by Matt Weiland
But the woman didn’t want to go. They both got car sick and neither one of them could ride in the back. My car was small. “I’ll stay here,” she said. “I’ll be fine. There’s plenty of shade.”
So I drove the man fifteen miles to the gas station while he told me the unbearably sad story of his life in the flat monotone of electric speech. Cancer of the larynx. Once he was sick his wife left him and took the kids. He got laid off from the factory. He had to go back to the country, where he’d grown up, see if he could farm some on the land his father had owned. Hard times. This new wife was nice to him though, that was a plus. At the end of every couple of sentences he’d thank me and I had to tell him to stop. He told me I could drop him off at the station and he would hitch a ride back, but we didn’t pass a car the whole way there.
“I can take you back,” I said. “I’m just out driving around. I don’t have anyplace to go.” It sounded suspicious but it was the truth.
I waited with him at the station even though he kept trying to shoo me off. He thought he was going to see a car heading back in his direction but no one came; after a while there was no choice but to relent. He said he would only take the ride if I let him pay me. We argued politely about this. I told him were the roles reversed, and they could be reversed, he would never take money from me. Reluctantly he raised the voice box to his throat and agreed with that. I drove him back to where the new wife was waiting. Just as it was over and we had said our good-byes, he leaned back in through the open window of my car and put five dollars on the passenger seat, then he turned quickly away. It broke my heart in a way that was out of all proportion to the greater sadnesses of life.
It was lonely out there on the road after he had gone, lonely when I pulled into Shiloh an hour before the park closed. More than ten thousand men from the Union and Confederate armies had died there in April of 1862. It took very little imagination to see this place the way it would have been that April, dogwoods and cherry trees and apples all blooming in the mighty undergrowth, the energy it would have taken the men to fight their way through the trees in order to come to some sort of opening where surely they would be shot. The Union dead are buried on a hill with a view to the Tennessee River. It is a lovely spot, cooler for the breeze that comes off the water, and each grave has a small white marker. Outside the gates of the graveyard there is a copy of the Gettysburg Address written on a metal plaque. The Confederates are buried in a mass grave in a trench that lies at the bottom of the hill, but they at least were all together, and they were home. I did not pass another soul in the park save the ranger at the gate who told me to leave when it was dark.
If anybody tells you Tennessee has changed much, tell them to come out to Shiloh. Tell them to listen hard to the stories of the men you pick up on the road on your way there.
Had I grown up in the city I might now feel the loss of my early life. I might look at one building and wish for the happier day when it had been something else. But I grew up in Tennessee, by which I mean the country, and out there everything stays exactly as I remember it, good and bad and every bit of it mine.
TEXAS
CAPITAL Austin
ENTERED UNION 1845 (28th)
ORIGIN OF NAME From an Indian word meaning “friends”
NICKNAME LoneStarState
MOTTO “Friendship”
RESIDENTS Texan
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 32
STATE BIRD mockingbird
STATE FLOWER bluebonnet
STATE TREE pecan
STATE SONG “Texas, Our Texas”
LAND AREA 261,797 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In McCulloch Co., 15 mi. NE of Brady
POPULATION 22,859,968
WHITE 71.0%
BLACK 11.5%
AMERICAN INDIAN 0.6%
ASIAN 2.7%
HISPANIC/LATINO 32.0%
UNDER 18 28.2%
65 AND OVER 9.9%
MEDIAN AGE 32.3
TEXAS
Cristina Henríquez
This is how a lot of people think of Texas: dusty plains and broad prairies freckled with tumbleweeds and sagebrush; a land with the occasional striated canyon and sweeping basin; a place occupied by ranchers and cowboys and horses; all of this under a huge, open sky. Texas is John Wayne movies and mammoth oil rigs and President George W. Bush and the place where, according to the song, all of George Strait’s exes live.
This is all true.
In a way. The sky there does seem vast, mostly because the view of it is uninterrupted by the endless unfolding of flat land. On working ranches, herds of longhorn cattle graze on a carpet of bluebonnets. Almost every other car has a w. THE PRESIDENT sticker on its bumper or back windshield (Texans have come a long way from when State Senator Guy M. Bryan wrote, in 1845, “We are all Democrats in Texas”). And the moment George Strait’s song starts playing in any bar in any part of the state I’ve ever been, people will raise their beers and sing along, no matter what.
