THE GRIT OF ‘HOMETOWN TEXAS’
THE Texas that most Americans know from the headlines, the magazine stories and the movies is not necessarily the Lone Star State that Peter Brown and I know. As a photographer and a writer, we find our Texas more appealing, in part because it’s fast passing, in part because we find it beautiful in an unaffected way.
The Texas we know is off the busy interstates, beyond the metropolitan regions spreading amoebalike into the surrounding countryside. It’s rural, small-town and slower-paced. Even today, it’s much more connected to the land, to the pine forests and pasture, the rich river bottoms and the vast stretches of rangeland that drew early settlers to the state in the first place. The Texas we know also is more intimately connected to the state’s frontier heritage.
That’s the Texas I encounter in my “Native Texan” columns in the Houston Chronicle, where these columns appeared originally. Even as the land empties out and the once-vital small towns collapse in on themselves, even in their dying, I find a certain rough beauty.
It’s also a Texas much more familiar to most Texans — urban and otherwise — than you would guess. A great many Houstonians, Dallasites and Austinites grew up in smalltown Texas. Many are only a couple of generations off the land. Even if they didn’t live it themselves, they’ve heard stories about small-town and rural childhoods, the appeal of growing up in a place where everyone knows your name.
One morning a few years ago, I flew to Amarillo, rented a car and drove to Lipscomb (pop. 44), to interview the county judge. As we shook hands, he told me I had just missed a deer that had wandered in through the front door of the Lipscomb County Courthouse and strolled out through the back. What I didn’t miss as I hung around Lipscomb for a couple of days was the flock of wild turkeys that for decades has ambled around town, the easy-going gobblers always sticking together, minding their own turkey business,
with never a worry about being bothered by the locals.
Most Texans have never heard of Lipscomb. Among the northernmost tier of Panhandle counties, Lipscomb is closer to Liberal, Kan., than to any good-sized town in Texas. The first time I happened upon the green and leafy little place, I was writing a piece for Texas Monthly about the Panhandle invasion of corporate hog farms. I’ve been back several times to investigate and appreciate the tiny community (most recently to see how it fared during a massive wildfire that ravaged the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles).
Founded a bit more than a century ago by German and Russian wheat farmers, the farming and ranching community was dying — had died except for the courthouse. Two lesbian women revived it.
Drawn to the abandoned Western-style storefronts on the courthouse square, Debbie and Jan rented a house, set up pottery and painting studios and a gift shop in a couple of the ramshackle old buildings and, despite some initial suspicion on the part of a few Lipscombites, made themselves part of the community. Not long after they moved in, the two women built an open-air dance platform and invited Bob Willsstyle Western swing bands from throughout the Panhandle and West Texas to play on Saturday nights. Every weekend, an hour or so before the fiddler struck up the opening Texas two-step tune, they put on country suppers, with farm and ranch women from miles around contributing their homemade specialties.
A few years later, two bedand-breakfasts opened up — in Lipscomb, Texas, of all places. Folks from Amarillo, 90 miles away, restored some of the old houses as second homes. More artists moved in. Lipscomb had come alive.
I tell the Lipscomb story because it contains the three elements that draw me to an older, more rooted Texas: intriguing people, the pervasive influence of place and the enduring significance of the past on present-day lives. These three elements are the focal points for “Hometown Texas.”
What intrigues me as a writer is how men and women take the hand they’ve been dealt — fate, family, circumstance, luck — and craft a life for themselves, like how a poet acknowledges the rules and limitations of a particular type of poem and constructs a work of art. We all do the same thing with our own lives. The challenge for the writer is to work to understand a person’s life, to get a feel for it, and then to recreate that life in a compelling way.
When I was a boy growing up in a working-class suburb of Waco, my dad had a potato chip route. Several days a week each summer from about age 4 until I was a teenager, I was his Creamer’s “Clover Fresh” Potato Chips helper, as we called on grocery stores and beer joints and hamburger stands in small towns within about a 50-mile radius of Waco. I came to appreciate the particularities — indeed, the peculiarities — of place.
Pulling into Marlin on Friday mornings in our yellow step-in van — Marlin, where the New York Giants trained in the 1920s because of the town’s restorative hot sulfur springs — I would try to sense how the little town was different from, say, Belton or Rosebud or Copperas Cove. As a kid, I gradually came to realize that towns, like people, are intelligible. They have distinctive personalities.
“The puzzle of Texas is that it is simultaneously diverse and unified,” Stephen Brook writes in a book called Honkytonk Gelato. “Climactically, topographically, economically, the east has no connection with the west, yet the Texans’ sense of themselves, their cultural identity … links the rancher from San Angelo with the timber merchant from Nacogdoches like mountaineers at different heights yet on the same rope.”
Anyone who’s driven across Texas is well-aware that it’s a large and remarkably diverse state, one that’s so large and so diverse that some have suggested carving five states out of Texas. When Texas was admitted to the Union, in fact, Congress authorized it to form “new States of convenient size, not exceeding four in number and in addition to the said State of Texas.”
Former Vice President John “Cactus Jack” Garner of Uvalde — best known for comparing the vice presidency to “a pitcher of warm spit” — maintained in the 1920s that slicing Texas into five states the size of Arkansas would “transfer the balance of political power to the South and secure for the Southern States prestige and recognition.”
Garner envisioned an East Texas, West Texas, North Texas and South Texas, with just plain Texas in the middle. The idea went nowhere, largely because most Americans believed that one Texas was more than enough.
Holley, who retired earlier this year as a Chronicle editorial writer, was a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series of editorials on guns and gun culture. A former staff writer for the Washington Post, his “Native Texan” column continues to run in the Chronicle on Saturdays.
Brown has photographed landscapes and small towns for 25 years. The author of five books, he teaches photography at the Glasscock School at Rice University and lives in Houston.