Michigone?

This is written on Friday: Blacker than Black Friday in Michigan, after the U.S. Senate failed to muster enough votes to approve a $14-billion bridge loan to the reeling Big Three American automakers. People in that cold North Central state are dejected, frightened, and angry. But unlike the fictional TV anchorman Howard Beale, who famously sputtered that he was “mad as hell and not going to take it any more” in the 1976 movie “Network,” Michigan autoworkers and executives expect they’ll be “taking it” – on the chin and in their pay envelopes – for a long time to come.

This is how the U.S. auto industry is feeling about now. Wait! What’s that German car doing at the top?

When people here in Washington – or in Denver or Des Moines, or a small town in the Dakotas for that matter – have a bad day, we’re prone to saying, “Hey, could be worse. We could be in Detroit!”

But what could be worse if you live and work – or worked – there now that unemployment in “the Motor City” is north of 18 percent and about to spill past 10 percent throughout Michigan?

Journalists and politicians speak of “Detroit,” meaning not just our beleaguered “automobile capital” but the entire embattled U.S. auto industry, whose influence reaches well beyond Michigan.

There’s not a lot of ho-ho-ho on the lots of car dealers this Christmas

One in ten jobs nationally – one in three in Michigan – is tied to the auto industry. When Virg Bernaro, mayor of Lansing, the state capital, recently led a delegation of 35 mayors and other elected officials on a trip to Washington to support an industry rescue plan, its members represented towns from coast to coast that depend not just on assembly plants or huge dealerships, but also on “Tier One” and “Tier Two” suppliers.

Tier One companies make parts and trim for Chryslers, General Motors brands, and Fords, down to the ashtrays and buttons on the radio. Tier Two companies, in turn, supply them. In a warped variation of “trickle-down economics” not stressed in business school, when an automaker founders or bites the dust, unpaid bills, job losses, and closures spread quickly to the little companies that feed off it.

That doesn’t count the thousands of people whose livelihoods depend on selling and repairing American cars. Or the owners of the deli on the corner that sells most of its sandwiches to those who work at the plant or dealer. Or the dentist who built a practice from the same clientele – and so on, on down the block.

Dark Days

Congress and the White House are having about as much luck as this farmer, pulling the auto industry out of the mud

So, “rescue package” for the embattled automakers or no rescue package, times are grim in Michigan, where people know that when they bundle up and fetch the newspaper from the snow, the news they carry in will not be good.

On top of all these dark developments, Michiganders, like almost all Americans, have also been buffeted by bad news from their stockbrokers and mortgage lenders. But not every town or every person in Michigan is despairing. Most folks in western Michigan -- around Grand Rapids, where the health-care and furniture businesses retain some vigor; and up north, around Travers City, where resorts and vacation properties and ordinary homes are still being built -- don’t greet the day with dread, as do a lot of people in “car country” to their south and east.

Henry Ford's plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan, hired thousands of former migrants during World War II, when the plant was converted from auto to bomber production. Ford had hired many southern African-Americans but switched to hiring whites after black workers joined the union

An irony is that Michigan was once a place that people by the hundreds of thousands hurried to move to, not get away from. During the Great Migration of the early 1900s, an estimated 7 million African-Americans, plus uncounted rural whites, poured into Michigan and other rapidly industrializing northern states. These places dangled good, steady jobs with benefits – a far cry from unrelenting, poorly rewarded toil under the hot sun in the fields and piney woods down South.

Good but not glamorous jobs in the auto factories turned Michigan into a “cash and carry” state: workers brought home a decent paycheck, paid their bills, put their kids through school, and splurged on only one or two modest pleasures, say a cabin at the lake or a nice driving vacation out west each year.

They were frugal, but there wasn’t much left over to save. Besides, why bother? Social Security and a good Ford pension would see you through your retirement years. And the parish church wouldn’t charge much to bury you.