Texas, of course, is more than its surface and stereotypes. Every place is. But the lore associated with Texas seems to be piled thicker than for other states. You have to drill down deeper to get to what lies beneath.
Before moving to Texas, I remember sitting in my apartment in Iowa and watching one of those commercials that state tourism boards put together to entice people to visit their magnificent and scenic and family friendly locales. The commercial concluded with the slogan, “Texas. It’s like a whole other country.” Which felt less like an invitation and more like a finger-wagging threat. As in, “Texas. You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into.” It was full of such braggadocio and inflated pride. Who did these people think they were, anyway? I thought. And in the next second, seriously, what was I getting myself into?
I had lived in six states by then—Delaware, Florida, Virginia, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa—in settings ranging from a mountain town so small that the phone numbers were a mere five digits long, to suburbs filled with street upon street of identical houses, to a city apartment with three deadbolts plus a chain on the door, to laid-back college towns, but not one of them felt like adequate preparation for what I imagined Texas life would be. Not that it really mattered at that point. My husband and I had already committed, because of a job opportunity, to moving there—to the Southwest, to Texas, and to Dallas specifically. For the next three years, we would call it home.
There is a clear division in Texas between those who have spent their entire lives calling the Lone Star State home and those who are transplants. Either you’re a Texan or you ain’t. Since I wasn’t born there, I ain’t. I could have lived there for the rest of my life and never made much headway on bridging that divide (although perhaps if I had adopted one of those “I Wasn’t Born in Texas, But I Got Here as Fast as I Could” bumper stickers, it would have helped). I was, as my friends there liked to remind me, a Northerner at heart. This, despite my Panamanian heritage and the fact that I grew up in a household where both my parents spoke Spanish. As a half-Panamanian Northerner, I tried my best to resist Texas. The whole time I was there, I complained. But now I’m gone, and I find myself wistfully recalling the state I left behind.
Aside from the television show that bears its name, Dallas may be best known for the famed Dallas Cowboys football team, complete with cheerleaders and aging Texas Stadium (actually in Irving), which has a hole cut out in the top of it so that, as linebacker D. D. Lewis once said, “God can watch his favorite team.” It is also home to the Mavericks (the NBA team owned by billionaire Internet entrepreneur Mark Cuban, who bought it from Ross Perot, Jr.), the Stars (winners of the 1999 Stanley Cup—yes, that’s hockey), and the Rangers baseball club (co-owned by George W. Bush before he became governor). But most of all, Dallas is a shopping city, featuring everything from the flagship Neiman Marcus (a building that takes up nearly a full downtown block), to the one and only Stanley Korshak, which offers services like closet-editing and vacation-packing, to the self-described oldest mal
l in America—Highland Park Village—these days full of upscale brands like Escada and Hermès.
Dallas residents dress accordingly. I swear they dress up even to go to the gas station. When friends from New York came to visit one weekend we went out to a neighborhood bar, nothing fancy, and they dressed in what they thought was—and what anywhere else would have been—appropriate: hoodies, jeans, New Balance sneakers. But when we arrived and were confronted with a sea of women dressed in Jimmy Choos, silk tops, and $300 jeans, and men decked out in custom-made button-down shirts, lightweight blazers, and $300 jeans, they felt so conspicuous that we left early. As my friend said, “It felt like we stumbled into some absurd debutante ball.” Dallas is the headquarters of Southwest Airlines, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Pizza Hut, Kinko’s, and 7-Eleven. Dallas is a place where, when the temperature shot up past 100 degrees for more than thirty days one summer, no one complained. I remember going to restaurants that summer and asking for a table inside, in the air conditioning, while true Dallasites requested seats on the patio, for which there was always a wait. In fact, patio dining was so popular that restaurants that didn’t have the space for one would extend a patio into the parking garage, and, still, people flocked to it.
