Things you see in the South

Oct. 31 – Cleveland, MS

I saw my first real live cotton plants today. Most of the crop has already been harvested and collected into modules that look like huge white Styrofoam bricks, but some fields remain in bloom. You could knit hundreds of sweaters from the cotton litter along the side of Highway 49 through Marvell, Arkansas. Uncollected bolls have been mashed into the dark mud of the bottomland, giving the entire landscape an unwashed appearance. The very countryside seems built by the river, as well it might, since the land here is an ever-changing accumulation of sediment deposited in floods and at river bends, which have become open farmland as the Mississippi meanders like a sidewinder across the face of the South. The sidewinder's tracks are seen in scores of oxbows in various stages of regression to dry earth: lake, swamp, muddy scar, fertile cotton pasture.

The city of Cleveland, Mississippi is small, but then again all cities in Mississippi are small. I can't say what goes on there, as I haven't really seen the town, but there is Delta State University and a double-wide downtown main street. And Wal-Mart. There is always a Wal-Mart. The city is located in the Greater Delta region of Mississippi, a name that actually refers to the inland alluvial landscape and not the deposition of sediment into the ocean. Cleveland is home to almost 14,000 people and at least one small obstreperous bird, who flew in circles above our hotel tonight, looking for somebody to annoy.

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Withstanding the siege

Oct. 30 – Fort Smith, AR

Fort Smith is a plucky little city located on a bend in the Arkansas River. It was founded in 1817 as a military outpost on the border of the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). That is to say, its original function was to keep exiled Indians from taking back any of their land. Just this evening, somebody told me I could walk across the bridge into Oklahoma, but don't get caught there.

There's a main drag, Garrison Street, lined with old brick building fronts. Literally. At least two of the façades I saw were nothing more than that: mere faces of buildings held up artificially while something else was being built behind them. And of the intact buildings, few were still being used for their original purposes. The historic downtown district is compact, and the blocks immediately beyond give an appearance that alternates between demilitarized zone and Mexico (the neighborhood buildings of Fort Smith look more authentically Mexican than any I saw in El Paso).

Yet somehow, the city's heritage is not lost with the re-use of old structures or, for that matter, the blocks of new large-scale development elsewhere downtown. And at the same time, it's not retained solely because of organized historic preservation, although this is also taking place. For some reason, history permeates the town of its own accord.

There's a difference between a place that has rekindled or reconstructed its past, and one that, despite decades of decline, never got around to dismantling its history in the first place. Fort Smith is the latter type. Its burnt-out appearance notwithstanding, the city has abided, with no apparent break in its historical continuum. While today there is (arguably) no need for Arkansas to defend its border with Oklahoma, Fort Smith is clearly the descendant of its foundling self, a town that, accounting for nearly two hundred years of aging, looks very much as it would have when new. At least from the front.

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65804

Oct. 29 – Springfield, MO

Springfield's GO magazine, the local out-and-about freeweekly (a paltry slim thing for Missouri's third largest city), is running a feature this week about local Sexy Singles, with photos and banal survey-style write-ups. The first thing I noticed was that they never mention which sex is of interest to these Singles, so we know it's not that kind of magazine. The second thing was that these are sixteen of the most unremarkable, uncompelling people you can imagine. "Romantic dinners at home with wine." "A guy who makes me laugh." And so forth. So we gather that normalcy is self-perpetuating here, as made evident by the city's media-sponsored breeding program.

There's also something fishy going on with beer. I asked two bartenders and a waitress at the hotel bar (actually the self-styled local sports hangout, only grudgingly affiliated with the attached hotel) what they could offer in a bottled beer. After ensuring that I did not, in fact, have lobsters coming out of my ears, I ultimately had to file a Freedom of Information request to get even a partial answer. Perhaps I was viewed as subversive for expecting any kind of departure from the Standard American Beer Menu.

Even Missouri State University has deleted "Southwest" from its name, disavowing any specific identity with its location, so as to make it relevant throughout the middlemost state in America. I couldn't find a Springfield entry into my collection of lapel pins. I've dined at both T.G.I. Friday's and Panera, and Starbucks held an employee conference at our hotel. It may well be that distinctiveness is strictly taboo in Springfield. Perhaps that's why the city shares its name with the fictional hometown of the Simpsons. It really is Anytown, U.S.A.

