75 Things We Love About Texas
Bluebonnets? Check. Enchanted Rock? Yup. Barton Springs? Duh. You probably guessed those. But what about buckle bunnies? Or goat barbecue? Or Thong Island? From Texas trademarks to personal favorites to the just plain weird, you’ll find everything here. And we do mean everything.
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49. Pride of place
I will never forget the horror I felt watching the second season of Survivor. On the first episode, that beloved good-ol’-boy Texas contestant, Colby Donaldson, proudly announced that he had brought along to the Australian Outback—as his one allotted luxury item, mind you—a Texas flag. When, like me, you don’t have the benefit of growing up inside this state’s borders, it is precisely that kind of inexplicable loyalty that makes you view Texas pride as, well, an astonishingly annoying character trait. But then I moved to Austin. On my third night, a group of new friends took me to see the Gourds, at Antone’s. For the encore, the band played Doug Sahm’s “At the Crossroads.” I hadn’t heard of Doug Sahm before; everyone else there had. A few minutes in, the entire crowd joined in unison: “You just can’t live in Texas if you don’t have a lot of soul!” It was the first time I understood Texas pride—and desperately wanted a part of it. Christopher Keyes
50. The dance floor at Billy Bob’s, Fort Worth
For the last quarter of a century, the greatest country-western dancers have come to Billy Bob’s, couples who are not just from Fort Worth but from far West Texas, the towns and blue-collar suburbs east of Dallas, even from Oklahoma. They move around the floor faster than NFL cornerbacks. They do the two-step, then the three-step. The men “wrap” and “whirl” their ladies. If you’re quick to dismiss the difficulty of western dance, go see for yourself. Just show up on a Thursday night at about ten-thirty, when the house band launches into “Boot Scootin’ Boogie.” Skip Hollandsworth
51. Glenwood Cemetery, Houston
There are cemeteries and cemeteries in this town, but Glenwood has something the rest of Houston lacks: hills. Driving from Howard Hughes’s elegant, austere grave site to George Brown’s sturdy brick plot is not unlike riding a roller coaster in an arboretum crossed with a graveyard that is a veritable who’s who of famous Houstonians. Up and down the steep, curving lanes, you can visit Cooleys, Mastersons, Cullinans, and that great society florist of the eighties, Leonard Tharp, all laid to rest under breathtaking live oaks and bountiful magnolias. Mimi Swartz
52. Sunday services at the Potter’s House, Dallas
Just when you think we’ve had our fill of great theatrical preachers, another comes along who sweeps us away. T. D. Jakes, the 48-year-old pastor of the 30,000-member nondenominational church called the Potter’s House, in southwest Dallas, could very well be the best of them all. You can catch him on one of the religious channels on cable, but to understand what he can really do, you need to see him live. A huge man with an eighteen-inch neck, Jakes is an unbelievable showman, but in religion, of course, showmen are a dime a dozen. What makes Jakes bring his audiences to tears, Sunday after Sunday, is his compassion—his understanding of people’s deepest fears and doubts. Skip Hollandsworth
53. The Capitol basement, Austin
Here hang the composite photographs of long-forgotten legislatures. The hall is almost always empty, so you can scan them in silence, looking for a familiar name while musing on who might have been a hero or a rogue in his day. And sometimes you can be rewarded with an unexpected find, as in the 1919 photograph of Sam Johnson, who has the same nose and ears as his son, the future president, and the 1911 photograph of the young Speaker Sam Rayburn. Paul Burka
54. Elbow room
Our old stereotypical braggadocio about bigness has faded, thank heavens; it was parochial and offensive. But notions of Texas and largeness—freedom to roam and aspire, in an almost metaphysical way—remain synonymous in much of the world. An English singer named Chris Rea honored the mystique some years back with a hit tune simply titled “Texas.” One line conveyed his envy and yearning: “They got big, long roads out there.” Jan Reid
55. The “pan dulce” at Mi Tierra, San Antonio
The Ricardo from San Antonio’s Mi Tierra bakery represents all that was sweetest about the happiest years of my childhood. Both of them. For one known to self-medicate with carbs, pan dulce was the drug of choice and Mi Tierra’s panadería the whole farmacia: marranitos, the stout, brown gingerbread pigs; pan de huevo, the basic unit of pan dulce, in white, pink, brown, or yellow; empanadas, their tender bellies filled with pumpkin or sweet potato. All had their charms. And all, back in the day, were cheap. The most expensive, though, was always the Ricardo, a Mi Tierra exclusive named for the baker who’d created this delicacy. A sweet bun filled with a “creme” unlikely to have ever met a cow and covered in caramel glaze and lots and lots of pecans, the Ricardo can quell a lot of anxiety. Sarah Bird