More than anywhere else I’ve ever lived, in Dallas you must have a car. And everyone in Dallas does their best to drive not a BMW or Mercedes (please, you might as well be driving a Tonka truck) but an Aston Martin or a Maserati as they zoom two blocks to anywhere rather than walk. Walking is so un-Dallas. I learned this in an unusual way. I had been living in Dallas for a few weeks when I snagged an interview to be an assistant at the local glossy city magazine. The magazine offices were exactly 1.7 miles from my apartment, and I had thought I might walk there and back (my husband and I shared one car, which he used to get to work, twenty-five miles away). When I woke up the morning of the interview, though, it was a steamy ninety-seven degrees outside, and because I would be wearing a wool-blend suit, walking was out of the question. I can’t remember now whether I even thought about taking a taxi because, as far as I was concerned, having been trained by endless El and bus rides when I had lived in Chicago, my next best option was to take public transportation.
I consulted a few maps and learned that I would have to take one trolley and two buses to get there. The trolley was a restored, old-fashioned streetcar that ran along a track in the brick-paved street. I stepped aboard in my suit, a portfolio folder tucked under my arm, and was greeted by a conductor wearing a uniform and cap. Cheerfully, he told me the history of the trolley car as he drove. “You’re riding car number 186, the Green Dragon. She was once owned by someone in North Dallas who used her as a hay barn.” The buses were surprisingly clean and bright and, unlike those in Chicago, they ran on time. Sure, I almost melted waiting at the stops, but everything was going fine.
At the interview, the publisher asked me to sit at a round table in his office. On the wall behind his desk was a rifle attached to a wooden plaque. The first thing he said to me was, “You are totally unqualified for this job.” I didn’t know how to respond. We got to the bottom of it soon enough: He meant I was overqualified and wanted instead to have me try my hand at writing for them. It sounded good to me and we ironed out the details. Then, as I was about to leave, he said, “So you made it here OK?”
Oh, sure, I told him, I just took the bus.
He blanched. “What are you doing taking the bus?”
“I don’t have a car yet, but I used to live in Chicago and took public transportation all the time.”
“You shouldn’t be taking the bus,” he said. “I don’t like the idea of it.”
“Really, I don’t mind.”
He looked alarmed, though, and after another second, called his current assistant into the room. He mumbled something to her, and she left, only to return a few minutes later with a set of keys, which he promptly handed to me.
“Here,” he said. “Now you have a car. You can drive it until you get one of your own.”
Then he turned to walk out of the room, while I stood there dumbfounded. He looked back, as if it had just occurred to him to ask, “You have insurance, right?”
“You know,” I stammered, “I don’t really feel comfortable—”
“Don’t worry about it. No employee of mine will ride the bus.”
“But I don’t—”
“Come on. I’ll walk you down to the parking garage so we can find it.”
I realized that he was not going to let me leave the building without that car. So I nodded and followed him to a teal Mercury Sable parked in the first space by the elevator. He unlocked it and, like a Texas gentleman, opened the door for me. Then he gave me back the keys and told me to keep it for as long as I needed, until I got my own car. As I pulled out of the garage, I could see him in the rearview mirror giving me a double-fisted thumbs-up and smiling so big his cheeks pushed up his glasses.
Austin, the state capital, is the one place in Texas that everyone who suspects they might not like Texas all that much is willing—and should be willing—to visit anyway. The city’s motto is “Keep Austin Weird,” which says something about its resistance to homogeny and about its attempt to keep itself creative, environmentally conscious, laid back, progressive, and humble in all the ways that has made it famous.
People come to Austin to go to school at the University of Texas’s main campus, which enrolls nearly fifty thousand students each fall. They come for the tech jobs. They come to see one of twenty-one complete and original editions of the Gutenberg Bible at the Harry Ransom Center. And they come to watch hundreds of thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats swarm out from their perch under the Congress Avenue Bridge, just as dusk is falling, all summer long.