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Little ways to Rock the Establishment

Oct. 24 – Little Rock, AR

Downtown Little Rock is trying hard to be Open For Business, with here and there a successful result. On Main Street, festive tree lighting and the presence of one the best-respected professional theatre companies in the U.S. belie the fact that most storefronts are vacant, even boarded up. On the other hand, at least the majority of storefronts are still extant at all, and those few businesses that operate are the kind that thrive in beleaguered mid-size business districts: wig shops, tattoo parlors, stamp and coin dealers.

On adjacent downtown blocks, any historic building stock that might have existed has been replaced with more recent urban renewal. Then again, it's been replaced pretty thoroughly, and these blocks retain the urban feel of uninterrupted architecture, with few injections of bare, open asphalt. These are the blocks of banking, service industries and the obligatory state and county government agencies. Employees of this district, largely unseen during daylight hours, are issued forth in quick umbrella-laden spurts at lunch breaks and at the daily close of business. There are a handful of delicatessens and at least one bar that cater primarily to this lunch crowd.

Nearby there are some spot attractions: the old State House, the River Market shopping development, and things having to do with President Clinton. And a vintage trolley, which someone other than its riders is clearly paying for. But between these locations and those times of day, most of the people seen out and about seem there by accident or circumstance. In the spacious concrete plaza in front of one bank building, four people milled about without purpose, one confined to a wheelchair. Others in the neighborhood were conducting matters of random business at county offices. Some were union members on smoke breaks. And some were panhandlers.

(I will never understand panhandlers. Why they ply their trade in areas where so few of the people have much to give, and where there is so much competition from other members of the industry, is beyond me. But I suppose if these folks could invent a more successful business model, they wouldn't be panhandling.)

Nevertheless, there is a pocket culture in this city. One corner cafe draws a modest crowd of Hip Young People, the kind who enjoy things like the arts, alternative newsweeklies, and Being Different. The piano bar, a humble sole proprietorship, seems to be doing as good a business as anything in Little Rock has a right to. And various establishments sport "Best Of" stickers, with a cartoon Bill Clinton pointing out somebody's picks for defiant undermining of the Big Box commercial mentality. Never mind that the Urban Non-Conformity Lifestyle seems poised to be a multi-billion-dollar industry in its own right. In a city of two hundred thousand, with "Best Of" stickers, panhandlers and a piano bar, I feel as much at home as just about anywhere.

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The land we belong to

Oct. 19 – Oklahoma City, OK

I was eating lunch at Madison's Pancake House and eavesdropping on two women having a lunch meeting. I was trying to guess from their conversation what line of work they were in. All I could gather was that they deal with vendors and contractors, that they spend advertising dollars, and that they needed to set deadlines for the selection of committees. Not once did they mention anything that might betray the nature of their profession. It made me wonder if they themselves had any idea what their job is. That doesn't surprise me, since the neighborhood I'm staying in reflects much the same character.

Oklahoma City, by area, is enormous, more than half the size of Rhode Island. The lack of local governments below the county level (townships, villages etc.) in Western states means that cities can annex land freely, in a way that's impossible on the East Coast. So once you cross the city limits of Oklahoma City, you've got ten minutes of farmland to traverse before you start to see suburbs, and another ten minutes before you get to the urbanized area.


Once you enter the inner ring of neighborhoods, you get the impression that you're seeing the city only from its back side. The buildings don't make much effort to put their best face forward, and the blocks alternate pretty quickly between the residential and the used-bus-scrapyard zoning types. To be sure, this part of town has more than its share of specialized businesses, such as lawnmower repair shops, picture framing concerns and vacuum cleaner emporia. And bars that look like outbuildings to which the primary edifice has long since been torn down.

Downtown proper is a healthy cluster of bank headquarters and government buildings, fitting for a Midwestern city of half a million people and a state capital. During the day there are convenience stores and lunch counters, and after six o'clock the streets are much emptier. But there's Bricktown, the requisite warehouse-turned- entertainment district on the upswing, with an unexplained canal flowing through it. (I can think of another city with a very well-explained canal flowing through it that hasn't done a damn thing about it.) And there's the WPA-era Civic Center Music Hall, with over 11,000 season ticket holders coming to see Broadway shows on Wednesday evenings. So it's a pretty average city with the added bonus of something actually going on here and about.

Then there's our neighborhood, which is located stalwartly in the suburbs, despite being inside the city limits. (If your street address is 2945 Northwest Expressway, face it, you're not part of a community. You're C-17 on the shopping mall directory of America.) It may technically be Oklahoma City, but it's also Amarillo. It's Albuquerque. To those of you reading this, it's Greece, it's Middlesex Township, it's northern Virginia. It's vendors, contractors and advertising committees. Instead of two people who have no idea what their business is, it's business that hasn't a clue who the people are.

