by Matt Weiland
In San Antonio I visited the Alamo, of course. I had buttermilk pie and the best vodka martini of my life. I went to the McNay Art Museum and stood for a long time in the sun-drenched courtyard. I drove by Sandra Cisneros’s bright purple house. I strolled along the River Walk. I toured the galleries at the Blue Star Arts Complex. I went from shop to shop—all with open doors and all selling Mexican art—in Southtown’s Art Walk.
All of Texas teems with Mexico’s influence. Sit idling in your car at a stoplight and you’re likely to hear Mexican music from the Mexican radio station filtering through the window of the pickup truck next to you. Go to the grocery store and the Mexican food is not relegated simply to part of one aisle, but takes up two. I used to visit elementary schools to teach creative writing to the students, and all they wanted to write about—no matter their race—was Mexican soccer heroes and pop stars. The Spanish-speakers among them often assumed, by looking at me, that I spoke their language. Which wasn’t a bad assumption, since it often seemed that I couldn’t walk more than five feet in any direction without running into someone who knew at least a little Spanish. Certainly, I got the chance to practice my language skills there more than anywhere else I’ve lived. When I worked tearing tickets at a movie theater, I overheard the cleaning crew joking with each other in Spanish one day and I laughed at something one of them said. After that, they talked to me on every shift, telling me about their kids at home, whom they were working to send money to, and asking me what the movies playing in the theater were about. In my first Texas apartment, the building handyman would hang around even after he’d fixed the light switch or grouted a cracked tile because in me he found someone to speak Spanish with. He was Venezuelan, and as much as he missed his country, he longed to assimilate to America. I remember asking him once whether he ever ate at a Venezuelan restaurant nearby, figuring he would love it. He shook his head and said, “Me gusto Red Lobster.” It was odd, though, because there were times that some combination of speaking Spanish and meeting people who missed their homeland, who felt that part of themselves had been displaced, reminded me of Panama and of my father and of myself. There were times that I saw in the Latinos and Mexicans there a version of what my father might have looked like when he first came to this country more than thirty years ago—the earnestness and determination, the bewilderment and yearning, the optimism and insecurity. There were times I felt more connected to Texas because of that.
But what made San Antonio come alive to me was meeting a man named Mike, and staying in his house. I was in the city to give a reading. The organization that had invited me arranged my lodging, setting my husband and me up with Mike, who lived in a remarkable house in the King William district (named after Prussia’s King Wilhelm I). When we arrived in the late afternoon, Mike was nowhere to be found. We walked up his driveway and around to the back of his house where, in a small yard, a few chickens were roaming around.
The house itself was pure San Antonio: historic, grand without being big, eccentric, unpretentious, and a fantastic amalgam of cultural influences. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with record album sleeves and contemporary art. The downstairs bathroom was wallpapered in concert and theater ticket stubs that dated back decades. There was a Pee-wee Herman doll perched on the mantel, and an old-fashioned bicycle parked inside the front door. There was a Christmas tree that was actually more of a Christmas bush, full and boxy and with no aspirations whatsoever to triangularity. Underneath it was a full-scale, three-dimensional replica of various Texas scenes, including a rodeo. There were Mexican papel picado—filigreed paper banners—hanging from the rafters. There was artwork featuring the Virgin of Guadalupe and Day of the Dead skeletons. There were Tiffany lamps on top of tables made of bamboo. The wingback chairs throughout the house were vintage, upholstered in floral fabrics. And there were scores of tinwork Mexican folk art sconces and chandeliers, the shades hole-punched to cast images of shadow and light against the walls and ceilings, in every corner and alcove and stairwell.
Mike was a slender fellow with glasses and a neat bow tie. I gave him a copy of my book, even though I’m pretty sure he had no idea who I was. He was simply a general supporter of artistic pursuit and, as such, had signed up to host visiting writers in town. He showed us around, told us to make ourselves at home, asked what we liked and didn’t like to eat, and then excused himself to a gallery function he had already committed to. Later, he cooked for us, and we ate on the back porch, the chickens milling outside, while Mike explained the German influence on San Antonio, and told us how a shameful number of the details in the movie version of Brokeback Mountain were incorrect and how Larry McMurtry, a Texan and the man who wrote the screenplay, should have known better. Mike was hospitable, interesting, and warm—just like San Antonio.
My fondness for Houston was slow to surface. The first time I was there, I somehow developed neck spasms—second only to childbirth in pain—and spent half of my trip in the emergency room. The other half I spent laid up on the couch while a tropical storm flooded the city.
The second time, I went to meet my then-boyfriend, now-husband, and help him pack up his things and move back to Chicago. We rented a U-Haul trailer, hitched it to his ‘93 Toyota Corolla, and hit the road. It was raining, and the sideview mirrors on the car were useless. I had to stick my head out of the car window every time he wanted to change lanes.
When I stuck my head out of the window the first time and saw that all was clear, I shouted into the wind-driven rain, “Go!”
My husband, driving along, dry as paper, said, “Did you say no or go?”
“Go!” I yelled.
“No or go?”