But the reason I first went to Austin, and the reason I returned again and again, was for what has to be the best literary offering in the state: the Texas Book Festival. Curiously, there are people in Texas—writers in Texas—who have never heard of the Texas Book Festival, although I think that says more about the rest of the state than about the festival. The event is a four-day extravaganza of readings and panel discussions and interviews with some of the best writers working today. Nearly all of it is free. It takes place in late October and early November, when the thermometer in Austin is still spiking at around 100 degrees, and writers and readers descend upon the capital with their programs in hand, trying to map out how they’re possibly going to do and see all the things they want to. The first time I went, I think I missed half a morning of readings because I didn’t comprehend how rigorous the schedule was. But after I got the hang of things, I spent the whole weekend dashing around to events in a sort of cultural ecstasy. In three years, I saw Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Salman Rushdie, Augusten Burroughs, Frank McCourt, Gore Vidal, Myla Goldberg, Seymour Hersh, Amy Sedaris, Jonathan Ames, Kevin Brockmeier, Jane Smiley, David McCullough, and lots of others. And I saw them in a pretty spectacular setting—the state capitol building.
The Texas State Capitol anchors the city of Austin. As the original WPA Guide to Texas notes, “Austin’s life revolves around the capitol, whose massive red dome dominates the physical scene. …” Regardless of whether you agree with either Austin city politics or Texas state politics (the two, hammered out less than a mile from each other, are diametrically opposed), it’s pretty impressive to walk into a reading and sit in a high-back leather swivel chair in front of a desk where a state representative usually sits and listen to an author’s voice echo through the spaciousness of the house and senate chambers. The first time I did it, I sat in one of those leather chairs and ran my hands over a locked wooden desk with a phone mounted underneath and listened as Joy Williams, wearing a pair of sunglasses, stood in front of the podium—an electronic voting board and oil paintings of historic Texas hung in a line behind her—and spoke about short stories, her words floating up into the roped-off balcony high above my head.
In accordance with the unofficial edict that “Everything is bigger in Texas,�
�� the Texas State Capitol, at 360,000 square feet, is the biggest capitol building in the country. It has 392 rooms and 938 windows. It sits on 2.25 acres of land. While every other capitol building in the country was built by contractors who were paid money for their time and labor, the Texas State Capitol is the only one that was paid for with land—3 million acres of it, to be exact. I heard a rumor once that Texas is the only state allowed to fly its flag at the same height as the United States flag, and although that’s false, the fact that people believe it is a testament to Texas’s reputation as a state more independent than the rest. In its early history, after all, Texas was a sovereign nation known as the Republic of Texas. When it joined the Union—the only state to do so by treaty—it kept the Lone Star Flag as its state symbol. One of the curious provisions of the treaty gave Texas the right, should it choose to do so, to divide itself into a total of five states. Officially: “New States of convenient size, not exceeding four in number, in addition to said State of Texas, and having sufficient populations, may hereafter, by the consent of said State, be formed out of the territory thereof, which shall be entitled to admission under the provisions of the Federal Constitution.” Although, as the WPA Guide to Texas says:
The question, occasionally discussed, as to whether or not, if Texas insisted, the National Government would be obliged to admit the additional States, is academic; no desire has ever been seriously evinced on the part of Texans to split up the “southwestern empire” of which they are so proud, even though by doing so they might have ten United States Senators, instead of two.
Texans have clung fiercely to the notion of independence. When I lived there, I heard more rhetoric about being a Texan than I heard in any of my previous residences about being a Delawarean or a Hoosier or a Chicagoan or even an Iowan. The only other place in the world where I’ve seen people exhibit such chest-thumping pride is Panama. I grew up hearing my father contend that Panama was not part of Central America or of South America. It was part of the world, certainly, but with an identity that linked it to no other place. When I was younger, there was even a popular T-shirt emblazoned with the words, “My name is Panama.” My father, if you ask him where he’s from, will invariably respond, “I’m from a small country in Latin America called Panama.” Though he explains it that way because he’s not sure that people here will recognize it by name only (many people over the years have thought I said “Canada”), you can see the pride shining in his eyes. Texans don’t assume any lack of recognition, but the sense of pride is the same. My born-and-bred Texas friend said that when he tells someone he’s a Texan, he’s thinking of the Alamo and what it represents. He said, “We’re tough, we’re fighters, but we’re polite. We embody the best of the American spirit.” For him, and for most everyone else there, saying you’re a Texan isn’t just telling someone where you’re from; it’s telling someone who you are.