Road Trip, February 2022
Even in Houston, winter can be cold, and I wanted to go south. Also, I wanted one more time to see places where I had lived for a few years as a child. Thorpe is up for anything that gets him behind the wheel and out on the road. So off we went south, as far as Trump’s folly of a fence would allow. Here are some impressions and meditations along the way.
Highway 59
On this sunny Tuesday in February, trucks and cars heading south on Highway 59 slow and stop as the road narrows to one lane. The joy of movement is frustrated; I imagine that everyone feels stymied, as I do. I sit resigned to wait, even letting a truck merge in front of me, in sympathy for the driver. But I am numbed, like T.S. Eliot’s patient anesthetized upon a table, ready for the long wait in traffic.
Then, on the right side of the road, from a shallow indentation I didn’t even know was there, a movement of white catches my eye. Wings slowly work their way up. A white egret is choosing the hard way, over the truck in front of me. Struggling to gain enough lift, the bird becomes horizontal and swings to the left out of sight.
Does anyone else see its beauty and feel its momentary grace?
2. Goliad
A few miles out of the little town of Goliad lies a battlefield where musket balls and bones are still buried. This is the site where the Mexican general Santa Ana ordered the execution of rebellious Texians wounded in the battle and captured as prisoners. The massacre, as it is known, fueled the revenge taken later at the Battle of San Jacinto, where Santa Ana was defeated and Texian independence from Mexico secured.
Every child in 1950’s seventh-grade Texas History schoolrooms learned about the Battle of Goliad, and I, at least, cringed at the Mexicans’ evil. There were no Mexican students in my classroom to present their side of the story, if they even knew it or felt brave enough to speak. Recent historical scholarship has argued that the Texians were motivated not just by love of liberty but to continue practicing slavery, which had been outlawed by the new Mexican Constitution.
On the Goliad battlefield, a white pavilion was erected for the 1936 centennial of Texas independence. Inside are pictures on the walls showing rows of people out to celebrate. Not a brown face is to be seen, and in the nearby town of Goliad hardly a white face is to be seen
3. Robstown
My Aunt Jewel lived here and I want to find her house on Baker Street. It was long and narrow, next to a field where, at age 12, I used to hike into the brush with cousins Drew and Lynn, ages 14 and 11. Canteen on my back, I was in boy-world. I think I find the house, but, of course, the field is no longer there.
Aunt Jewel was loving toward me, but Puritanical in general. She and her sister, Aunt Uda Fay, prohibited their aged, deaf father from playing dominoes in the downtown game hall, one of his few pleasures. He played dominoes like a champ, but the respectable ladies of the town disapproved of such disreputable places.
I want to see the domino hall, but as we drive at the edge of what remains of a downtown, all I see are empty, decaying buildings. Along the perimeter back to the highway I see nothing but third-world shacks. There is no sign of much money coming into Robstown, or at least of money being spread out to very many people. That is the story in all the little towns we pass through in South Texas, but I don’t remember such dereliction and decrepitude when I lived in Corpus Christi and Harlingen.
In all these towns, public schools with well-kept grounds are the best-looking buildings. Is that reason enough to hope?
4. Victoria
Founded in 1824 by the Mexican empresario Martin De Leon, the town was named for the first President of the Republic of Mexico, Guadalupe Victoria. After Texians defeated Santa Ana and the Mexican Army at the Battle of San Jacinto, the Anglo settlers of Victoria drove out the Mexican residents. No doubt the Anglos felt justified. The clash of cultures has only gradually eased. Even as a child, I knew that Anglos were on top. Now, however, as we drive around Victoria and on into the Valley, we see signs for candidates in the upcoming primary election, all with Hispanic names.
5. Corpus Christi
Driving in from the northwest, Thorpe and I pass refinery row before coming upon the beauty of Corpus Christi Bay. Although fewer refineries and chemical plants lined Hwy. 77 when I lived here as a kid in the 1950’s, even then I resented the ugliness of the approach. With the political awakening of my college years in Austin, I resented oil companies in general. Now, as I burn the gasoline pumped from the ground and refined by these companies, I know I am complicit. But I can still resent ugliness. Or maybe my definition of beauty is too narrow. At least, as a kid riding at night in the back seat of the family car, I found the lights beautiful. But not as beautiful as Ocean Drive along the bay.
When Alonso Alvarez de Pineda’s ship rounded a bend in the coastline in 1519 it happened to be the feast day of Corpus Christi. Presumably a religious man, he named the bay Corpus Christi, claiming territory by naming it. Karankawa Indians were already here, but they cannot be found by name today. That didn’t matter much, when I thought about it as a kid, because they were supposed to be cannibals, an allegation now discredited by historians and anthropologists. I also didn’t question then the social order that placed Mexicans, perhaps descendents of Pineda’s men, as second-class. In my ignorance of history, I thought it was their fault because so many were poor.
The Texas legislature still would keep today’s children ignorant, by banning the complexities of Texas and United States history from being taught. My seventh-grade, one-sided version of history once again would prevail.
6. South Padre Island
Approaching the island from Port Isabel, we see condos, most twenty stories or so high, spreading along the Gulf of Mexico. A long and narrow strip of sand dunes covered with grasses and succulents, South Padre is not protected from such commerce. North of Matagorda Channel, the island is protected as a national seashore. But I am not complaining; sleeping in an air-conditioned bedroom after a day on the beach is what my body would prefer. So do a lot of white retirees with enough money to splurge on hotels and meals of fresh fish. I couldn’t help noticing—we all looked alike.
7. Border Wall
So much has been written about the border wall, Thorpe and I wanted to see it for ourselves. Our preconceived notion was that it is Trump’s Folly. As my Republican brother-in-law quipped early on, “Build the wall, someone will build a taller ladder.” Driving along Hwy. 281 from the Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge, we are sometimes as close as thirty feet away. At one point the tall, metal fence snakes behind a cluster of new brick houses only to end where the houses do. Even bordering fields, the fence starts and stops. It reminds me of the Maginot Line bordering France from Belgium. When the Germans wanted to invade, they simply drove the tanks around. Folly and more.
8. Home
And so we end our wander, for me a trip back in time. As a kid I didn’t know the word feudal, but still understood an economic structure of rich and poor with little in between. At the Santa Ana Wild Life Refuge, a photograph showed a large group of Anglos clustered beside a train. The text explains that between 1910 and 1927, property developer C.W. Swallow brought trainloads of potential Anglo buyers into the Lower Rio Grande Valley. These were the people who built orchards and large farms and eventually formed the power structure of the region when I lived there. That has changed, but poverty remains. Old South Texas has not aged well. And new South Texas seems to consist mostly of franchise and national chain commerce with thick rows of billboards screaming for attention.
But in Victoria, Kingsville, Corpus Christi, and Brownsville we saw branches of the University of Houston, Texas A & M, and The University of Texas, as well as older colleges such as the lovely Southmost College in Brownsville. On these campuses mostly Hispanic students were walking to class. They looked young, healthy, and hopeful. I put my hopes for the future of the region on them.
