Images of South Texas

One thing that's both refreshing and maddening about the nomadic lifestyle is how it tends to make me collect mental clip files for future reminiscence. It's an odd grammatical tense to live in, the imagined-future-past-tense, but one convenient feature of this kind of thinking is that it does a light, little tra-la-la skip over the more obvious question, "What will the next place be like?"

So far, the military has pulled a neat little poker trick where it holds out two options of our next posting. We're allowed to express a preference, and it's filed away somewhere, but it's only a tiny part of the giant, mysterious equation that actually decides where we'll go. Up until our orders are written and posted, we must consider each option with equal weight, even though they may be on opposite sides of the country. Like Virginia and California.

Faced with such uncertainty, I find it's much more productive to think in the imagined-future-past-tense, and that's what I did on the commute to work today. South Texas scrolled before me in a kind of sensory montage as I tried to press each image and sensation into the deepest animal level coils of my brain.

The resulting impression was startling in its otherworldliness, and when I say that I'm thinking mainly about the plants. Sunflowers are everywhere this time of year, along the highways and railroad tracks, muscling their way into the neatly planted fields. They grow up to six feet tall in large, swaying clusters, and since it's nearly always windy, you get the impression of a crowd of nodding spectators, twisting their heads on whiskery green necks.

The crops here are corn, cotton, and grain sorghum and each moves differently in a strong wind. The grain sorghum attracts most of the birds, including the giant population of idiot doves who regularly smack into our living room window, causing me to drop whatever drink I'm carrying and crouch like I've been shot at. Grain sorghum is also given to rogue genetics depending on the variety of the seed, and at regular intervals, one bizarre stalk will poke out high above the rest. It's these rogue stalks that the grackles and mockingbirds like best, and they'll perch on top of one and bob lazily on a reddish sea of grain.

This whole lower part of Texas used to be underwater, and that doesn't seem so far-fetched when you consider how big the sky is out here. Some people need a big sky. My mother talks about how much she misses watching storm fronts roll in from miles away when she was growing up out in West Texas, how you could see the whole thing tumbling towards you, lit from within by the stuttering flashes of lightning. On days like today, when the sky is crowded with an impossible variety of clouds, some solid and bone-white with scalloped edges, others scraped thin across a background of slate gray, I can agree with her-- I need a big sky. But on the days when nothing but a scrim of palest gray hangs between me and the sun, and it stretches from one horizon clear to the next, and all light becomes muted and hazy, I feel like it's too much, like I've been tucked in too tight under a smothering quilt and everything's pressing down on me at once. Then a few skyscrapers would be nice to poke the sky back a bit and give me some room to move.

Mostly I get a sensation of things growing here in wave-like profusion. Hibiscus blossoms as big across as my hand (and I have big hands) unfold like crepe paper in colors so bright they seem to vibrate. Bougainvilleas explode in purple, magenta, light orange, white, and yellow from well intentioned little corners in gardens, but soon take over sidewalks, porches, whole corners of parking lots with their thorny branches.

The most sinister and prehistoric of the plants are the cacti. Impervious to Nature's mood swings, these things grow in more frightening variety down here than I've ever seen. There's one devouring the back fence of our neighbor, and it's well over 12 feet tall, a sprawling, muscular mass of stems as thick as movie pickles that sprout thorns as long as hypodermics. I can understand how our neighbors would be afraid to do anything about this cactus, even if they had children. This thing looks entirely capable of whirling around smacking anyone who dared sneak up on it with a pair of shears.

One of the houses I run by in the mornings has a front yard consisting entirely of horrific looking species of cacti, carefully maintained and displayed, like nature's medieval armory. There are the prickly pears I'm familiar with, who sprout little cup-like pink and yellow blossoms of top of ping-pong paddle-looking branches (are they branches or leaves on a cactus?), but then there are about seven other types, each reaching almost chest high and sporting a variety of violent appendages that seem to me like the kinds of plants only dinosaurs could eat.

I guess it's that-- the feeling that everything I'm looking at has been around for ages-- literally-- before me, and so much of it seems to be aggressively bent on the idea of taking it all back, of shoving up through the asphalt and twining up the sides of buildings until it grows thick enough to snap something off.

There is a century plant down the street and around the corner from us, and in the last month or so it's been sending up its legendary blossom, a stalk that's reached the height of a nearby telephone pole with a chandelier of nobby yellow beads unfolding from the top of it. Lately its begun to lean streetward under its own weight and the constant push of the gulf wind, and what I wonder is, when is it going to snap and what will that sound like? And whose car is it going to hit?