Brownsville or Bust

Sun rising above the Piney Woods, East Texas

 With a Kentucky Lake sunset, I finally accepted the huge task ahead. I barreled ahead with a cooler of snacks in the trunk, an overnight bag in the back seat and all sorts of doubts swirling in my head. A trip start that started as the longest of longshots now soared into reality. I set off to retrieve my Dad from his latest work assignment, a contract gig at a manufacturing plant in Mataramoros, Mexico. With the drug troubles in most border cities, Dad commuted from Brownsville, Texas. With my passport application at the U.S. State Department, that was fortunate; the days of a driver’s license as the only necessity for a quick trip over the Rio Grande had vanished.

Passing Memphis with a breeze, I entered Arkansas’ great wall of darkness. Somehow I had only traveled west through Arkansas at night. Traveling east, I saw the rice fields and other farms, so I did not mind the lack of light. For several spans of 10-plus miles, I had the interstate to myself. Thanks for a fuse dying and leaving half of my dials in the dark, including the speedometer, I had to My old friend Jon graciously opened his door for me, cooking up a nice quiche and pouring the white wine freely. We chatted for a few hours about life and politics before the couch beckoned.

The Foggy Road to Houston

Tenaja water tower bathed in fog.

Working on five hours of sleep, I slipped out of Little Rock. From the rural expanses beyond its borders, I remember scant details. Sleep tugged at me for 100 miles. Hope eased the fatigue, as the first dashes of blue broke the steely darkness. 

Blue vanished into a gray veil of dawn as I reached Texarkana’s State Line Avenue and began the long turn south. U.S. 59 left Texarkana quickly and descended into a fog that left scarcely 50 feet of visibility in places. A few white trucks stayed almost invisible until I drove close. 

The fog made sense;I drove through the heart of the Piney Woods region, what was once a dense forest prior to logging. Much like the thick marine fog nourishes California redwoods, the trees here suck in the fog and grow to heights unexpected in East Texas. Areas south of Nacogdoches housed the Big Thicket, a portion of dense forest also logged heavily since the Texas Revolution. But the trees steeped in fog erased my preconception of treeless oil fields dominating East Texas.

U.S. 59 goes through a confounding series of loops around several cities, including Nacogdoches and Lufkin. Despite all the turns, it kept the traffic moving. As best I could, I tried to catalog little traces of East Texas. I spotted a few cowboy hats, a flourish always best suited to parts of the country where people wearing them actually work with livestock.

Abandoned drive-in north of Lufkin

The fog endured for one hundred miles or more. Tendrils drifted near the road, casting dormant trees as ghostly ruins. Most towns have the same grim looks of small towns anywhere. In one small town, every house seemed at least a century old, most bearing heavy wear from their years. Any burg with more than 1,000 people had its own Dairy Queen. A chain restaurant in most places, Texas DQs had a different vibe. For most towns, they were town commons, places where community members huddled and chatted. 

Closer to Houston, the highway fanned out into an airstrip with five lanes in each direction. Stopping for my first Whataburger (double meat, all the way), I eased into Houston, barely grazing the speed limit. 

Approaching Houston

The nation’s fourth-largest city had wide highways and sprawled to all horizons. Houston defied my expectations. I never slowed down on highway as I circled its core of gleaming spires. I expected Chicago and got Columbus on a Sunday morning. If one of the nation's worst towns for driving gives you a mulligan, you take it.

In February, even during another surprisingly warm winter, the legendary Houston humidity did not thicken the air. Refinery odors were more distinct. I stopped at a beer store I found online and stocked up with craft brews unavailable anywhere near Nashville. 

Sensing that the road would not offer many easy respites, it was good way to break up a 15-hour day and see a few blocks of Houston before I focused solely on signs for Victoria. Back in the flow that only seven lanes of highway could provide, I held my own. Just as I complained aloud about the stench of Houston, I realized I entered the highway behind a loaded garbage truck.

Houston’s might sprawl petered out gently, flowing into a rural highway surrounded by empty farm fields and towns hugging the road. The terrain changed. Flat as a cutting board, the horizon expanded out here. While it was tempting to simply say “Beyond here lies nothing”, that was far from true. Dormant farmland sat on either side of the highway. At most towns, the highway offered the choice of plowing ahead or a slower business loop.

The Great Mesquite Forest

Coastal Bend river and swamp. I can't remember which one.

