C-File #68: On Fort Worth, Texas

Well, I have now been to real Texas (defined as not Houston or Abilene) and I have only one thing to say: yee-ha! Or was it yippee-o-kiay?

This past weekend, as a sort of reward for surviving the horrors of Harding Dead Week and Exams, I went with my roommate to stay at a friend’s house in a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas, which let it be known, is entirely distinct from Dallas, Texas, even though they share a major airport.

This annoys my friend from Fort Worth, whom we shall call “Jennie.” She silently bears the burden of hearing people refer to her hometown as “Dallas Fort Worth,” when the entire city of Fort Worth sees “Dallas” as more of a giant nebulous blob of interstates from which there is seldom escape rather than as an actual part of their community. “You’re three hours late, and you smell funny,” the denizens of Fort Worth are often telling each other. “Well, I had to drive through Dallas,” they reply, and all is immediately forgiven.

Driving is a bigger deal in Fort Worth than it is even in Tuscaloosa. It takes at least thirty minutes to get anywhere, and heaven help you if you want to go somewhere outside of your immediate neighborhood. Come to think of it, it’s kind of like Tuscaloosa, in many ways, only bigger. Much much much MUCH bigger. The suburbs wedged between Fort Worth and Dallas strike me, in fact, as a giant, overgrown white suburb. Everywhere you look there is an upscale mall stretching for miles in all directions, consisting almost entirely of leather outlets, every one of which you are required to go into because Jennie’s mom is on the prowl for some unspecified leather item, but you are not bitter, because you are in Fort Worth, Texas, and Fort Worth is a fabulous, heaven-like city that you would love to go back to, provided someone else is driving.

The people of Fort Worth are very used to being in the car for geologic eras at a time. This is why they all carry vast quantities of fun music in their cars to help wile away the dull hours. For example, Jennie owns a CD that was burned for her by a friend the day she left for college, and contains many funny traveling songs, such as our all-time personal favorite: “The Big-Rig Song.” It goes something like this: **ahem**

There... are...

onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelvethirteenfourteenfifteen

sixteenseventeeneighteen wheels on a BIG-RIG! And they’re rollin’ rollin’

rollin’, rollin’ rollin’ rollin’!

(Repeat several hundred times, each time doing something different, like, “Okay,

now only numbers in the Fibonacci sequence!”)

With music like this in the CD player, you can be kept occupied for hours while the Dallas traffic moves at the speed of a particularly slow glacier.

Fortunately, there’s also plenty to look at. Everything that I saw in Fort Worth is gleaming and white and suburban, like a giant rich neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama that never ends, and enough traffic for everyone to share. Did I also mention that there are hamburger joints?

In Alabama, we don’t have Whattaburger, or Braum’s, or Jack-in-the-Box. So, naturally, I had to eat at every one of these places to have a real Fort Worth experience. As far as hamburger places go, they were all very good, provided you scraped all the onions and what-not off the burger before eating it. I’m not a big fan of what-not. All the entrees at Whattaburger, I would also like to mention, had clever names such as The Whattaburger, the Justaburger, and the Almostaburger, which is actually made of turkey. Only in Texas. And possibly other states I haven’t been to.

Fort Worth is also distinct from Dallas in that its downtown is notably less crime-ridden. The Fort Worth downtown is probably the kind of downtown that other downtowns only dream of becoming. And why shouldn’t they? Downtown Fort Worth has many remarkable attractions, including:

- An endlessly looping tape recording of what sounds like a duck being strangled with barbed wire, playing at very high volumes from the second floor of the parking deck.

- A hole-in-the-wall coffee house named “Coffee Haus” and pronounced COF-fee hoss, despite the German pretensions. (I guess in Texas, everything is “hoss”)

- Clusters of ladies singing Christmas carols to the passing teenagers with punk hairdos, only you can’t really make them out because there’s a duck being strangled with barbed wire at the parking deck.

- A giant, condemned office tower that was nearly knocked over by a tornado

This is a tremendous improvement over downtown Tuscaloosa, which, despite the vast, heaping quantities of well-manicured sidewalks, is not considered a cool place to hang out by anybody, except for guys who think that robbing people who have just used an ATM is great loads of fun. (And who knows, maybe it is.)

It is a mistake to judge all of Texas simply by one city, such as Abilene, because Texas is a very dynamic and diverse place. Just because Abilene is flat and brown doesn’t mean that all of Texas is flat and brown. Just most of Texas. The flatness is quite a novelty to me. In Tuscaloosa, you can’t see that far, what with all the trees and billboards showcasing giant smiling realtors and their inane slogans. But in Texas, you can see for miles and miles in any direction, which would be nice if there were something besides brown grass and stumpy trees to see. To an Alabama person, while the flatness is new and interesting, the landscape isn’t all that... well, attractive. However, this is not at all how Texas people see the world. Jennie actually said, on the way out of Arkansas, “I can’t wait until we get out of the trees so we can finally have some scenery.” Can you believe that? You can? Well, pooh on you.

Nevertheless, I can understand now why approximately 80% of the world’s population seems to come from the Dallas area. When people say, “I’m not from Texas, but I got here as fast as I could” (which is evidently enforced by Dallas city ordinance), I can see their motivation. It makes sense to me now why every time someone even mentions the word “Texas” in Harding’s Benson Auditorium, what feels like the whole student body starts yelling and hooting in a proud, cowboy-like fashion until the riot cops are brought in. It’s a great place, full of fun and excitement and lots and lots of automobiles.

Maybe one day, I too will be able to say “I’m not from Texas, but I got here as fast as I could, which isn’t very fast because I had to go through Dallas.”