My Favorite Place
Texas is vast, but its appeal is intimate. Out of patriotic duty, we admire its size and sweep, but our most treasured places are likely to have a more human scale. These spots might be public domain showplaces—monuments, vistas, idyllic Hill Country towns—or they might be simply the scene of some private epiphany, homely or peculiar places that we would never have noticed if they had not somehow left their mark on us. The Texans on the following pages have left their own mark on the state, but for all of them there remains that one unforgettable place whose mystery never fades.
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I like my work, and I suppose this is where I do the major part of it. My study is where I live the life of the mind. It’s where my imagination is most engaged, is at its freest, and where it does the most good. It’s the happiest place in Texas for me. Actor Tommy Lee Jones was most recently seen in Lonesome Dove. His latest film, The Package, will be released this summer.
T.R. Fehrenbach
The Living Stone of the Capitol
A favorite place should be a renewable resource, like a trout stream or a family farm or ranch preserved across the generations. It should always be there, rewarding both the senses and the spirit, immutable.
For this reason my favorite place in Texas is the state capitol. While no structure built by man lasts forever—even Nature does not last forever—the Capitol seems likely to last as long as our present culture. Over the years we’re compelled to restore it, because it represents more than any other symbol the true spirit of our state.
The Capitol, like the capitol of ancient Rome, was and is more than a mere symbol or celebration of government; it was raised to the grandeur of a republic and the vision of its people. There is no greater reminder of Texan boldness (no, not even the Alamo!) than this mighty edifice in the center of the state. Our forefathers, still subject to Indian raiding in the west, still suffering from the ravages of civil war and occupation, poor in all but land and hope, planned what was said to be the seventh-largest structure in the world, defiantly taller than the national capitol, and set it down in a frontier town of 11,013 where it remains our most splendid architectural monument.
And it is not an erection of cold marble and granite dedicated to a dying memory; it is an artifact devised by the mind and hand of man that remains in constant use—a useful, used place that has spanned the generations gracefully, even awesomely, one we live with comfortably and proudly, just as the Texans who built it planned. T.R. Fehrenbach is the author of Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans and the chairman of the Texas Historical Council.
Beverly Lowry
Hearth and Home
Winter, one of our cold nights. We turn off the lights, lay in a fire, and debate the music. In its early stages a fire is balky and unlovely, like a child in a pout. Sputtering, it stalls, as if doing us a favor by not dying. We turn the music up loud and, glasses in hand, settle in. From the hearth, more resistance. We poke, prod, and cajole, add a chunk of the dry oak we bought from the old man in the white truck on the side of the road, then a leaner one of greener mesquite ordered from the local young entrepreneur. Patient but determined, we are waiting for enough logs to burn through that some fall beneath the grate and make a solid red base on which the body of the fire can feed. Flame is our desire, all-out flame. Could be Randy Travis singing; might be Nina Simone, Jessye Norman, or the Gipsy Kings. So long as it’s loud. As the fire finally begins to thrive I awaken with it. Soon it is one, two o’clock, and I never want to sleep again. Outside the moon may be high. The dog may walk across the porch, scratch herself, leaving as clear and as black a shadow as if the beer clock on the porch wall said noon instead of the middle of the night. Now the fire is really hot. When I stoke it, my skin heats up fast.
Where is this place? Some living room somewhere. Does not have to be Texas. Could be anywhere.
Growing up, I did not learn about fires, did not understand the need for kindling or know the difference—in fire terms—between dry wood and green. I knew when the wind blew a fire spread, but not why. To his dying day my father wondered why we did not just whip down to Sac-N-Pac for a paper log. Why go to the trouble, he wanted to know. A fire’s a fire.
Could be anywhere but it is not. Seems to me a long way from where I started. Three o’clock now, I can feel the bass notes inside my earbones. Outside the road is so lit up with moonlight I could make it to the highway on my own, without a flashlight. Beverly Lowry lives outside San Marcos. Her latest novel is Breaking Gentle.
