In Ted Flato’s youth, summer days often meant snorkeling in the Nueces River, cooking outside over an open fire, or ambling through persimmons, prickly pear, sotol, and sedge grasses at Kickapoo Ranch, his family’s estate on the western edge of Texas’s Hill Country. Nestled along four miles of the river’s banks, the land had been in his family since the 1930s, but Flato’s parents made it their own, constructing for their visits a one-room rock shelter void of running water and electricity. “It was like ,” Flato says, “and a