56. North Island, Lake Texoma
Lake Texoma is one of the few lakes where the shoreline is not dotted with boat slips and lake houses. And in the middle is North Island (also known as Thong Island), one of the state’s great hedonistic gathering spots for guys who like to drink beer and women who like to wear bikinis. On holiday weekends at North Island, hundreds of boats are tied together. Everyone hops from one boat to another, flirting outrageously and shouting such memorable lines as “Let’s party!” It’s just ridiculous—and blissful. Skip Hollandsworth
57. “Personage With Birds” and “Untitled,” by Joan Miró, Houston
Walk into the Menil Collection, continue back into the galleries of twentieth-century works, and you will find yourself in my favorite place in Texas: standing in front of Untitled, a painting by Joan Miró. It hardly seems like much at first. Most of the canvas is eggshell white. Just left of center is a circle of red. Nearby is a much smaller black dot. It looks like a planet circling too close to its sun. To the right of center and slightly higher, there is a pale yellow circle about the same size as the red one. That’s it. How can something so simple be so deep and beautiful? Sometime after World War I Houston Post columnist Hubert Mewhinney wrote, “Houston is a whiskey and trombone town.” Personage With Birds, Miró’s brash, colorful monumental sculpture, on Milam Street, not far away from the Menil, captures this side of Houston, though this was certainly not his intent. But Untitled represents a more personal Houston that insiders come to recognize, a place possessing beautiful and mysterious secrets. ( Untitled is currently on loan but will return to the Menil in September.) Gregory Curtis
58. Code switching
“Me da un Whataburger with no cheese y también una orden de french fries, please.” The hybrid language of Mexican Americans is often referred to as “Tex-Mex” or “Spanglish,” but neither label does justice to its richness and complexity. While most people believe that speakers who switch languages within a sentence are linguistically deficient, language specialists argue the opposite. Their studies have found that “code switchers” blend languages to achieve myriad outcomes—to emphasize or clarify, for example, or to mark breaks in narration for dramatic effect—and that Spanglish is governed by its own rules of grammar. Code switchers know when to speak what language to whom, and only in an insignificant number of cases do they resort to mixing because they can’t express their idea in one tongue. Languages come together in the same creative style that cultures do. To speak Tex-Mex or Spanglish is to choose to live in two worlds. Cecilia Balli
59. The park road to Palmetto State Park
The flat, scruffy terrain along U.S. 183 near Luling, in South Texas, isn’t so much serene as it is narcolepsy inducing. Quick, before you pass out, veer off the highway onto Park Road 11 for a refreshing jolt of scenery. The short two-mile jaunt—the landscape equivalent of a shot of espresso—is long on visual stimulation: a hill (where’d that come from?), a counties-big vista across orchards and plowed fields, red rock walls built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, and a green tunnel of pecans, oaks, and sycamores with palmetto palms tickling their trunks. Suzy Banks
60. Whooping cranes, Aransas National Wildlife Refuge
Over four feet tall and weighing a mere fourteen pounds, they are the supermodels of the avian world. And like paparazzi stalking Kate Moss, birders converge on Aransas National Wildlife Refuge for a glimpse of these winter residents, whose population has grown from a low of fifteen in the forties to two-hundred-plus this season at Aransas alone. The most rewarding sightings are from atop the refuge’s forty-foot-tall observation tower, where snowy couples, perhaps with a russet-colored junior in tow, stand out in sharp contrast against the evergreen marsh. A high-powered spotting scope brings the cranes so close that it’s like having a front-row seat right next to the runway. Suzy Banks
61. The Fort Worth Cultural District
It says something when the Amon Carter Museum, designed by the most attention-grabbing architect of the past century, the late Philip Johnson, is often overlooked among Fort Worth’s closely spaced trio of world-class (really) art museums. It was here, in 1961, that Johnson gave Postmodernism a trial run. Six years later Louis Kahn built what may well be the twentieth century’s most admired building, the sublimely proportioned, barrel-vaulted Kimbell Art Museum. In 2002 Tadao Ando made it a trifecta with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, his sophisticated global fusion winning raves and setting an exquisitely high bar for twenty-first-century greatness. Michael Ennis
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