Teaching About Place: Learning From The Land

Chapter 11. The Bayou and the Ship Channel: Finding Place and Building Community in Houston, Texas

c h a p t e r 1 1 The Bayou and the Ship Channel Finding Place and Building Community in Houston, Texas t e r r e l l d i x o n a n d l i s a s l a p p e y Most Americans view our cities as having a sort of built-in placelessness . Cities are mainly freeways, and malls, and chain restaurants. The real Places, the ones that matter, are the Grand Canyon, and Old Faithful , and Rocky Mountain National Park. Once we allow for differences in weather, one American city is pretty much like another. Our students share this general sense that place is somewhere outside the city.To counteract this viewpoint, to get the students thinking about cities in a different way, we each have chosen to focus our “Literature and the Environment” classes on the city where we teach: Houston. At first, it sounds like an overwhelming challenge: how can we make the epitome of the placeless city a place that lives for them? The solution is simple: get them out in it. What follows is a distillation of our experiences in teaching urban nature in Houston. Lisa works with undergraduate students, mostly non-English majors, at Rice University; Terrell works with graduate students in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston. We share the desire to help our students discover the nature of place in t e r r e l l d i x o n a n d l i s a s l a p p e y 1 5 5 the city. Taking Rice students to the Ship Channel and University of Houston students to Buffalo Bayou makes Houston both our subject and our classroom. t h e s h i p c h a n n e l When I ask students where they imagine living after college, few say Houston. As a small private university within Houston’s metropolis, Rice can often seem dissociated, both physically and culturally, from the surrounding city. The school boasts a strong residential-college system, and even commuting students need not stray far from campus. Students rarely see this city as a desirable living place, nor do they realize how many Rice graduates either stay in or return to Houston to work in our medical center, our petrochemical industry, or our shiny downtown buildings. Many will make their fortunes and raise their families right here. To begin to instill in them an awareness of Houston as a wonderfully complex place, we go outside for a look at the city that they call home for at least four years. What they see is not always pretty. A trip to the Ship Channel may provide the most revealing, if the least aesthetically pleasing, vision of Houston. Though we may also visit Buffalo Bayou, Brazos Bend State Park, or the Galleria, the Ship Channel takes us to the source of so much of the filthy lucre available here. Many of the social, economic, and environmental challenges facing Houston are evident in this segment of the waterway that connects Buffalo Bayou to the Gulf of Mexico. The place itself is a history lesson. In 1836, Sam Houston’s forces defeated Santa Anna’s Mexican Army at the Battle of San Jacinto, opening the way for an influx of American settlers into the new Republic of Texas. Most of those early arrivals to the city founded by the Allen brothers and 1 5 6 m e e t i n g t h e c h a l l e n g e s bearing Houston’s name came by this water route. The outcome of that 1836 contest of international wills set the stage for Houston’s emergence as not merely a Southern cotton exchange or oil refining boomtown but as a global commerce headquarters as well. Houston houses the nation’s second-busiest port and the world’s second-largest petrochemical complex. Proud of those designations, the city offers a free public relations boat tour of the Houston Ship Channel. Taking my students on the ninety-minute tour aboard the m/v Sam Houston to meet our petrochemical neighbors requires that we make reservations, bring identification, and clear Homeland Security. Bureaucracy aside, everyone associated with the Ship Channel has always welcomed us, though I warn the class not to expect the “unforgettably spectacular waterborne adventure...