The auto companies and the United Auto Workers are on the same side of the table when it comes to seeking help from Washington

Rampant entrepreneurship did not develop in Michigan to the degree that it did in bustling California or Texas and elsewhere, for the same reason. People put their trust in the long-term stability of the union and a good company job. Higher education was something for the kids: You don’t need a degree to solder joints on the line.

Rock Solid

We admire these “salt of the earth” people who are some of our last countrymen, or so it seems, who still actually “make stuff” with their hands and backs. They don’t deliver things or trade things or sell can’t-miss paper schemes. They go to work each day and make stuff. If we lose the auto companies and these automakers, we wonder and worry what America will make any more.

If the answer is not much, what does that portend?

This extra-long Chevy Suburban sport-utility vehicle, and millions like it, played a role in the Big Three’s “fat years” and now, in in its lean ones

“Michigan is the nation’s economic story writ large,” Detroit Free Press business reporter John Gallagher wrote in October. “The state gave birth to the American middle class in the early years of the 20th Century, as rising productivity in the new auto industry boosted incomes for millions of working families.” The state routinely led the nation in per-capita income in the 1950s and ’60s, and just a decade ago. And just a decade ago, the Big Three could hardly count their money fast enough, as Americans drove off happy in the latest gas-guzzling minivans and sport-utility vehicles: Detroit’s metal mastodons.

` With 15-percent profit margins on SUVs, what was not to like about life in the Wolverine State?

An Unsettling Precedent

Timber was once to Michigan’s economy what the auto industry is now. The car folks hope their next chapter does not resemble the loggers’ last one

But a faint warning can be heard from a century past, when Michigan’s lumber industry fell from boom to bust in a flash. In the North Woods throughout the early 20th Century, roving crews of lumberjacks made short work of millions of pines, some 200 years old. They turned logs into boards that built millions of homes for many states around. It was not long before all that remained were sawdust and ghost towns throughout the North Woods.

No one, not even the auto industry’s naysayers, is saying that tumbleweeds will whistle down the streets of Flint and Detroit any time soon. But whole slum neighborhoods in some parts of the latter already resemble what one Michigander described as “Dresden after the bombings” – a reference to the German city destroyed by Allied air attacks during World War II. (It doesn’t help that already-frayed tensions in a city where racial unrest has simmered for decades and occasionally ignited that 95 percent of Detroit City is African-American and mostly poor, and – until recently, when upwardly mobile blacks earned enough to get out – 97 percent of the surrounding suburban population was white.

There are dark clouds over Ford, all right. Even darker ones over GM and Chrysler, which have fewer funds in reserve to weather a storm

With the national nonfarm unemployment rate creeping upward – from 6.5 to 6.7 percent in November alone – Michigan’s rate, as I mentioned, is bumping up against 10 percent. In some of those “Dresden” neighborhoods in Detroit, the figure is estimated to exceed 40 percent.

So the already downcast people of Michigan are a little fearful, too, about what the volatile combination of despair and widening unemployment could bring.

Slumped Shoulders, Eyes Averted

“You know how you pass someone you know on the street and say, ‘How ya doin?’” Ronald Dzwonkowski asked me. He directs the editorial board at the Free Press.

“We don’t do that here anymore. We don’t want to hear the answer.”

This statue on Woodward Avenue in the Motor City has no official name, but locals call it “The Spirit of Detroit.” Right now, spirits are low there

It’s bad enough that the auto industry teeters, but the Detroit Lions pro football team has assembled an abject 0-13 record as of this writing, the Tigers baseball team – picked to waltz to the American League pennant – finished last in its five-team division, and the once-mighty University of Michigan football team, which had played in 33 straight post-season “bowl” games, will compete in none this year after a 3-9 season that ended with a stomping by Ohio State, its archrival to the south. These are not trivial matters in a blue-collar state where sports are a useful distraction, especially now.

Did I mention that the state of Michigan just announced that it will cut its budget by $200 million? That’s hardly surprising. Many other states that rely on sales tax revenues have done likewise as Americans zip up their wallets in response to the ongoing recession. But the loss of good government jobs on top of hemorrhages in the auto industry is a crippling body blow.

