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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People are always asking how come Lubbock produces so many musicians and artists. ’Cause there’s dog-all else to do in the place. In Lubbock you got to make music, laugh, or go crazy. Lots of famous musicians are from Lubbock or have done time in Lubbock—Buddy Holly, Bob Wills, Waylon Jennings, Mac Davis, Joe Ely—but I like the ones who never made it. Robin Dorsey from Matador, for example, went to Tech and had a girlfriend named Patty from Muleshoe and wrote a song about her, “Her Teeth Was Stained, But Her Heart Was Pure.” Dorsey’s college buddies were responsible for what scholars believe is the only country and western song ever written with a correct use of the subjunctive in the title: “I Wish I Were in Dixie Tonight, But She’s Out of Town.”
Lubbock has a newspaper, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, that is without redeeming social value, which is good by me because I love to pick on bad newspapers. They call Lubbock “The Hub City of the Plains”—actually, only the chamber of commerce ever called it that—and as Jimmie Dale Gilmore once observed, “Plain is the opposite of fancy.” One of my most prized possessions is a packet of postcards entitled “Ten Scenic Views of Lubbock, Texas.” It naturally includes a view of the Cotton Club, which is closed now and never was much to look at, even if it was the finest honky-tonk in all of West Texas.
Also in the ten scenic views are Prairie Dog Town, a tornado, and a lot of flat land with a lot of sky over it. I like flat land. Land you can fall off the side of makes me nervous. In Lubbock the world is about 88.3 percent sky, which I believe is the correct proportion: It takes a while to get used to, but after you do, Lubbock feels like freedom and everywhere else feels like jail. Molly Ivins is a political columnist for the Dallas Times Herald.
Prudence Mackintosh
The Timeless Spell of Ferndale
Ferndale, an old East Texas fishing club established in 1909, is about two hours and forty years from Dallas. Four or five times a year we turn off Interstate 30 at Sulphur Springs and travel through time down Highway 11 through rolling dairy country punctuated by the small towns of Winnsboro, Newsome, and Leesburg. Holsteins, who probably don’t know that they’re voguish, pose with cattle egrets on lush green hillsides. Once, two Amish girls on sturdy, ancient bicycles, white caps and long skirts flapping in the breeze, passed us and waved. “Wait’ll you see it,” my son says to his two friends who have joined him for his sixteenth birthday celebration, “it’s like a big old plantation house.” The old two-story white frame structure with screened-in porches and jury-rigged additions is nothing of the sort, but as we turn at Shrum’s Grocery on the road leading into Ferndale, the sunlight dappling through dense shade from overhanging trees does make the approach seem a little enchanted.
I am not a fisherman, so the lure for me is not the elusive ten-pound bass in the lake. It’s the escape, the step back in time, and the apparent immutability. The unstated requirement for membership is that one shall have no desire to change anything. Replacing a rotting boathouse required years of heated negotiation. I am confident that the oat-bran muffins or croissants will never defile Ferndale’s breakfast offerings of hotcakes, grits, or biscuits and gravy. Deep East Texas meals of fried chicken, catfish, hushpuppies, green-tomato-and-onion relish, and blackberry cobbler are served family-style at long wooden tables. The kitchen staff will not count calories or discover cholesterol here until the last one of us who are homesick for this country fair is long gone.
Decorators have been kept at bay as well. Accommodations are Spartan—pine-paneled dormitorylike rooms, iron beds with plaid wool blankets, and communal bathrooms down the hall. “Keep voices low after 10 p.m.” reads the sign in the upstairs hall. The whole place smells of pine, probably Pine-Sol disinfectant, and my 1940’s Texas summers. I take a deep breath each time I go, and I am transported to Little River in Arkansas, a summer place visited so early in my childhood that it has no stories, just vague images of pine cabins and screened-in porches, bare feet, adult laughter, whiskey, cards, and, once, a king snake. I like to think that my sons will have stories to go with this smell. They will remember Camp County dogs named Barney, Daisy, and Jeff who retrieved or stole tennis balls, then retreated to the porches for long naps. They will remember O.P., the black man of indeterminable age who patiently baits hooks and untangles the fishing line of small children on the dock. Looking like a figure in a David Bates painting, O.P. never changes. Midwinter or in beastly August heat, he wears overalls, a heavy flannel shirt, and the same hat. The boys marvel that he chews Levi Garrett but never seems to spit. He’s a man of few words, so they listen up in the boat, trying in vain to keep pace with his instructions as they move across the lake. “Worm for this place,” he says in his low, raspy voice, and just as they thread the worm and cast, he shakes his head sadly and says, “Shallow water, need a top water.”
When we first joined this club several years ago, I thought it might be a nice place to write, and even now I always pack my small portable typewriter, paper, and several books I intend to read. But there are no desks at Ferndale, only rocking chairs, and the book that held my interest in Dallas can’t compete here with tiny hummingbirds hurling their iridescent bodies at feeders outside the dining room windows. At Ferndale I want to be a naturalist, not a writer. I read dog-eared books on wildflowers and birds and take walks on pine-needle-covered paths. I try to sketch wild blueberries with fuchsia stems and identify native pines, oaks, maples, dogwood, and gum. I step idly over a fallen limb in my path and shiver when it slithers off into the brush.
Occasionally someone at lunch will suggest that we should go into nearby Pittsburg to poke through antique shops or to some dress shop called the Cow House Palace. I decline. My afternoon is full. I’ve spotted someone’s sweet-smelling baby who needs rocking on the porch, and I need to watch for the woodpecker. Supper is at six-thirty. I’ll take my coffee outside. The frog chorus and the evening star show begin early. Prudence Mackintosh, a contributing editor of Texas Monthly, is the author of Thundering Sneakers and Retreads.
Elmer Kelton
Mesquite Country
Many good things can be said for Texas cities, and I enjoy them on occasion, if the visits are not extended. But I always feel a sense of relief and renewal when I find myself on the road—any road—back into the vastness of the West Texas rangelands.
Fort Worth used to pride itself in a slogan, “Where the West Begins.” Actually, the west can begin almost anywhere on the sundown side of I-35, from Laredo to Gainesville, anywhere the cities leave off and cattle, horses, sheep, or goats take the place of street signs, subdivisions and “ranchettes.” For me, the threshold of God’s country is on Highway 1888, between Blanco and Fredericksburg. After skirting the Blanco River awhile, one climbs a succession of hills and finally tops out a few miles short of Luckenbach. There, when the sun is right, the oak-covered limestone hills are visible row upon row in the distance, each row a deeper blue than the one before it, stretching far westward out upon the Edwards Plateau.
Perhaps the most special ground for me, because it is my own home country, are the mesquite ranges from San Angelo west, merging with the creosote flats as one approaches the Pecos River, and beyond the Pecos the grandeur of the Davis Mountains and the Guadalupes rising from a desert floor. In the place where I spent my boyhood, I still enjoy the glistening sandhills, rippling with summer heat waves, from Crane and Odessa westward toward Monahans or northward toward Andrews.
Big and empty you might call this thinly settled country. You might even feel it has more history than future, its rural outlook no longer relevant to a state whose population is mostly urban. But it is there, and it is huge. It is home to sturdy holdouts of an independent-minded ranching and farming and oil-patch heritage—my people—who have met the challenge of a stern land and endured for generations. Elmer Kelton, a novelist who lives in San Angelo, is associate editor of Livestock Weekly.
My Library
