Gruene, TX

Purple yellow dusk saw us in Texas Hill Country, heading towards Gruene, TX. Following signs towards "Historic Gruene" (pronounced like "green" and used to it full punning potential with places like the Gruene Apple Bed and Breakfast and the Gruene with Envy Boutique) brought us to a two-street town of antique chic--old small town store fronts with new insides, nostalgia played up to full capacity. What I heard was, "adorable," "quaint," "cute," "old-timey." And indeed it is, yet in the same way that Disney's Animal Kingdom is "exotic"--to the letter true, but genuine? Not so much. From the minute we parked in the town's vast (and full) parking lot and stepped onto a Main Street with county fair-sized crowds milling on a Wednesday night, I could sense something was awry. Small towns are supposed to be quiet, simple, understated. And Gruene probably was like that, once upon a time, but at some point since then quaint became a commodity.

The few restaurants in town were dining hall-sized and had scores of headphone-wearing hosts shepherding the crowds of diners. The food was unimpressive and generic and not even the interesting building--an old gristmill--at the place we ate could make it worthwhile, though drinking some local Texas wine was a unique experience. The half-handful of stores, instead of selling local antiques as some tourist towns would, were mostly souvenir shacks reminiscent of a Cracker Barrel's lobby.

Despite it all, there is redemption in the sage-colored Gruene River. Stories below a steep treed bank, it draws its arm around the town and you remember where you would have been.

Florida is just biding its time

I believe that Florida is just biding its time before it reclaims its own. Who are we kidding? We live in a wilderness and our toehold is weak. If hurricanes don't flood us and destroy our houses, then tornadoes rip them apart anyway, or if all else fails, a sinkhole could always open up and swallow you into the ground. And then there's the swamps--or should I say, "swamp" singular, because nearly the entire state is one. I am actually rather fond of swamps--the drapes of Spanish moss, the black water, the sense of stillness--but I can't say the same for some of its denizens. First, there are the mosquitoes. I don't believe they need further explanation, except to add that oh, they on occasion carry the West Nile virus. Scorpions, too--we used to find them in our house. Then, there are the several species of venomous snakes...cottonmouths, copperheads, rattlesnakes, our friend the coral snake... And last but not least, the king of the swamp: the alligator. Like their habitat, I do have a soft spot for alligators. They were my backyard pets growing up. Luckily for me, they always ran in the opposite direction whenever I tried to play with them. Though I probably wouldn't have been so fortunate if I were say, a small dog.

Let us not forget the ocean, surrounding us on three sides. Breathtakingly beautiful and bathwater warm, what could be the problem? Besides the lovely potential to be swallowed by the ocean if global warming continues, there is the fact that while we bathe in those pristine waters, we have ceased to be at the top of the food chain. Sharks. Not quite Jaws down here, but every so often a bull shark or tiger shark gets a little frisky and decides it wants manflesh for lunch instead of boring old tuna. And while stingrays aren't quite as deadly, getting stung can make you wish you'd never been born. Same goes for the jellyfish and man o' wars, of course.

So basically, no matter where you go in Florida you're threatened by either dangerous animals or impending natural disaster.

fitting in, in Las Vegas

For a night out in Vegas, I opt for my low-back, spandex American Apparel mini-dress. My mother looks me up and down and tells me I look trashy.

Well, at least I'll fit in.
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Some comments I received while walking along the strip:

"Oh baby, you're more than a ten, you're a twelve!"
"Damn, legs galore!"
"Oh, baby mama!"
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Oh yea, I fit in.

3 things every Florida school child learns about their benevolent home state

1. Red touch black, friend of Jack. Red touch yellow, killer fellow.

This means: Little ditty to remember the difference between a king snake and a coral snake. They are both red, yellow, and black, but differ in the above-mentioned pattern. King snakes are harmless and coral snakes are the most poisonous North American snake. A coral snake once slithered across my fourth grade teacher's foot. We students were in no doubt that it was, indeed, a coral snake.


