Pride of Place: A Contemporary Anthology of Texas Nature Writing

14. Stephen Harrigan, “What Texas Means to Me” from A Natural State

189 Chapter 14 Stephen Harrigan What Texas Means to Me Stephen Harrigan writes fiction, journalism, and screenplays. He is the author of multiple novels and collections of essays. He and his family reside in Austin, and he teaches at UT’s Michener Center for Writers.“What Texas Means to Me” is part of his collection A Natural State. Lying in a feather bed, in the guest room of a friend’s two-hundredyear -old house in western Massachusetts, I suffered a lapse of faith in Texas. I’m not sure what brought this crisis on. Perhaps it was simply the act of waking up, looking out the window at the syrup buckets hanging from the maple trunks, at the banked snow glistening in the sharp air, and realizing that Texas would never be that. I could stand to live here, I thought. I would keep my cross-country skis propped by the front door, a bowl of apples on the kitchen table, a steady fire by which I would read during the dim winter nights. But it was not just Massachusetts.The hard truth was that I was getting tired of Texas and was now able to imagine myself living in all sorts of places: on one of those minor Florida keys where a little strip of land containing a shopping center and a few houses counted as barely a riffle in a great sheet of translucent ocean; in an adobe house,even a fake adobe house, in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos; or perhaps in a city like 190 Los Angeles, which with its corrupted natural beauty seemed so much more likely a center for the development of urban chaos than Houston. These were uneasy rumblings, and I was enough of a Texan to feel heretical in even allowing them access to my conscious mind. But my affection for Texas had gone unexamined and untested for so long that it was time to wonder just how much affection was there after all.There are certain people who are compelled to live in Texas, but I was never one of them. I am not a two-fisted free enterpriser, I have no fortune to make in the next boom, and my ancestral ties to the land itself are casual and desultory. Like a lot of other Texans, I am here because I am here, out of habit,out of inertia,out of a love of place that I want to believe is real and not just wished for. Because I was born in Oklahoma and lived there until I was five, I missed being imprinted with native fealty for Texas. I don’t recall having any particular image of the state when, on the occasion of my widowed mother’s marriage to an Abilene oilman, I was told we were going to move there. But I did not much care to leave Oklahoma City, where my baby footprints were embedded in cement and where the world of permanence and order was centered. In the park behind our house was a sandstone boulder where several generations of children had scratched their initials. This boulder, whose markings seemed to me to have some ancient significance, like the markings on a rune stone, was one of my power centers, one of the things that persuaded me that I had not been placed arbitrarily on the earth but was meant to exist here, at this particular spot.In the same park was a little garden with a semicircular rock wall dominated by a bust of Shakespeare and brass plaques containing quotations from his plays. It was a place to ponder and reflect on the immortal bard, but its hushed and reverent aspect made me mistake it for a tomb. I had no real idea who Shakespeare was, only that he was one Stephen Harrigan 191 of those exalted characters like Will Rogers, and so it seemed perfectly appropriate to me that he would be buried in Oklahoma. But all such reverberations stopped at the Red River. I filed them away,and with a child’s tenacity I resisted letting Texas invade my essence. Abilene, Texas, had been named for Abilene, Kansas, and that fact was a convincing enough argument that it would be a dull and derivative place. Our house there had a dry, nappy lawn and a cinder-block fence. My brother and...