I whipped my head back inside the car. “GO!”
We switched to a yes/no system after that.
Houston was 0 for 2 with me.
I didn’t think I would ever go back, but it turned out that one of our good college friends lived there, and since we were already in Dallas, it seemed easy enough to drive down and say hello.
By now, every state in the country relies on a web of highways, but I know of no other state that is built quite so much along the highways. You can drive in virtually any direction through Texas and see whole towns and the majority of cities from your car. In other states, you zoom down the highway and then, when you near your destination, you take an exit, drive a bit and rumble into town. In Texas, there’s no such thing as a town or city offset from the highway, so what you see as you’re speeding along are churches and upscale restaurants and bowling alleys and condos and sports stadiums and boutique shops. It’s peculiar, but it makes for visually stimulating road trips pretty much anywhere you go. Anywhere, that is, but the drive from Dallas to Houston. That drive is all about desolation.
It’s a four-hour trip and for about the first three hours the main attractions lining the road are a Dairy Queen, a drive-in movie theater, and a few adult-video stores. Then, out of the barren landscape rises what is billed The Largest Statue in the World of an American Hero, a towering, gleaming white statue of Sam Houston. It’s scary if you don’t know it’s coming: Sam Houston, standing in a long coat, seemingly stepping out of the forest at his back, about to take one giant step across the highway, his walking stick in hand. The statue is technically in Huntsville, about seventy miles north of Houston and where Sam Houston—two-time president of the Republic of Texas as well as governor of the state—liked to spend his time, but it’s how you know you’re getting close (seventy miles is close in Texas) to the city that claims his name. When I saw it (I had only flown into Houston previously), it made me like the entire city just a little bit more.
The rest of the trip supported my burgeoning favorable assessment. I ate at the House of Pies, a diner that offers thirty varieties of pie and ten kinds of cake. My husband and I went to a series of Gold Cup soccer matches at Reliant Stadium, where we watched Panama lose to the United States and where I think I nearly lost my hearing from all the horns and whistles that erupte
d when Mexico’s team took the field against Guatemala. (As my husband said later, “It was like being in Mexico.”) I shopped for antiques on Westheimer, spending quite a bit of time in a futile search for a three-foot-tall rooster made from spare auto parts that a friend had spotted once and desperately wanted. And I partook in a Texas experience if ever I had one: a Hank Williams III concert. The concert was at a bar called Fitzgerald’s, with a sagging porch and a dank interior, and we drank beer from bottles (Lone Star, since we knew we would be laughed out of the establishment if we tried to order anything else). We stood around in a loud, raucous, smoky room until Hank III took the stage and all hell broke loose. People were hanging from the balcony going crazy for this man who until that night I had never heard of. His grandfather, Hank Williams, Sr.? Sure. His father, Hank Williams, Jr.? Of course. But Hank III? It quickly became clear to me, though, that this was not so much a problem with him as with me, since everyone else was swooning, screaming the lyrics to his songs, and jumping around in uncontained revelry.
After he finished his “country” set, he went through some sort of transformation and took the stage again as a metal rocker, playing a brand of music that I have since learned is called “hellbilly.” I felt, I’ll admit, distinctly out of place, but also strangely exhilarated. I wasn’t thinking about the rain in Houston, or the humidity, or about how I should have ordered a different kind of pie earlier. I was just thinking, This is it. This is Texas. Energetic and loyal and proud and rowdy and a world unto itself. Hank III sang it in his doleful way to a rapt and swaying crowd:
It’s a certain kinda livin’,
It’s a certain kinda style.
Not everybody likes us,
But we drive some folks wild.
UTAH
CAPITAL Salt Lake City
ENTERED UNION 1896 (45th)
ORIGIN OF NAME From the Ute tribe, meaning “people of the mountains”
NICKNAME Beehive State
MOTTO “Industry”
RESIDENTS Utahan or Utahn
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 3
STATE BIRD California gull
STATE FLOWER sego lily
STATE TREE blue spruce
STATE SONG “Utah, We Love Thee”
LAND AREA 82,144 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Sanpete Co., 3 mi. N. of Manti
POPULATION 2,469,585
WHITE 89.2%
BLACK 0.8%
AMERICAN INDIAN 1.3%
ASIAN 1.7%
HISPANIC/LATINO 9.0%
UNDER 18 32.2%
65 AND OVER 8.5%
MEDIAN AGE 27.1
UTAH
David Rakoff
“Great swarms of bees will arise. Are you ignoring the signs?” This fortune cookie is nothing more than a canny History Channel promotion for a special about Nostradamus, but it seems an eerie message to receive mere days before my departure for Utah. After all, the forty-fifth state owes much of its history to fiery-eyed revelation and prophecy, and Deseret—the original pioneer name for the territory—was a neologism Joseph Smith coined in The Book of Mormon to mean “honeybee.” The beehive is even the state’s symbol. Perhaps it is folly to ascribe wisdom to a cookie, but with just over a week to visit and explore a state with an area of almost 85,000 square miles, I can use all the ju-ju I can get.