Things are anything but OK right now in Michigan and in the homes of autoworkers

“The whole American dream, that’s a snow job,” the wife of a Michigan electrician told the Free Press in October. The paper found her and her husband several states away, living in a tent city in Iowa because they had lost their home and could not find work in Michigan. Reporter Gallagher closed his story with a reference to the itinerant camps of the Great Depression, quoting the electrician’s wife’s rueful suggestion that the late songwriter Woody Guthrie, who put the sorrows of the Depression into song, “should come back to write an anthem for today’s struggling families.

“These are historical times, I’m afraid,” she continued. Not grand ones, either, by a long shot. “Everyone knows someone who has been laid off,” John Gallagher told me. “We had nine people to dinner the other night. Three had lost their jobs.” Mirthful banter was at a minimum. Instead, he says: “Lots of gallows humor.”

Help for Fat Cats

There will be plenty of imports to eat if one or more of the Big Three goes under

What really “grinds” Michiganders, says Ron Dzwonkowski, Gallagher’s Free Press colleague, is the cheery willingness of the government in Washington to shovel $700 billion to Wall Street, big banks, and mortgage and insurance giants. It did not go unnoticed in Lansing and Monroe and Port Huron that President Bush twice made televised appeals for a Wall Street bailout. Nor does it escape notice in Michigan that those wagging a disapproving finger at the idea of a “Big Three” rescue plan one-fiftieth the came right out and said that if one or two of the Big Three automakers went bankrupt or folded, that was their tough luck. It served them right for getting into trouble in the first place. A “leaner” auto industry might be better for the country.

“For God’s sake,” one man in Michigan muttered to me. “This was a bridge loan, a lifeline, to be paid back, not a bailout.” A loan complete with a “car czar” to scrutinize the industry’s every move. On the way to work, I heard a Detroit autoworker tearfully react to the notion that it was they, the unionized labor force, that fouled the deal by refusing to accept deep wage cuts. “I can’t afford a pay cut,” she said. “I’ll lose everything.” She may anyway if there’s no paycheck at all.

There was no “stock czar” or “bank czar” on the case when financial houses gobbled from the federal trough, another worker complained, bitterly. “They used a lot of that money not to get loans going again to the little guy, but to prop up their own portfolios and buy more banks.”

And here’s something else that grinds Michiganders: It’s not as if they are making manual typewriters or rotary-dial telephones for which there clearly is no use any more. The Big Three still make half of the eight million new vehicles that sell each year in the United States. Or I should say, sold, before worried Americans began bypassing even the foreign makers’ dealerships. Ford still produces the best-selling small truck, and it and General Motors still bring in $200 billion a year or so apiece. (The figures at Chrysler, which is privately owned, are not public, but they are estimated at half of Ford or GM’s figures.)

A Few Regrets

Yes, our own companies’ greed trumped need as they kept rolling out the SUVs, the people of Michigan admit. Yes, we should have joined the “green revolution” far earlier, with smaller, more efficient products. But do we deserve to be beaten like the proverbial “red-headed stepchild”? Do those in power hate us, or our unions, so much that they’ll allow a century-old industrial giant of an industry to crumple and die?

There’s a vacancy at this motel, and many vacancies to come, perhaps, on the assembly lines of Michigan’s automakers

Like some other Americans, the people of Michigan see home after home going up for sale or foreclosed and abandoned. “Vacant homes and vacant feelings is what we have here,” Dr. Steven Craig, a psychologist practicing in the Detroit suburb of Birmingham, told me. He says a friend and neighbor, like many in Michigan, packed up and headed somewhere south where firms are hiring. The neighbor left behind what had been a lovely home that is now overgrown with weeds and vines. “It looks like the Munsters’ place,” Dr. Craig says. They were a creepy, but funny, family of monster-film stereotypes who lived in a mansion that had gone to rack and ruin.

So many Michiganders are heading to relatively prosperous Texas that a joke describing them is making the rounds:

“What’s the last thing that a Texan wants to see?”

