Hello! I didn’t spend last night in a hotel. This has become a sufficiently unusual occurrence that I thought I should mention it.
Not that I’m trying to present myself as a cosmopolitan traveler, mind you. My destinations have included Houston and Indianapolis, and next weekend I’ll be in Atlanta. These are places which don’t qualify as America’s armpits, exactly — what are we, Goro? — but they could fairly be called the sweaty small of our great nation’s back.
There’s something to recommend each of them, though, and there was a lot to recommend Houston in particular. First, my sister lives there, and she’s very charming. Beth works for the nonprofit that manages The Orange Show and the Beer Can House (both of which are very cool), and her boyfriend Jeremy is in the business of making deadly, spider-attracting chemicals. The two of them have an extremely pleasant house in the part of Houston near the highway, which is to say I have no idea where they live. It’s right by a taco truck called Elena’s II, though, which is across the street from a taco truck called Elena’s III. I can vouch for Elena’s II — that was some of the best food I’ve had in recent memory. Elena’s III could be a crapshoot for all I know.
That was the first thing that Emily and I realized about Houston: the food’s great. We ate Mexican food at every possible opportunity and I don’t think we were ever disappointed. Real barbacoa was a revelation.
The drinking was good, too. Bought from the supermarket, Shiner and Lone Star are unremarkable beers. But placed into their proper context — say, an ice house yard filled with Sunday sun, kids shooting basketball, dogs stealing food and friendly gentlemen who genially critique visiting Yankees’ horseshoe skills while not-very-discreetly smoking joints at the corner picnic table — they become the best beers you’re ever going to taste.
Oh! We also went to the rodeo. The attached fair and livestock show are pretty much what you’d expect, except with more places selling multi-foot sausages (available with stick or without!). The actual rodeo, though, was unexpectedly great. Perhaps on repeat visits the novelty would wear off — I can imagine that the casual sexism with which the announcers discussed each barrel-riding cowgirl’s beauty might start to rankle — but the actual events were thrilling and proceeded in quick succession. There’s a lot to be said for watching a grown man leap from a horse onto a steer and wrestle it to the ground, and even more to be said for watching it twelve times in a row. Since then I have been surprised to find myself watching professional bullriding on television, and reading with credulous interest accounts of how the sport isn’t actually cruel at all. That’s how quickly this sport (see? I’m calling it a sport) can get its hooks into you.
But none of the proper rodeo events could compete with the Calf Scramble. For the uninitiated, this is an event in which our human society pits its children against those of the cows. Dozens of fresh-faced Future Farmers of America race toward a smaller crowd of confused, slightly bored calves and attempt to cajole them into submission. If you manage to subdue one of the calves you’ll be presented with a certificate good for the future purchase of such an animal, which you’ll then presumably raise. Who knows? With hard work and a little luck, in a few years you might be one of the cowboys over at the Ag Expo applying can after can of hairspray to a bull.
The charming part of the scramble is how simultaneously overmatched and excited the kids are. Emily and I watched a post-game interview with an ecstatic and disheveled young woman who had just won a calf, and no sir, she didn’t mind at all that it had stepped on her head, in fact she didn’t even remember that part!
Here’s some video of the 2005 Houston Rodeo calf scramble. Unfortunately the professional rodeo videographers who shot it seem to have been intent on playing up the desperate athletic conflict of the thing. And who can blame them? They spend most of their time filming flinty cowboys as they casually, mercilessly assert their dominance over the bovine world. But most of the calf scramble is much more hapless than that, and considerably more endearing. If you had to pick a single representative image of the proceedings it would be of a girl holding on to a calf’s tail in the corner of the arena, both of them confused about what should happen next.
From Houston we went to Galveston, then to Austin via Lockhart. We had some great seafood in Galveston and stayed in a fancy hotel — it was nice! — but the town’s clearly still getting itself together from the hurricane’s aftermath. Austin was Austin — you know it’s great. Suspiciously great, in fact, like all college towns. Oh, and everything Kriston has said about barbecue in Lockhart is correct, and perhaps even understated. Kreuz Market is a monastery, and imposes vows of abstinence from sauce and forks upon visitors as soon as they walk through the door. When your server turns and reaches into the fire-flecked pit behind him to retrieve some brisket, it’s easy to imagine that he’s actually reaching into the underworld — and is that really beef? It seems too tender. What sort of barbecue sect is this, anyway? It’s all too delicious to fight, though. Accept your damnation, and be sure to try the sauerkraut.
And that was about it for Texas. I spent the past few days in Indianapolis at the Computer Assisted Reporting Conference. The conference was good: it was fun to be told embarrassing stories about my new coworkers, and to observe the extent to which journalists everywhere seem to share the same talents and affectations — many of the same ones that I suffer from and/or aspire to. These were good people, and I felt right at home.
Indianapolis, though… well, I don’t know. They’ve got some creepy, Masonic-looking monuments, which makes me think there may be some pretty good secret conspiracies going on. But the downtown is incredibly free of personality; the closest thing I observed to local color was an installation of the Weber Grill chain restaurant. On the plus side, the tapwater seemed to be extremely soft, so any travelers who are more worried about limestone scale or excessive shampooing times than about access to culinary and cultural options would do well to give Indianapolis a look.
In five days: Atlanta. I’ve been before and it was okay, although it was hard to shake the feeling that Ted Turner was singlehandedly responsible for about 90% of the city. Maybe this time will be different; I’ll report back.