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A noisy interlude

Oct. 14 – Ruidoso, NM

After two days of travel in the state, I was beginning to think there was no part of New Mexico that isn't desert scrub and barren hills. I wondered what the appeal was for retirees and artists who seem to speak so highly of the Land of Enchantment. The towns we had seen were dusty, run-down places where the inhabitants seemed to live not by choice, only by circumstance. These towns had an Old Western feel, but that was because they had scarcely progressed since that time.

Seven thousand feet up in the mountains of Lincoln County is Ruidoso, which is unflappably Cute. It's full of Cute stores with Cute names selling Cute items with Cute slogans on them. (One questionable shop name was "Michelle's Double D Ranch".) There are Cute restaurants serving Cute fare with Cute things plastered on the walls. (One bar advertised beer, wine, live music, and skateboards.) I ate some Cute jambalaya in a Cute pizzeria with Cute antique cell phones nailed to the ceiling. Our hotel was the archetype of Cute. (Make your own waffles at breakfast? C'mon!) Clearly this was the Grandma's Attic of Southwestern towns.

Before we reached our performance venue, we had read some pretty high-falutin' write-ups about it. In the neighboring hamlet of Alto, somebody had donated many millions of dollars to build the Spencer Theater, a supposed jewel of architecture on a high plateau, but likely a blemish in the eyes of many long-time residents. For myself, I was undecided, but our first comparisons on seeing it were to (A) a doorstop, and (B) the Jawa Sandcrawler from Star Wars.

But we played our night there, and it was comfortable. Really comfortable. And so was our hotel (the aptly-named Comfort Inn), and so was Ruidoso. The night was chilly, the first real taste of autumn I'd had after a long summer. I craved hot cider. I wanted to sit on a couch by the artificial fireplace with a faux bearskin rug. But I had to go to bed, because the next morning at five-thirty we were due to drag our sorry selves back across the desert toward Oklahoma City.

I watched the sun rise over Roswell and blot out the morning star. We stopped for lunch in Amarillo, not far from Cadillac Ranch. Later, I did a Wikipedia search for "center pivot irrigation". I'm still looking for hot cider.

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The day after Columbus

Oct. 13 – El Paso, TX

Some people in this country believe Americans should not have to "press '1' to continue in English". These people ought not visit El Paso.

Walking down El Paso Street, past pawn shops selling pneumatic guns, accordions and life-sized novelty statues, past shops selling clothes para niños y niñas, past mercados that spill over into the sidewalk to promote browsing and haggling, you could be in any Mexican city. With one exception, that is: the proportion of Mexican people is much higher here.

For all the spaciousness of Texas, El Paso seems uniquely crowded, and not merely from the throngs of cross-border shoppers on El Paso Street. The city spreads out in three wings where it can find space between the Franklin Mountains, Fort Bliss Military Reservation (a vast tract of mostly vacant desert that must be worth thousands of income tax returns per acre) and the Rio Grande. At the hub of these wings, freeways and the railroad jockey for position, not always with a clear winner emerging. Trying to edge into the fray, already bursting at its own seams, is Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

Urban revitalization has claimed only a small pocket of downtown El Paso. Pioneer Plaza is the locus of an arts and cultural district that includes the Plaza Theatre, marvelously restored in the Mission style with stars in the auditorium ceiling and a mild summer breeze blowing across the seats. Across the street is the elegant, old-fashioned Camino Real hotel, whose cocktail lounge boasts a 25-foot cut glass Tiffany dome and live cover bands. And I heard that around the corner is a great low-down dive with a six-piece mariachi combo and home-cooked Mexican grub. Wish I'd gone there: press "2" to continue in American.

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A Tale of Four Corners

Oct. 12 – Farmington, NM

Not much to say about Farmington. You cross more than 150 miles of desert to get there from Albuquerque, and in mid-October there's a splash of autumn color on the deciduous trees along the Animas River. Farmington and its neighbor city Bloomington seem to be optimiscally named, as any signs of successful agri- and horticulture are scarce (however, there is a preponderance of scrap yards, motels and battered trailers in dusty lots).

Our hotel had a wigwam out front (Farmington borders the Navajo Indian Reservation), and the auditorium at the Civic Center was so small that half of our scenic elements had to be eliminated. Back at the hotel later, there was a five dollar cover charge at the lounge for karaoke, but I had a headache and so went straight to bed. I heard later that a woman was beaten by her boyfriend in our parking lot during the night. I guess in the Land of Enchantment a few people are genuinely touched.

