TEXAS AND GEOGRAPHY

When I was a child, I had a puzzle map of the United States in which the states were scaled to size. Rhode Island was so small that it came attached to Connecticut and Massachusetts, Delaware was similarly attached to Maryland and perhaps also to Virginia.

Texas was the largest state, something that I have had reinforced in recent years when I have looked at an electoral map and seen all those electoral votes going Republican.

I suspect they don’t make puzzle maps like that any more. The words "DANGER : CHOKING HAZARD" come to mind. Keeping a few children from choking to death is worth a nation of geographically challenged individuals, which is the polite way of saying people who have no idea where the states are.

As I was writing this, I mentioned what I was doing to someone quite intelligent who told me that they had once claimed (incorrectly) that it was impossible to go from Texas through Oklahoma to Kansas because Missouri was there. Having mastered putting the states in the right place at a young age, I knew that right down the middle of the USA, from north to south, are North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.

Of course, instead of giving myself an ovation for this trivial piece of knowledge, I should point out my own answer to the question “In what direction does one travel to get from Vanderbilt (in Nashville, Tennessee) to Los Angeles?” My answer was “Southeast.” I then explained that one went Southeast to the Nashville airport and got on a plane, and what heck difference did it make where anything was.

I thought that my smug reply was useful until I was talking about my snarky approach to geography with a friend who told me about some relatives who came from Israel to visit them in California. They wanted to see the Grand Canyon and also the Grand Tetons. So they flew to Arizona and back. Then they flew to Utah and back. Thank goodness they didn’t want to see Miami and New York City.

Now, while I realized that Texas was big, I had no concept of how big it was until my wife and I and our two dogs drove cross country from Nashville to San Diego (December 2012) and back (March 2013). Because we had the dogs and had to stay at pet friendly hotels we only managed 350 miles a day. Our itineraries were as follows:

Nashville to Little Rock

Little Rock to Fort Worth

Fort Worth to Midland, Texas

Midland to Las Cruces, N.M. (just across the state line from El Paso)

Las Cruces to Casa Grande, Arizona

Casa Grande to San Diego (actually Del Mar)

That means two and a half days to cross Texas.

I suppose I should have had some sense of this in advance. Obviously, I knew where we were stopping each day, but it wasn’t until I was driving that the vastness of Texas became real. For those of you who have never driven across Texas let me share some observations.

When writers talk about the wind roaring across the Texas plains, they are not kidding. There were times when we were crossing Texas that I thought we were in a thunderstorm but without any rain.

Coming back east, we left El Paso, Texas, and saw a sign that read “Beaumont 784 miles” (at least that’s as best as I remember the sign) and Beaumont is still in Texas. Heck, it’s 450 miles from where I grew up in the Chicago suburbs to where I live in Nashville and that takes me through parts of four states : Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. Google maps says the short route from El Paso to Beaumont is 828 miles so if I’m wrong about the sign, I’m not wrong by much.

On the sad side, it was March, three weeks before spring, when we drove back east through Texas and we were more than 400 miles into Texas until we saw the first green, a very small field that looked smaller than the two acre lot on which our house stands. We were taking the southern route, but the drought has been terrible. It’s one thing to read about it but another thing to see it. When we turned northeast to head to Dallas/Fort Worth it was clearly spring.

By the way, both going west and coming back east we stayed in Midland Texas. I never thought that I would say this, but I now feel sorry for George W. Bush. He may have started a war with Iraq for no reason, and he may have claimed to be a "uniter not a divider" before starting us on the road to partisan stagnation, but he paid for it in advance by being born in Midland. How a town of 100,000 people can have absolutely nothing except for one new Japanese restaurant is beyond me. I thought that Kenton, Tennessee, the home of the major characters in “No Cause for Shame” was the middle of nowhere, but I was wrong.

Then again, my characters needed to be from a small obscure town, and Midland is neither small nor obscure.