2. Always shuffle your feet when you walk in the ocean.

This means: If you do not shuffle your feet, you might step on a stingray hiding just underneath the sand. The stingray will not take well to being stepped on and it will sting you. This will hurt like a mother. If you shuffle your feet, hopefully you'll just nudge it and it won't mind as much.

3. If you are being chased by an alligator, run. But in a zig-zag line, never, ever a straight line.

This means: Alligators can run up to 35 miles per hour. If properly irked, they will chase you, with the intent to eat you. You cannot run up to 35 miles per hour. Luckily, alligators are not the smartest of God's creatures and will follow you step for step. With your superior leg length, you can run faster in a zig-zag line than an alligator can.

why Florida is saved from suburb hell

There's not much city to speak of here in sunny Florida. There are of course a few exceptions, the spikes of chain link fence poking from the crown of Spanish moss, the few metropoli in this nearly all-consuming wetland. Miami, of course, though I can't comment much, having seen little but the cruise terminal and a few seasons of Nip/Tuck. Tallahassee I suppose deserves to be up there, being the capital and all, though in my opinion politicians and drunken college students does not a city make. Jacksonville does not count, because it smells. Really. This may seem illogical, but if a paper mill miles outside of city limits can overpower all other impressions of a place, then the place can't have much to impress. Orlando's downtown is an afterthought, built up to try to distract people from the fact that they came to the veritable middle of nowhere because of a cartoon mouse. And last but not least, Tampa, my hometown.

Tampa has one of those downtowns that has office buildings, restaurants that are only open from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and nothing else. But from here on it spreads, sometimes more than an hour's drive in all directions: the greater "Tampa Bay Area." Read: suburbs. Miles of strip malls and subdivisions, as far as the eye can see. Normally this sort of setup has me itching with anxiety, searching vainly for non-existent public transportation to take me far, far away.

But Tampa is saved from suburb hell by the simple fact that we are in Florida. Beaches with sand as fine as flour and warm green waters are on the other side of the four-lane highways. Palm trees, black against a sky bright yellow with sunset, rise impossibly far, impossibly thin, twice as high as the rows of two-story houses. The hottest summer afternoons are relieved by massive storms, purple and black and inescapable, that rumble in, first thickening the air with potential, then shattering it with thick, hot drops of rain, falling like grain from a sliced sack.

You'll emerge from a series of condominiums to suddenly rise over a bridge, and there will be the setting sun, staring at you like an inverted pupil, a reaching light instead of a swallowing dark, its sunset iris spreading around it. You'll look away for a moment and then it will be as if the sky blinked, but took its eye with it, and there will be nothing left but the perfect line of sky and sea.

There are houses that instead of grassy backyards with swing sets have an ocean and a dock. Dolphins and manatees are as common here as squirrels and songbirds are in that more ordinary yard. My far more typically suburban childhood home has no cookie cutter fence and postage stamp yard but a swamp and a sunbathing alligator outside my back door.

This is why coming home to Florida, even though it is the suburbs, is truly like a breath of fresh air. And this is coming from a girl who clears her head with city smog.

the introduction, part 1

It's a combination of 11th grade lessons in U.S. History, adolescent hours spent playing The Oregon Trail, and a little bit of the grass is greener: manifest destiny. The American pioneer's much theorized, but essentially inexplicable, westward drive. And I have it too.

New York never captured my imagination. Spending several weeks a year there visiting my father, glutting myself on all things cultural and cool, got the City out of my system long ago. Maybe it was too much of a good thing, because, don't get me wrong, I have no cynicism for the city that introduced me to Richard Avedon, Shakespeare in the Park, Starry Night, and handmade italian ices. Nevertheless, I, more or less your average suburban teenager, needed a different shiny idol upon which to focus my dreams of bigger and better things.

In the hazy incertitude of senior year, the only direction my grasping ambition had were two negatives: no woods and no New York. A less defined, but no less important, condition was also my violent aversion to the cold. Being as I am from the veritable tropics (sunny Florida), and having already spent far too many Christmases freezing my ass off in Rockefeller Plaza, staring at that dumb tree, cities in colder climes were not so much eliminated from possible destinations as not even on the radar to begin with. The University of Chicago may as well have been on Mars, for all the thought I gave it.

