Big Bend Gazette :: Learning the Lone Star State of Mind

And that is a strange realization for a Yankee. For reasons I can no longer recall very clearly, growing up in Connecticut, Texas always seemed like a big joke. Maybe because Texas seems like everything that Connecticut isn’t: flat, hot, sharp, southern. Full of real cowboys and snakes. Way macho.

A place one (Yankee) would never want to go, much less live.

Of course most of that impression is true.

I moved to Texas five years ago, sight unseen – and it has turned out to be one of the best places I’ve lived (and there have been a lot).

So, back to my story: last summer I met up with some good friends to celebrate my 40th birthday. We camped in deep woods next to the Lewis River, about 2 hours’ drive from the nearest town. When I worked at Mount Saint Helens, this was one of my favorite nearby spots.

Late morning, as we were packing up to leave, an older woman stopped by our campsite to ask for help. I’d seen her strolling around the campground loop earlier that day, with her grandson who was learning to ride a bicycle. Now she looked somewhat desperate. She and her husband and grandson had been camping there for a week, and it was time to return home – but they couldn’t get the pop-top on their camper attachment to go back down, and they couldn’t drive with it up. And apparently her husband was having fits over this.

We were just about the only other people in the campground, probably the only people around for many miles. There are no phones, no cell phone towers, and even if the satellite phone worked, I knew it would be many hours before any kind of repair service would show up – if the driver could even find the campground.

We were miles and miles down a rocky, dirt road.

There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when I would’ve thought Oh, well! Not my problem and told the woman Sorry, can’t help you. And not even felt badly.

And really, I know nothing about pop-top campers or RV’s in general, nor did I have many tools on me. Neither did my two friends.

But after living in West Texas – where who knows how many times friends and neighbors have helped us out with all sorts of big and small hassles –I thought I had to at least try.

I went back to their campsite with them.

After a couple of minutes in which I did nothing at all except walk all the way around the trailer, squinting at it, and ask them to try once again to roll down the pop-top, the four-year-old grandson suddenly figured it out: the pop-top was getting caught on an open door, so of course it couldn’t fold back down!

There we go.

Door got closed, pop-top got cranked back down, and they were ready to hit the road.

And they were so grateful to me, though I hadn’t done anything, really; I got off easy, since all that was needed in this case was my willingness to lend a hand – or another set of eyes, really – to another human, a stranger, even. Very Texan.

I came back to our campsite all puffed up that I had been able to help them solve their problem. How this was a legacy of my years of living in Texas was lost on my Northwesterner friends, even after my trying to explain this.

But you understand.

I think of the time I got a flat tire on Route 385, about 45 minutes south of Marathon. It was – you guessed it – a hot summer day. And by that point, I had already changed about 4 tires in my first year living in the Texas Outback. And I had the right tools. But one lugnut was giving me a hard time. Thankfully, some nice rancher happened to drive by, saw me, and stopped. (Not like the time I had a flat tire on I-5 in Oregon on an equally hot day and hundreds and hundreds of people whizzed past in their cars before someone stopped and helped.) This rancher guy was probably in his 60’s, had a beautiful slight Texas twang and a rifle propped between the driver and passenger seat of his giant diesel pickup truck – the stereotype of a Texan that would’ve scared me 20 years ago back in Conn.

I was grateful – and delighted to talk to him. We both worked a while on loosening the lugnut, until finally, it gave up when I happened to be turning the tire iron. This rancher was so cool and so self-assured, he wasn’t emasculated by the fact that I got the winning turn on the lugnut – he gave me credit. Graciously. Made some joke about me clearly being the stronger of us two.

I wondered about his political stance on many issues, felt pretty sure that in other contexts, we sure wouldn’t agree on some big issues (but then again, who knows?). A line from a talk I once heard by Native American writer Sherman Alexie came to mind, something to the effect of how we liberals don’t like the idea of guns and conflict, but in the post 9/11 world, when he gets on an airplane, you bet he’s going for the seat by the big guy with the cowboy hat. “Cause if the shit hits the fan, I am not counting on some long-haired skinny white guy wearing Birkenstocks!”

I never learned the rancher’s name, and he never learned mine. I tried to give him money to buy himself a six pack, but he declined. He was just doing what anyone would’ve done, he insisted.

Any West Texan, maybe….

I love how even outside of the Lone Star State, Texans often transform the people and situations around them. Like my friend Liz Rogers, who has a walloping good time everywhere she goes, it seems, because she approaches everything and everyone in pure Texan form: friendly, forthright, genuinely curious. (Granted, Liz is in a league of her own, though the way I would describe her is similar to how people have written about the late Molly Ivins and Ann Richards: bold, funny, extremely energetic – kind of a larger-than-life type of native Texan woman.) Liz tells of going to New York City and having a great time, how friendly and helpful and willing to talk everyone there was, nothing like the negative stereotype of New Yorkers. Go figure.

Last winter I was in my natal state for the first time in more than a decade. My friend Paul and his two-year-old son and I walked around a state park near his home in central Connecticut. It was cold and grey, typical February day there, and the only other person we saw was a guy walking his dog. I struck up a conversation with the dog, a young boxer, and then the person.

At first the guy seemed taken aback – What does she want? But I was very interested in his dog, so we talked boxers for a few minutes. He told me, in his thick Jersey accent, how he had been resistant to having a dog but his girlfriend wanted one…and now? He loves this dog so much, she’s this, she’s that, etc. He was effusive. We had a great time talking.

Afterward, my friend Paul chastised me, jokingly. “Uh, Marlys? We don’t talk to strangers, remember? I think you’ve been away too long. You’ve violated the code. We make just enough eye contact to say ‘You’re not a cold-blooded killer about to hurt me, and I’m not one either.’ We might throw in a nod.”

This summer, outside a Stone Cold Creamery ice cream place in San Jose, while we ate our elaborate ice concoctions, I was talking with family about how funny most Americans are about going to the bathroom outdoors. I regaled them with a story a good friend in Terlingua once told me about her brother coming to visit her, getting drunk enough that in the middle of the night he had to throw up, and him being so urbanized that it didn’t seem right to just vomit right there on the ground, out in the desert, so instead he ran to the nearest bucket – which was, as morning light revealed, part of my friend’s dishwashing set-up.

Our family all found this very funny (one is a native Texan, which helped). While we laughed really hard, I noticed a few glares and looks of disgust from some ice cream eaters nearby who had overheard. It was then I realized how most Texans – well, West Texans, anyway, which is most of whom I know of Texans – have good senses of humor. And are very honest and direct. And raw.

Not so endearing to many in other parts, it seems. Their loss.

The other thing is, Texans know how to have fun. You know how to kick back and enjoy simple pleasures. A lot of you know how to dance, even you men. And nearly every one of you knows how to barbeque.

(And shoot a gun. And ride a horse.)

Maybe this is a response to living in such a hardscrabble place? Take the joy wherever you can find it, however small or fleeting, with whatever friends are around, amidst the heat and sharp things and the often unrelenting sun....

I mean, California – well, you can see why everyone loves it. Ditto for Colorado. But Texas takes a little more work to love and to survive and thrive in.

As local river guide John Parker recently put it, “There’s something about the community here, about the tolerance people have for each other. Maybe that comes naturally when you’re all living in a place that tries every day to kill you.”