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Turning over a new...cheek?

Oct. 11 – Lubbock, TX

I knew something funny was going on when I first looked at Lubbock on Google Maps. Between Texas Tech University and Avenue Q, from Broadway Street to 4th Street, the aerial view clearly showed that some 49 city blocks had recently been razed to the ground. Throughout this area, new construction is popping up with incredible alacrity. A Wal-Mart across the street from our hotel (actually two blocks away across a vast, windswept plain of a parking lot) is so new that it doesn't yet appear on the map. And the walls of a new pharmacy were erected between the time I went to bed and the end of my breakfast the next morning.

I wondered why such a huge swath of land had undergone so complete and concerted a transformation. I assumed there had been existing development that had suffered some calamity and had to be condemned. I imagined a huge fire, industrial accident or, quite possibly, a tornado.

As it turns out, there was a tornado here, on May 11, 1970. It struck North Overton, a neighborhood once comfortably average but by then already on the decline. The tornado was probably not the reason for North Overton's fate, but it certainly shattered whatever hope may have existed for the neighborhood's rehabilitation. By the end of the twentieth century, North Overton had become notoriously destitute and degenerate, boasting only two per cent of the city's population but more than a quarter of its crime. It was dubbed the "Tech Ghetto", and university students were warned not to cross University Avenue into this dangerous area.

A local real estate mogul by the name of McDougal therefore decided to purchase, demolish and redevelop the entire Godforsaken place, and after nearly a decade of title searching, tenant relocation, asbestos abatement and demolition, new blocks of planned residential and retail development are finally starting to appear. North Overton is now Overton Park.

And who knows, in another forty, fifty or hundred years, the faux-wrought iron lampposts, terra-cotta Spanish roofs and brick-lain sidewalks may represent such an abomination upon the flat face of Lubbock that some benevolent patron will see fit to wipe them off the map altogether. Or, quite possibly, a tornado will do the job instead. And Google will be there taking pictures.

Much of the information I learned about Overton Park is contained in this thorough, if biased, article.
(http://tinyurl.com/2knuzk)


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Two postcripts:

1) Apparently they weren't satisfied with anything in Lubbock and decided to remodel it all at once. 4th Street is being turned into a freeway at the moment. And our hotel, a clean and comfortable Clarion, is being revamped aggressively and entirely into a clean and comfortable Radisson. North Overton becomes Overton Park.

2) I can't ever see or hear the name "Lubbock" without thinking "buttock". I'm just saying.

Another opening

Oct. 4, 2007 – Amarillo, TX

At Palo Duro Canyon, an old Panhandle cowboy told me his life was perfect.

His place sits on the canyon rim, about ready to tumble in. It's a brace of wooden buildings, ostensibly a town square of the Old West, and a handful of trailers and pickup trucks. There are horse corrals, no grass, and a cat on one of the roofs. Half a dozen dogs play fetch with scraps of milled lumber, since there are no trees large enough to drop twigs. His business is horseback canyon tours, and his shop counter is a stump in the dirt out front.

Palo Duro Canyon, like many of the Panhandle's landmarks, is unexpected. The plain could not be flatter, more featureless, than when it opens dramatically and without warning into the country's most sprawling canyon complex after the Grand Canyon itself. It could not be more surprising if it were ten garishly painted Cadillacs nose-diving into a wheat field. (It's been said that the American West hides more through sheer spaciousness than any dense East Coast metropolis.)

My horse was Caliente. In Spanish, caliente means "hot", although this adjective described neither his temperament nor his inclination toward forward motion. He was gentle and sure-footed, a rich rusty-colored companion, and he carried me through a landscape approaching desert austerity, but with enough shade and flowing water to seem habitable. He showed me another collection of Old Western storefronts, part of a disused attraction called Six Gun City. Amidst this tableau our guides, the cowboy's son and his bride, were building themselves a cabin.

Past wildflowers and junipers, past crisscrossing stream beds that seemed merely part of the network of trails, past campsites empty yet fully equipped, past the old wooden outhouse, Caliente and I traced a path down and back through the canyon. I saw a kind of life there. Not from Nature, not from adventure, but from my horse, my guides, the cats, the outhouse, the river. From a sense that there was nothing more to know than what you could see with your eyes. From the imperative abruptness of the canyon. From the old cowboy.


In his ageless Texan monotone, with a voice that seemed more mustache than man, the cowboy had said to me, "I love my children, my wife, my horses and my job. I've got nothing to be sorry about."