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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John T. Biggers
The Beauty of Elemental Forms
The Rothko Chapel in Houston is made of warm earthenware brick. The brick seems antique, almost ancient, and the chapel itself is a very simple structure. Inside it is cool and quiet and somewhat dark. Arranged in a square in the middle of the room are monolithic benches with no backs—plain, substantial structures that look almost like carved logs. The floor has the color and texture of a natural clay floor in an earthen house. There are no decorative aspects anywhere. At first the building looks like a perfect square, but you slowly realize it is an octagon, with a floating octagonal ceiling that always reminds me of a cloud formation. And here are Rothko’s paintings. At first impression they seem black, but after a while you notice there are reddish and bluish tones in them as well. Like everything else in the chapel, they possess the beauty of elemental forms. They help create a soothing unity. I love the Rothko Chapel because every time I go there—leaving behind the chaos and confusion of the city—I feel isolated and relieved. I feel that I can think with my own mind. John T. Biggers is a Houston artist. “Internal Orders,” a show of his work, will open next year at the Nave Museum in Victoria.
Paul Horgan
Alone With History
Shortly after dawn. A heavy mist. Flatlands sweetened by the silvery veins of river and creek. Air pungent with scents of early spring—the wry woody tang of reviving mesquite, the waft from meadow wildflowers, the muskiness of damp earth. Birds ready for the day calling in the groves. Against the paling nacreous sky, a cardinal making a scarlet streak on the peripheral vision.
Turning with the road I take my first view of the Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo on the outskirts of San Antonio on 29 March 1949.
I am in the midst of several years of travel, pursuing information, impressions, conclusions that would feed into a book I would write: Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History. As the cultural history of the river reaches far from its banks, the inland Franciscan foundations of eighteenth-century Texas are a part of my study; and I have come here to see the temples of San Antonio—San Antonio de Valero (called the Alamo), San Juan Capistrano, San Francisco de la Espalda, La Concepción, and San José, that one which I now pause before in this spring morning.
The mist is a curtain over the scene. I need a second look to see the outlines of the mission.
Is that a tower—is that a dome? These seem to waver with the slowly shifting densities of the laden air. As I strain my vision to see, I think of the veiling mist as an instrument of history. It sets the mission and its whole meaning dimly back two centuries; and I seem to be looking at it through spent time. This March morning of 1949 slowly dissolves as the mist is beginning to dissolve, and as I follow my memory of what I know about the Franciscan enterprise of 1720 founded by Fray Antonio Margil de Jesús and Captain Juan Valdéz, the shadowy outline of the mission comes clear and I see then the lasting fabric of their belief and labor.
Rising above the grove of ancient mesquite trees showing the first yellow-green leafage of spring, the tower and dome and stout walls of San José are statements of purpose, skill, and grace: devout defense in wilderness, fine craft in building with gray stone, beauty of design. As the light of memory and morning continue to grow together, I am moved by the style of the four-sided tower, with its high, narrow apertures, its decorated cornices, its pyramidal roof. The effect is both light and massive. From the rear of the church rises the dome over a drum with large rectangular windows. Like the tower, it is surmounted by a cross. The dome is a perfect hemisphere. So just are the proportions of these dominating features that the great walls, coming to sight through the green haze of mesquite, seem to share in the lightness of the high profile.
It is too early for tourists. I am alone with history. I am free to people the vision with the friars, the soldiers, the Indians who live there; and I make notes of their uses of life as I walk about the mission and its outlying buildings. A total life of two centuries past is visible. There is worship under the dome; labor in the fields and irrigation system; harvest in the great barrel-vaulted granary; workshops and sleeping cells; and a perimeter for defense against Indian marauders who would take by force what other Indians abide by under a firm Spanish peace.
At the west entrance from whose south side the tower rises, I rejoice in the exuberant ornament of the facade. A great lofty Moorish doorway supports a grand entablature in the churrigueresque style. It unites the heritage of Arabic Spain with memory of the Mexican pre-Catholic decoration of Aztec temples and palaces; and it projects long corridors of thought and feeling about the transit of human ways across worlds and times.
