I was not altogether impressed with the place, upon my first visit to Texas. That first visit coincided with Air Force basic training, which meant confinement to the premises of Lackland Air Force Base, with the exception of a couple of hours, aside from the time spent coming and going. Those few hours spent, on the day that we were all released to explore the off-post fleshpots available in walking range of the USO in Downtown San Antonio, while in Class-A uniform and in pairs with another military person, was barely enough to give any sense of the place at all. In my case, being fixed up with a blind date escort in the form of a tech school student friend of the boyfriend of one of the girls from my flight turned out to be a total bust. I got to see the Alamo, and a bit of the Riverwalk, before the escort ditched me while I was in the ladies’ in Joskes’ Department Store, and I had to throw myself upon the chivalrous instincts of the first guy I saw with a military haircut, pleading with him to walk with me back to the USO where I could catch the first bus back to base. I had not been impressed, either with the blind date or the city: the Alamo was full of souvenir tat, of the “supposed to have belonged to” or “carved from a piece of” tat, and the Riverwalk--- those bits that I saw at the time--- smelt of drains, and was a dank, mostly deserted backwater. Within a week and a half of that abortive visit, I was departing Texas, early on a dark January morning in a pouring rainstorm, and didn’t return for eighteen years--- coincidentally, the first hour back at Lackland AFB caught us in another frog-strangling rainstorm; some kind of symmetry in that, I think.

It is a mythical and curious place, Texas--- and this part of it rather baffles those people who come with expectations of oil wells! And cattle herds! Tall, drawly guys in big cowboy hats, brandishing six-shooters! The belt buckle on the Bible Belt!
That last may very well be, but Texas is not anything like the Deep South. I did a TDY to Gulfport, Mississippi a couple of years ago, and the biggest grocery store in town was practically deserted at 6 PM on a weekday evening. Mississippians were lovely, cordial people, charming and mellow, and so leisurely about things I kept wanting to scream in their ears and shake their shoulders, and slap them around some, maybe they would WAKE UP! Texas hustles--- the grocery store is jam-packed at that time of day, and people walk purposefully.

There aren’t any oil wells around these parts, either--- just rolling green, hilly country that reminds my mother of Pennsylvania, dotted with tiny stone houses built by the German and Alsatian settlers. And while Texans may reverence the Alamo, high school football and the cowboy way, they remain completely irreverent about everything else. In ten years I have yet to see anyone brandish a six-shooter; it being a concealed carry state, I think most people keep them in the glovebox of their motor vehicle. Those “gimme” billed baseball caps are rather more common than cowboy hats, and the businessmen around here wear ordinary business suits--- no string ties and cowboy boots. Cattle in the streets? Well, in Fort Worth--- they have a drive there. Occasionally on the traffic reports there is a mention of a fence down along the 1604 highway, and the odd cow wandering on the roadway. I see deer much more often--- in fact, I saw one at Thousand Oaks and Nacodoches, just last week, loping across the road from the direction of the cement plant, towards the Northern Hills golf course, and the green alleys leading out to the undeveloped acres of scrub, and a neighbor of mine nailed one with a late model Nissan, just around the corner from my house a while ago. (Killed the deer, and smashed the Nissan’s fender.)
There are a couple of classical music stations here, several universities, and the symphony orchestra keeps on trying. Every city block on every major road has a place where you can get breakfast tacos, the food of the gods. The hills and the highway verges in spring are all one color with wildflowers-- vast swathes of blue and pink and yellow.

I realized what a truly civilized place this city is, when driving home one afternoon, along one of the back roads, just one lane, either way, with deep sweeps of green grass and wildflowers on either side, and suddenly there was traffic backed up in my direction. All I could see were the cars and SUVs and trucks stopping in the road, and then carefully driving into either the oncoming lane, or onto the verge. They were carefully avoiding something in the middle of the single lane, something that I could not see until the last vehicle in front of me pulled into the oncoming lane, circling… the biggest, most angry, and coiled-up rattlesnake I had ever seen, in the exact middle of the road. And everyone was driving carefully around it. Anywhere else, I swear, the first bubbah in a pick-up would have run right over it… but they are getting a little rare, you know… and everyone was driving around it.
Truly special sort of place, after all.

(But opossums and armadillos are plentiful, and they take their chances!)