You probably can’t have San Antonio without the River Walk. It fills up with tourists at shops and bars and restaurants at night, but on Saturday morning, as The Yankee and I happily discovered, it is quiet, still and serene:

There are bridges for the over the road traffic passing just overhead, but that seems about as far removed from people on the walk itself as possible. There are also pedestrian crossovers to get you to that restaurant you really want to try on the other side without having to rejoin the land of the suckers.

There are also the boats, one part tour, one part mass transit system and, sometimes, a dinner cruise. Here the passengers were learning about the historic architecture overlooking the San Antonio River:

Among those trees and ducks and squirrels and ferns you can find too many people, or the feeling of a land lost. In the early morning hours only the odd mosaic are there to disturb you. One tells you that just a few feet away is a tree where a Mexican sniper hid to pick off Texan settlers.

Enjoy rounding that corner, friends.

Another mosaic, for reasons never explained, lays out the city’s interstate grid. A better one shows the modern route of the carefully controlled river. From that one you can start to figure out how all of this came together.

For if you can’t have modern San Antonio without the River Walk, you can’t have the River Walk without Bowen’s Island.

In the middle of the 19th century they called it Galveston Island, but it was technically a peninsula bordered on three sides by the river and on the fourth by an important local irrigation system. The local postmaster, John Bowen, built his home there. When he died in 1867 it turned into a beer garden, a market and what we today would probably call a recreational area. Gymnastics, picnics and religious meetings all took place there.

The Bowen family held onto the land until 1910. Developers rerouted the river, made the nearby streets longer and put to work their vision of a 10-acre site for buildings, including a hotel, the Federal Reserve Bank and commercial buildings.

None of that could have been done, perhaps, without Robert H. H. Hugman. He was the architect that had the idea to spruce up the place. His fingerprints are everywhere, as are these bronze plaques, replicating the stamp he placed on all his drawings:

And so here we are today.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to one of these restaurants where the gimmick is the waitstaff gets to treat you horribly bad. We’ve been to two locations of Dirty Dick’s. One, in Boston, because we were hungry and they sat us for lunch right away. Tonight we ate at the one on the River Walk … for much the same reason, actually.

At lunch they have perfectly good burgers. And, for whatever reason, the guy we had in Boston was relaxed and chatty with us. Meanwhile they were simply abusing other tables. This is probably good therapy for people who’ve waited tables one-shift-too-many, but I’m not sure why the customers show up.

Anyway, the dinner was OK tonight, though not as good as the lunchtime burger half a continent and almost a removed from my memory. We had a large group tonight, six adults, all people with way too much money invested in their brains, and a really sharp four-year-old.

The waitress tonight started out to give us a little grief which, I don’t know about you, but no thanks. And then it just … stopped. It was like she just noticed the child sitting with us. Oh you get the hat with the stupid insult on it, there’s no escaping that, but she was fine, left us alone, didn’t overtly scar the kid and we all pretended like we didn’t notice.

Maybe there’s a vibe some tables give off.

So the little boy, the son of two of our friends at dinner with us, gets into a dance contest with me. And he was awesome. Remind me to never do that again. The restaurant had a local band playing, and we caught maybe their first two songs, including something from the early 1960s soul era that I’ve already forgotten. I just sit in the chair and bop along a bit because the boy and I have become buddies.

I break out the classic stupid dances of our generation: the shopping cart, the sprinkler, the Q-tip, making the pizza.

The child responds with what he calls the Lighting Lawnmower. He sticks out his hands, tenses up his entire body and starts a little shimmy which soon turns into a full-on, almost violent shake. Suddenly the lawn mower image is out of control. He’s not pushing the mower, but hanging on for dear life as it runs over everything in site.

It was awesome. No one knows where he got it from and all agreed he easily won our dance competition. Even me, and I don’t mean in that “Sure, you were better than me kid” way.

At the end of the night he gave me what he called dinosaur hugs, which seem to involve choking me out, tackling me and roaring a lot. He’s a cool kid, despite his need to defeat me in light saber duels and mock finger-pistol shootouts all weekend.