“A Yankee with a U-Haul.”

There’s irony in that, because 20 years ago or so, the stampede of rented U-haul trailers carrying families’ every possession, was heading in the other direction, out of Houston. But by 2003, according to a report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, “U-Haul trailers leaving Michigan for Texas exceeded those making the return trip by a ratio of 100 to 1.”

The “black-tag people” were back. (For years, Michigan license plates were black, and the watch was out for them in Texas.)

See You Later

This is not yet a Great Migration in reverse, but it has the makings of one, especially among the young. Already, Michigan’s newspapers are bemoaning a “brain drain” of young people who are leaving, likely never to return. They simply can’t find work in Michigan, or don’t want to, given the gloom.

Those were the days. New American car. Happy carmaker (here called an “autobuilder”). Satisfied customer

Older folks are hunkering down and, by and large, staying. Their roots sometimes stretch through three generations of auto workers. It’s the work and the lifestyle they know. They can’t come to grips with starting over, even in some sunny and upbeat spot. Comforting support systems are nearby in the factory towns: family, friends, church, union, dog park, corner tavern, bowling team. It’s one thing to contemplate a whole new start, and quite another to do it, given humans’ resistance to change.

So on the outside, people are “bucking up” as best they can – whistling past the graveyard, in the view of others who foresee decline and death for the auto industry ahead.

Inside, people are not doing so well. In many homes, dejection has turned to quiet desperation and feelings of failure, even though it wasn’t the rank and file that flew corporate jets to Washington to beg for handouts.

Dr. Craig says his patients “look to me for a lifeline, as a drowning man cries out for a lifeguard.” But if the nation’s greatest economists do not have answers, could Steven Craig have any?

Mad as Hell Inside

Mental health professionals like him describe a growing, generalized anger. “We played by the rules and did all that was asked of us,” their patients tell them, in return for what they hoped was a sliver of the good life: a sturdy little home, a ballgame or two, that place at the lake.

Once, too, families in trouble could lean on their elderly parents for emotional support and, if need be, a roof and a bed for a time. Now Mom and Dad are despairing, too, because of the Wall Street collapse that sucked the life out of their pension funds. The old folks, too, are asking, “What about us?”

An image of days to come? An abandoned assembly line after a plant closing. This one was in Illinois and made tractors. But...

There are danger signs ahead. Fearful Michiganders are putting off medical appointments, slashing their church and charitable donations, turning inward, avoiding friends lest they ask Ronald Dzwonkowski’s question: “How ya doin’?” Even small talk is to be avoided, since it is sure to touch on the weather (lousy again), the job (gone or imperiled), a vacation or home improvement (canceled), or the kids (likely stressed and depressed, too).

Down in Ohio, in my hometown of Cleveland, which has been buffeted by its own waves of steel plant closings over the years, Case Western Reserve University's Mark Chupp, a professor of social work, knows the drill. “Probably the worst long-term effect of economic downturn and hardship in a Rust Belt city is cynicism about the good life,” he says. “People are pessimistic and have been lowering expectations of the good life for a long time.

Unrelenting stress has no upside

“Sadly, what comes with this is the ‘couch potato’ lifestyle. We have one of the highest obesity rates in the country. People are ‘vegging out’ in front of the TV.” And he doesn’t mean eating vegetables. He means passing the hours mindlessly, eating poorly and, likely, slowly killing themselves with drink as well.

Collateral Damage

Back in Michigan, there don’t appear to be hard figures on the suicide, drunk-driving, domestic abuse, and divorce rates these days, but the sense from those with whom I’ve talked is that they are higher. Perennial stress, as a whole state contemplates the loss of a way of life, is a killer –of the depressed and of others.

And yet there a gritty reserve of hope remaining in Michigan. As Dr. Craig explains it, the economic fortunes of the auto industry have been cyclical. And in the past, the tough-it-out, weather-the-storm, this-too-shall-pass resolve has prevailed.