So when it came time for me, a reliably good student from an ambitious and pretentious prep school, to apply to universities, by rote Harvard, Brown, Stanford, and Georgetown were on my list. Yale was eliminated because New Haven was small and on the ugly side, all the other top schools that come to mind were axed because they were in the woods, and the only reason Harvard--in frigid Boston--was allowed to stay was because, well, it's Harvard. Being from the South, Tulane was on the list as well, as was the University of Miami because I somehow paradoxically thought I had a shot at Harvard but was also unwilling to trust my college counselor's assurances that Tulane was easily a safety school for me. And lastly, based on my mother's recommendation, a school I had barely heard of before: Rice, in Houston, TX.

After I had decided on Rice, the response from my friends and teachers was eerily unanimous: "You? In Texas?" Me in Texas, indeed. The enormity of my decision didn't fully hit me until several of these reactions had finally broken through the cloud of ignorance. I had visited Houston prior to my decision and had found it to be sufficiently big, and from what I could tell, interesting. Rice's campus was also very pretty. Oh, and it was warm. So, so warm in ways that Washington D.C. and a faculty of Jesuits never would be. Yet somehow, in all my considerations, the fact that Houston was in Texas had inexplicably escaped my notice.

Texas--Texas of gallon hat-sized ego, cows, feathered hair, boots, the Bush family, and barbecue--was about to be my home for the next four or so years. My first impression of Texas was arriving at the border via I-10 and being greeted, shortly thereafter, by a car dealership with the typical house-sized flag--except it was the Texas flag, not the familiar 50 stars and 13 stripes. No, here in Texas we just have one star, two stripes. We only need one star. Because we are the only star that matters. We were our own country for about five years, about 150 years ago, but oh, oh no have we ever forgotten it. I would be hard-pressed to tell you what's on Florida's flag, but I can safely say the Lone Star is branded in my memory. In the original statehood agreement, it was stipulated that the Texas flag could be flown at the same height as the American flag, instead of lower like all the other states--oh no, we are not just another state, we are sister nations, joining in alliance, but well, if you insist, we will condescend to be called by your name, but only because we like you. This privilege is always exercised.

Needless to say, things have not changed much; if anything, the Texas Ego has only grown. It is so much a part of the collective mentality that the majority of ad campaigns feed off of the idea. Ford makes trucks Texas tough. Whataburger has small, medium, large, and Texas-sized. Pretty much everything has a Texas size, in fact. And no one blinks an eyelid. This is completely normal. Can you image an ad saying something like, "and now carrying California-sized?" Yea.

The nation-sized ego has not changed. Neither has the rancher culture. "Home on the Range" Texas once was, and it is still true that there are lots of ranches left, lots of cows. But in cities like Houston, I'm pretty sure the majority of the citizens haven't been closer than 100 yards to a cow in three generations. But this phases no one. Cowboy boots are not cowboy boots. They are shoes. Cowboy hats (also just "hats") are worn unironically. There are actually people here who wear ten-gallon hats (straw in the summer and felt in the winter, of course), have crisp button-up shirts (buttoned to the neck and adorned with a bolo tie) tucked into tight-fitting jeans (let me tell you, these guys put hipsters to shame), belted with a buckle about the size of a small child's face, and cowboy boots. And they are being completely, totally, utterly serious.

My increasing trepidation was not assuaged when during orientation at Rice, it was mentioned that, "Oh, and if you have any guns with you, you have to keep them in the gun locker. You can check them out and go shooting any time you like, of course, but you know, it's just for safety." Later, I overheard two Texas natives talking about hunting. "Why," I asked, "why do you think killing animals is fun?" "Well, how else are you supposed to get venison?" I figured the answer of, "You don't!", was the obvious one only to me.

But despite the big hats, big guns, big talk, and big heads, Texas ended up pleasantly surprising me.

And now, on the day I leave it, I am not surprised that I am sad to go. Houston has been good to me, and now I leave it behind as I would a true friend. And ahead is California, and my own manifest destiny.