Throttling away from Houston, I crossed a number of rivers more famous further upstream – the Mission, the San Antonio, which hosted the renowned River Walk in its namesake town. No sooner did I comment on the lack of drough impact than the Colorado River. Not far from its Gulf delta, a ribbon a water bent beneath the highway adjacent to a bigger swath of sand and soil. 

With too many hours alone and only texts from Nancy for communication, the weight of driving hit me hard out here. At times I barely topped 60 mph, 15 below the limit. With border-bound loads, the big rigs zoomed by.

Then I found the longhorns in the trees. Texas’ signature cows grazed amid thick groves of mesquite, their brown and white hides breaking up the gray bark and limbs. At irregular patches in the groves, small herds munched the grass and managed to exude a grace I didn’t always find.

In my mind, Ennio Morricone’s somber theme from Once Upon a Time in the West played repeatedly as other herds repeated the beauty of grazing in these low forests. The song pairs Morricone tropes (guitar and sonorous female singing) with a classic Western soundtrack feel. In the world of the Coast Bend, where the Texas frontier still felt real, the music in my head fanned out over this mystic landscape.

Never had a landscape so impossibly flat captivated me. The place emanated a strange power. It could urge a driver to abandon their power and wander through the groves all the way to the Gulf or at least to Padre Island, the thin barrier island that shielded the Texas coast from tropical storms.

The road curved away from Victoria. U.S. 59 jogged to Laredo, while I picked up U.S. 77 for Corpus Christi and Brownsville. My frantic pace would not allow for a detour into the city called Body of Christ, a surprisingly large port town visible faintly from the highway.

My car engine began burning oil zealously several years ago. Spying the map’s empty stretches beyond Corpus Christi and Robstown, I left the road to keep my engine fresh. The thought of a breakdown on an empty road racked my brain. At the Kingsville stop I grabbed 2 pounds of ice to cool the beer, a Mexican blanket as the trip’s only souvenir, and two quarts of oil. .

Now racing the sun, I reached Kingsville and the scar of highway that spanned 60 uninhabited miles to Raymondville. The mesquite had been replaced by towering palms rocking gently in the wind.

Trust me, they were towering.

Kenedy County is America’s fourth-least populous counties, with less than 500 residents and large parcels of the King Ranch and the 198-turbine Penascal Wind Farm. Desolate barely does the county justice. The King Ranch covers much of the county and more of neighboring Kleberg County, more than 800,000 acres, and has operated since the 1850s. Its headquarters lies in Sarita, the county’s biggest settlement. The only other community of note was Armstrong, the only building its post office, a small shack in the northbound lane. Dick Cheney also shot his hunting partner nearby.

As the sun slowly plummeted across the plains and the palm trees grew larger, the wind turbine field flashed in strange patterns, its red warning lights erupting to the east.  Near Brownsville, the towns clicked off quicker – Raymondville, Sebastian, Combes, Palm Valley, Harlingen and San Benito. After almost 15 hours in the car, they could not click off quick enough. On a map, Harlingen and Brownsville practically form a single entity. Not so on U.S. 77/83.

I called Dad as I exited Reuben Torres Boulevard. In a mile and some change, I found him standing curbside in front of La Mansion, where his employer rented a nice apartment. At some moments, there is no greater joy than a familiar face in a foreign land. This was one.

Almost 15 hours in the car took its toll. Three hours later, we sipped some chardonnay for a night cap. Dad took his comforter and curled up on the couch and I found the spare bedroom.

Before that, I demanded one luxury from my only night in Brownsville – good Mexican. Washing away the grime of the road and settling into fresh clothes, we headed out for a border town dinner. Around the corner, we found a 30-year-old Mexican bistro. Out of respect for the rather personal tales our waiter told us, I’ll leave out the name. The restaurant had some Mexican-style tacos that were pure bliss with chicken, peppers, greens and beans on corn tortillas. They went down smoothly with a pair of Tecate lagers. They had a mariachi band snaking through the crowd.

During dinner, the reality of the border flared up. Our waiter jumped right in when Dad volunteered about his job in Matamoros. He called it a terrible place. It was hard to blame him; he had been kidnapped by narcos, spending three tense hours in their custody before they realized they nabbed the wrong ransom target and released him. 

The waiter abandoned a dentistry career on the other side of the border in order to keep his family safe in Brownsville (he did note that he was born in Brownsville). He shook our hands profusely as we left and wished him well in finding a new career on this side of the Rio Grande. We would leave the border tomorrow, but as dangerous as it could be, it would always be home for others.