Turns out Basye, VA has a sister in Texas. It is a village by the name of Wimberley.
Wimberley is about 40 mi. from Austin in the Texas Hill Country. I first saw it when I evacuated Houston along with wife and cat, all of us fleeing Rita, the second of the major hurricanes of 2005 to hit the Gulf Coast. We left our Houston townhouse at 2 in the morning to the care of Jorge, our Salvadoran landscaper, and reached Wimberley at 12:30 the next afternoon (it’s normally a three-hour drive). My neighbor had refused to evacuate, choosing instead to trust in survival skills and his 9mm Beretta pistol. We were all still in the grip of television images of armed thugs and looting New Orleans neighborhoods and I understood. But when I got to Wimberley, I felt sorry for my neighbor. The village, designed around Cypress Creek (which itself has a story of interest... but later for that) is a little tarted up, but in a tolerable way; the setting is gorgeous.
As it passes through Wimberley, the translucent olive-emerald color of the Blanco River is an effect of the bed of gouged limestone at a depth of a mere one to two feet beneath the surface. A light layer silt, the color of sun-bleached sage, rests on the limestone bed. There is something unique about the hue it creates, and once I saw it, my eyes seemed to lend it to every view of the town. It blends with the darker palette of Cypress Creek which, shortly before it joins the Blanco, glides more umber and viridian through Wimberley in a turning ravine. As you glance down on it from the bridge on Rt. 12, the creek, echoing the turn of the road itself, forms a bend way below road level. Wimberley is built around that double-notch. It gives the town a sort of spiral form, with the roads splayed off from the bevel of the banks. From the bridge you look down at the trees and below them the creek, and it takes a while to learn about the beautiful space formed beneath the branches, the light pooling like plasma under the broad leaves imposed on the darkling water below. One or two restaurants have patios that back up to the banks of Cypress Creek, creating a terrace with an intimate view, cool in the summer heat.
Within five minutes of having arrived in Wimberley, we heard about the Wimberley Vortex - at the Town Hall where we had stopped in a desperate attempt to find a hotel room (everything was booked for a 500 mile radius from Houston). My ears perked up at the mention of vortex energies… and I was even more surprised to hear it from someone behind the counter at Town Hall. After all, vortices (or “vortexes,” as the new agers in Sedona refer to them), are controversial even in this age when “plasma” is recognized as the fourth state of matter.
Other than this blog, which has languished on the tips of abandonment, I had created a web site based on the Basye Vortex, the (sort of) history of the town and the native Americans (the Shendo, or Senedo) who formerly lived in the Basye area. The Basye Vortex web site constituted the first public announcement of the existence of natural energies, in a measure greater than the norm, at Basye. About 2 hours by car from Washington DC in the Appalachian foothills of Virginia, Basye is, like Wimberley, a community of second homes and retirees. Since the evacuation, I have been even more interested in both the phenomenon of vortex energy and the parallels between Wimberley and Basye. Digging into it further, I found some interesting material…
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