a variety of menu items and lodging in 12 “bed and brews” above the brewery. Dinner: $18. Lodging: $79-$89.

Andy’s Diner, 413 S. Washington St., Fredericksburg, tel. 997-3744. Eggs, biscuits and gravy, chicken-fried steak; $20.

The Old German Bakery and Restaurant, 225 W. Main St., Fredericksburg, tel. 997-9084. German pancakes, kolaches and strudel; $16.

The Navajo Grill, 2098 E. Main St., Fredericksburg, tel. 990-8289; our favorite among Fredericksburg’s upscale restaurants; $34-$50.

The Hill Top Cafe, in an old gas station about 11 miles north of Fredericksburg on Highway 87, tel. 997-8922. The owner is a former member of the band Asleep at the Wheel; superb Cajun and Greek food, and live music on weekend nights; $18-$40.

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What to see and do: The Enchanted Rock State Natural Area, 18 miles north of Fredericksburg on Rural Road 965, tel. (915) 247-3903, fax (915) 247-4977, https://www.tpwd.state.tx.us. Admission: $5, free for ages 12 and under. Occasionally gets too crowded during the spring and officials limit the number of visitors.

For more information: The Johnson City Tourism and Visitors Bureau, P.O. Box 485, Johnson City, Texas, 78636, tel. 868-7684, fax 868-7803, https://www.lbjcountry.com, information about dining, lodging and shopping. The Visitor Information Center, 106 N. Adams, Fredericksburg, Texas, 78624, tel. (888) 997-3600), fax 997-8588, https://www.fredericksburg-texas.com. The Texas Visitor Center, 8799 S. Desert Blvd., Anthony, Texas, 79821, tel. (915) 886-3468, fax (915) 886-4616, https://www.traveltex.com.