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Nov. 6 – Abilene, TX

Some cities are boring because they're unremarkable. Abilene was remarkable for being boring. The city is square buildings on square blocks formed by streets with square names like Walnut, Pine and Hickory. The civic center auditorium looked like an overturned shoe. We'd been told the hotel lounge would be closed for renovations, but not to worry, since there was a new place open nearby that was the only game in town. Well, it was, and it turned out to have closed after lunchtime. Just as well, perhaps, since it looked more like an insurance agent's office than a cool hangout. But that was the end of the line; there was nowhere else to eat, nowhere to drink, nowhere to hear music in downtown Abilene after sunset. So we ordered pizza, I found some beers that I had left over from New Orleans, and we played our own music. The only instrument I could find for myself was my empty beer bottle, which worked as well as any.

In reaching Abilene we had completed our survey of Texas, both geographically and culturally. En route from McAllen we'd crossed that odd mixture of desert and coastal wetland that is South Texas. We had traversed the fabled Hill Country, gold dusted from the early November. We breezed through San Antonio, which tantalized us with intrigue. We saw Fredericksburg, Texas' answer to a quaint New England resort town, a good place for antiquing and a light lunch with your tea (though we forwent it at our lunch stop in favor of some place called Brady). We landed in the so-called Big Country, where Abilene lies far enough from the major population centers to register as a cipher, though not so remote as to engender an identity of its own, as in the Panhandle.

We had seen trendy Austin, sultry Harlingen, motley El Paso, and ambrosial Orange; the inimitable Waco and the epiphanous Palo Duro Canyon; Lubbock rising and oh, Amarillo. We had touched the five points of the Lone Star State, by its very expansiveness both arresting and compelling, like a dramatic pause.

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