The light is growing. Soon the modern world will begin to awaken and arrive. I work faster at my notes. From a vantage ground among the mesquite groves I make a watercolor drawing of the wiry black trees with their young greenery, and the dome and tower growing out of and above them.
Now I am back in the morning of 29 March 1949; and I take with me my possession of this Texas place. It will remain intact for me into the moment of this writing forty years later. Novelist and historian Paul Horgan is professor emeritus at Wesleyan University.
William Broyles, Jr.
The Submerged Neighborhood
Burnet Drive in Baytown doesn’t really end; past the last houses it just disappears into the bay. I’ve been going to the end of Burnet for almost forty years, since when the street was paved with oyster shells; the crunching of the shells beneath my bicycle wheels as I made the rounds of my paper route is the sound of my childhood.
When I was a teenager the end of Burnet was the favorite parking spot. From our ’56 Bel Airs and ’57 Fairlanes we could see the lights of the refineries reflected on the dark waters of the bay: the pipes, the tanks, the huge catalytic cracking units all glowing with light, strange shapes unlike anything else, a fantasy world at our feet. Flames roared from flares amid the lights, as if the earth itself was belching fire.
Occasionally a ship would pass, bound from the port of Houston to some distant place we had only read about: the Strait of Malacca, the Gulf of Sidra, Singapore, Penang, Rotterdam. The ships were in motion, free, but we were rooted to this piece of earth lapped by the waves, on a spot where land and water meet, a no-man’s-land dotted by tires and garbage and filled with the smells of paper mills, refineries, and dead fish. Just across the estuary was a subdivision called Brownwood, the home to girls I dated and many of my friends. Since I was a boy, the pumping of water and oil from the earth to support industries along the Ship Channel has caused the land to subside almost ten feet. Nearly all of Brownwood is now beneath the surface of the bay.
I look out from the end of Burnet today and there are many more lights of refineries, and they are just as beautiful. The San Jacinto Monument still stands sentinel over the battlefield, the ships still pass in the night, bound for places that are now familiar. But the scenes of my childhood, the homes and the very land itself, are gone beneath the waves, a civilization as vanished as the Toltecs. William Broyles, Jr., the founding editor of Texas Monthly, is a co-creator of China Beach.
Kinky Friedman
The Left Bank of Texas
My favorite place in Texas is a restaurant that closed almost ten years ago. It was known as the Nighthawk on the Drag. The Drag, of course, spiritually speaking, isn’t doing too well either. But in the early sixties, when I was a student at the University of Texas in Austin, the Nighthawk, along with the Pancake House and the old Plantation restaurant, was where people went to stay up all night, drink coffee, and solve the problems of the world. Sort of the left bank of Texas.
It was a different world then. People didn’t rent movies. Women knew their place. Homosexuals still hid in the closet. A scruffy guy named Bob Dylan had just put out his first album. Soon the SDS would be holding raucous meetings at the Y. Revolution was on the way. Coffee was a dime. All right, it was twenty cents.
It was an age of innocence. Barton Springs ran pure as it had since the beginning of time. Though Elvis was no longer driving a truck and Fidel was no longer playing baseball, Charles Whitman and Lee Harvey Oswald had not yet dreamed of ascending great heights and rearranging the local or national landscape. In a quiet booth beside a window looking out on the Drag and the world, I first contemplated joining the Peace Corps.
I think it must’ve been sometime later while I was riding Greyhounds and driving pickup trucks across America trying to find myself that the Nighthawk on the Drag disappeared. Just flew away in the night.
Today it’s gone, the Drag’s been sterilized of hippies, radicals, and riffraff, and the campus hums along like a happy Volkswagen factory. There will always be Young Republicans in this world, but the phantom clientele of the Nighthawk may be an endangered species.
And there was a waitress there I remember… Kinky Friedman is a singer, songwriter, and novelist. His third mystery, Frequent Flier, will be published in August.
My Library