I talked with a woman in the little town (800 people) of Lyons, Michigan, which is now a bedroom community outside Lansing. Not only are four out of five people in Lyons still tied to auto-industry work in Lansing or Grand Rapids or elsewhere, but the old timers in town know what it’s like to have the economic rug pulled out from under their lives. Lyons once had an auto plant that produced interior trim for Chryslers. It closed tight in the 1970s during a corporate reorganization.

“I grew up on a farm. Life was hard, but we always made it through,” the woman told me. “My parents and their generation made it through the Depression. With faith, we’ll weather this, too.”

Faith in the Lord, she meant, not in Detroit or Washington.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the great automobile industry, others in Michigan tell me. So the fix for the auto industry will take a while, too.

If there is a fix.

Here’s what Dr. Craig tells his patients: “Do something. Take control of something, even a little thing like definitely deciding to send the kids to summer camp next year, or definitely deciding not to.” Dithering, indecision, hoping for better days, he says, are recipes for deepening disillusionment – and physical dissolution.

Storm Clouds Brewing

Then-candidate Barack Obama was all smiles at a Chrysler plant in Sterling Heights, Michigan, in May. He’ll have more serious work with the industry come January

What lies ahead for Michigan? A grim winter, for sure, and a long one. No bridge loan can fix that. And according to many forecasts, no matter how much money gets funneled to the auto industry once the new Obama administration takes office January 20, more cutbacks and layoffs seem as certain as the sunrise.

Long-term, the people with whom I talked envision a less-populated but more economically diverse state. Ron Dzwonkowski thinks Michigan’s future should be hinged to its abundant natural resources as a source of energy, enjoyable retirement, and recreation. Michigan has more fresh water, and not just from the three Great Lakes that touch it, than any other U.S. state, including neighboring Minnesota, the “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” Michigan may not have 10,000, but it has so many that everybody in the state lives within 75 kilometers of a good-sized one.

The lakes aren’t going anywhere. But, especially if one or more of the auto giants collapses, some of the people who own cottages on them could be.

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Disillusionment and dissolution. The former means disenchantment. Even idealists can get disillusioned during hard times. The latter means decay or disintegration. Disillusionment can foster psychological and physical breakdowns.

Rack and Ruin. Utter decay. “Rack” is a variation of “wreck” or “wrack.” This is another phrase that always appears in this order. One doesn’t, for some reason, go to ruin and rack.

Red-headed stepchild. This wretch is always being severely beaten in a popular phrase. Stepchildren often get short-shrift when there are natural siblings around. Read the “Cinderella” story. As for why redheads get a double dose of trouble is not clear, except that they, too, are not as common in most families as are blonds and brunettes. No one is sure who first called attention to the plight of red-haired stepkids.

Wolverine. A foul-tempered, musky-smelling, burrowing weasel after which both Michigan and its largest public university’s sports teams decided to nickname themselves. Wolverines don’t back down from a fight – a welcome trait in the state’s current economic morass.

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Texians

President Bush has frequently vacationed at his Prairie Chapel Ranch near Crawford. Like former President Ronald Reagan at his Western White House, Bush relaxes by clearing brush.

On the January day that he becomes our former president, or soon thereafter, George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, will leave Washington for their ranch near tiny Crawford, Texas, outside the city of Waco. By some accounts, the Bushes are pining for that day, not just out of relief after eight years of crushing responsibility, but also because they "just love the place to pieces," as exuberant Texans would say.

Love it beyond reason, it can seem to others, since Texas is home to killer bees, biting red ants, ill-tempered rattlesnakes, flying cockroaches the size of dirigibles, raging blizzards, blinding dust storms, a coastline routinely mauled by hurricanes, thorny cacti, smelly oil and gas refineries, and entire counties where temperatures average 37 degrees Celsius for two or three straight months each summer. They topped 38 degrees 10 days in a row one year that I lived in Texas, and “I like to have died,” as Texans and southerners sometimes say. Yes, yes, it was “dry heat” up by the Oklahoma line, but Texas endures sponge-wringing humidity anywhere south of San Antonio (or San Antone, as old cowboy-movie heroes liked to call it).