Ernetso J. Cortes, Jr.
The Doors of Perception
I have no trouble remembering my least favorite place while growing up in San Antonio: the Alamo. It was an oppressive reminder that Mexicanos—even though we were the majority—did not really belong. This fact came home to me when an elderly woman would frequently accost me on my way to the bus stop and remind me of what a wonderful neighborhood this was “before all you Mexicans moved in.” Fortunately, my mother taught my brother and me early on never to allow anyone to question our right to be where we were. What I did like about growing up was the public library. Transportation was cheap then, and the bus system went right by my house, so it was easy for my cousins and me to spend a weekend at the library and at the movies. One of the librarians, Ray Sanchez—who later married my cousin Yolanda—was my personal guide to the inner workings of the library system. He helped me bridge the gap between the juvenile books and the more sophisticated world of adult knowledge.
As we grew up, Ray helped my brother and my cousins get jobs at the different branch libraries and, I am embarrassed to say, helped me to check out more books for longer periods than was allowed. The library opened my eyes to the histories of different cultures, to the wanderings of Odysseus and Aeneas and the epic stories of Charlemagne and his twelve peers. Through the library I discovered Dr. Carlos E. Castañeda and his classic works on the mission era in Texas. There, I also learned of a different side to the Texas Revolution.
I don’t go to the San Antonio library anymore. Ray died recently, and the original library is now a museum for the Hertzberg Circus Collection. Somehow the bigger downtown library does not have the charm or the attentiveness that it once had for me as a young man growing up. But I hope that there are people there who care as much about what libraries can mean to young people as Ray Sanchez did, and I hope that they can make it as attractive, warm, and charming as the library once was for me. Ernesto J. Cortes, Jr., is on the national staff of the Industrial Areas Foundation and is the director of Texas Interfaith.
Larry Dierker
Nature’s Lap Pool
I know why some folks run in small circles and swim laps in overgrown bathtubs—nobody wants to get old and tired. But I’d feel like Pavlov’s dog doing that. All of my life, laps have been punishment—the price I paid to get to the floor of the arena.
But when I saw Austin’s Barton Springs it was love at first stroke. There among the pecan trees, cypresses, cottonwoods, and rocks I found a delightful blend of the pastoral and the civilized. I found native Hill Country parkland sloping unevenly into one side of the water and, on the other side, a modest old bathhouse sitting on a terrace above a descending apron of lawn. Both sides of the pool have been unobtrusively bulkheaded with concrete, and there are steps leading down to the starting point, which is marked with a simple white line.
Beneath its mysterious dark-green surface, the pool offers clear views of all sorts of rock formations varying in depth from two to fourteen feet. I’ve seen fish of various sizes down there, and I am told that if you swim the pool often you will eventually meet up with a turtle. The water is cold, to be sure. But so is the Pacific Ocean. What I like best about Barton Springs is that it takes only four laps to make a mile and that it is virtually impossible to take the same route back and forth. There are no lines on the bottom, so you can’t go straight. Each long lap offers a slightly different scene.
Barton Springs is one helluva place to swim. It’s the Fenway Park of swimming. Larry Dierker played for the Houston Astros for thirteen years. He writes a weekly baseball column for the Houston Chronicle.
Molly Ivins
Lubbock: Seat of Rebellion
My favorite place in Texas is Lubbock, mostly because Lubbock, like Popeye the Sailor, is what it is. Lubbock’s a place that’ll keep you honest. It’s hard to be pretentious or affected if you’re from Lubbock. Damned hard.
One thing I like about Lubbock is that people there know what sin is. There’s more confusion on that issue than many people realize, with all this bushwa about being nonjudgmental. The advantage of being able to identify sin is that you can go out and do it, and enjoy it. Lubbock gives people a lot to rebel against: You don’t have to waste time trying to figure out what the rules are; you can go right ahead and break ’em and see what happens.
My Library