If the lobby of the Salt Lake Plaza is any indication, the end of October is an auspicious time to visit, with the air abuzz with omen and augury. Arriving past midnight, I am greeted by an elaborate Halloween display of a dry-ice fountain, skeins of cobweb, and cutouts of Dracula and Frankenstein, made all the more ghoulish by overhead fluorescent lighting, like the nurses’ station in a state hospital. Turning on the television in my room, cheerfully located between the sixth-floor elevators, I note that the public access channel is showing a late-night program of a group of local Franciscans playing touch football in their brown cassocks, their rope belts swinging. The springs of my bed wheeze. The elevator dings. The ice machine right outside my door rumbles forth its icy bounty, a steady tattoo that beats “Stay up! Stay up!” I am in a canvas Edward Hopper never felt bummed-out enough to paint.
Morning banishes the gloom. The air is sun washed and pristine, carrying only a veil of haze from the California wildfires that have been raging for weeks. The lobby is full of genealogy tourists who have come to trace their family histories at the extensive Mormon archives. Utah, it seems, is where one comes to be found.
I join their happy ranks and follow them the few short blocks up to Temple Square, the spiritual and geographic heart of the city. A bride and groom hop up onto the stone ledge of a planter for the photographer, the better to capture the shining gold statue of the angel Moroni in the background. Moroni is the archangel of the faith, the prophet-warrior who gave Joseph Smith the golden plates that would eventually become The Book of Mormon. There are numerous couples in white dresses and tuxedoes marking their big day, but the walkways of Temple Square are filled with an excitement that dwarfs anything matrimonial. Some back-up dancers from the Hannah Montana Live show have been spotted, identifiable by their tour jackets, scrubbed faces, and natural turnout. Children and elders alike swarm like bees and approach repeatedly to ask, “Is She here?”
She is not, alas, and we must console ourselves with naught but the opulent glories of these world headquarters of the Latter Day Saints. I begin in the South Visitors’ Center, a sparsely furnished, carpeted space as hushed as a high-end rehab facility. The bulk of the displays are about the extraordinary and arduous efforts of the early Mormon pioneers in building the Temple. Huge, rough granite blocks were hewn by hand, transported one at a time over miles in wagons that often broke under the weight of the stone.
“The Latter Day Saints labored with faith for forty years to build the temple,” reads one display. “A flawed initial foundation [and] the arrival of federal troops in 1858 caused major delays.” This is an oblique reference to a skirmish known as the Utah War, when the federal government, alarmed at the subversive and un-American practice of polygamy, sent soldiers in and replaced Mormon leader Brigham Young with Alfred Cumming as territorial governor. Meanwhile, the chief mason had his leg amputated and still managed to hobble the twenty-two miles to Temple Square and then climb the scaffold in order to carve the final, consecrating declaration “Holiness to the Lord” in the stone façade.
In his 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne sends Phileas Fogg and his valet, Passepartout, through Utah by train. There they encounter a man, dressed in the severe dark clothes of a clergyman, pasting flyers up and down the train. “Passepartout approached and read one of these notices, which stated that Elder William Hitch, Mormon missionary, taking advantage of his presence on train No. 48, would deliver a lecture on Mormonism in car No. 117, from eleven to twelve o’clock; and that he invited all who were desirous of being instructed concerning the mysteries of the religion of the ‘Latter Day Saints’ to attend.” Passepartout takes a seat among thirty listeners. The Elder William Hitch begins his heated oration “in a rather irritated voice, as if he had been contradicted in advance: ‘I tell you that Joe Smith is a martyr, that his brother Hiram is a martyr, and that the persecutions of the United States Government against the prophets will also make a martyr of Brigham Young. Who dares to say the contrary?’” Hitch’s outrage is understandable. Verne was writing in 1872, less than fifteen years after the Utah War. Brigham Young had been imprisoned by the United States government for polygamy just the previous October. But by the end of the jeremiad, Passepartout is the only one left listening.
Nearly a century and a half later, the Mormons remain objects of suspicious scrutiny, a reputation stoked by the likes of lunatic fringe polygamist leader, convicted rapist (and, it should be noted, non-Utahan) Warren Jeffs. Or by the fact that blacks were only admitted into the Mormon Church in 1978 (a divine revelation of racial inclusion that coincided a little too tidily with the recruitment needs of the Brigham Young University f
ootball team, I am told). A sampling of some of the other things about the Latter Day Saints mentioned to me over the course of my time in Utah includes:
Polygamous houses are identifiable by the screening stands of cedars out front.
Mormon housewives will “accidentally” throw a red item of clothing into the washing machine thus changing their Garments—the ritual underclothing that comes in standard-issue white—pink.
There is a growing social problem in polygamous families where the patriarch—also known as the father—like a silver-back gorilla whose sexual dominance is threatened, casts out the male children upon reaching puberty. This is particularly common in households where some of the wives are young teenagers themselves. Facing homelessness, these adolescents fall under the care of the state or live in group homes, eking out livings as carpenters and cabinet-makers, part of the traditional LDS skills set.