And the cuisine is even hotter. Who wouldn’t hurry back to such a place!?

A Desperate Start

American settlers in the Mexican state of Texas turned the old, limestone Alamo mission into a fortress where they made a heroic but fatal stand for independence in 1836.

The people of this state were called “Texians” back in 1836, when 200 or so besieged Texans died inside the Alamo mission in San Antonio fighting the 5,000-man army of Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna. That heroic, though doomed, standoff helped spur the region’s ultimately successful war of independence from Mexico. Texas’s nine-year run as a republic before it decided to join the United States in 1845 still resonates in the Texan character and feeds an almost nationalistic pride you’ll find in those parts. To this day, Texans have a remarkable ability to tune out the drawbacks and latch onto what’s enviable about their whopping state.

Burgeoning Houston, the nation’s corporate energy capital, has bounced back from many devastating recessions in the oil economy. It also features the world’s largest medical center.

This was easier once, before cities like Dallas and Houston exploded into clusters of gaudy skyscrapers. And it was easier to find Texas charm before the state capital of Austin turned into a trendy technology and nightclub scene, and before Texas went nuts building superhighways. More about that in a bit.

Just as bobbing pumpjacks dip into the earth, up and down, day and night, night and day, hoping to suck oil from the West Texas prairie, let’s drill into Texans’ love affair with what a lot of them still stubbornly consider the country’s largest state. (Dismissing remote Alaska, which is twice as large, they snort, “Daggone it, some place that’s one-half ice and th’other half moose bogs don’t count.”)

On the Road – Forever

West Texas is hot and dry in the summer and endures fierce blizzards each winter. And as you see, it can be unforgiving to humans and beasts alike.

Texas is big enough by any measure. Enter it at Port Arthur on Interstate Highway 10 at the Louisiana border and head to El Paso, which is stuck between Mexico and New Mexico way out west – way out west – and you’ll pass 828 mile-markers. Again, that’s 828 separate mileposts on the same highway in the same state – 1,333 mind-numbing kilometers from the first to the last.

That’s no big whoop to a Texan. Thanks to those “westerns,” the state is world-famous for open spaces. (“The prairie sky/ Is wide and high/ Deep in the heart of Texas.”) All by its ownself – another Texas expression – one South Texas cattle spread, the 334,000-hectare King Ranch near Corpus Christi is larger than the entire state of Rhode Island. It’s no coincidence that just about every Texas town sports a business with the word “big” in it: The Big State. The Big Texan. Big Red’s...

And then there’s the entire city of Dallas: “Big D.”

Funny, though. Despite Texans’ fondness for welding first and middle names into a single identity, I don’t remember seeing “Big Jim Bob’s” or “Big Janie Sue’s” in my Texas travels.

A Place Unto Itself

Journalist and fiction writer Pete Hamill once observed, “There is a growing feeling that perhaps Texas is really another country, a place where the skies, the disasters, the diamonds, the politicians, the women, the fortunes, the football players and the murders are all bigger than anywhere else.” But what does he know? Hamill is from Brooklyn.

Breeders did not fashion the exotic longhorn. The breed developed on its own in rugged territory. Crossbreeding nearly wiped out the species, but longhorns are now carefully preserved.

The big goes on in bid’ness deals, as Texans call them, in gushers of oil, lumbering longhorn cattle, and at the nation’s biggest state capitol building. And soon you can add the biggest room without columns in the world: the new Dallas Cowboys’ football stadium, which will seat 100,000 people for certain events. Like the ’Boys’ current home, Texas Stadium, it will have a hole in the roof “so God can watch his favorite team.” Texas brag.

Now let me tell you about what, in the words of the Associated Press, “sounds like another tall tale told by a Texan.” The state has embarked on an audacious project to build superhighways so big and so complex “that they will make ordinary interstates look like cow paths.” Here’s just how adventuresome and outrageous one of these roads, the new Trans-Texas Corridor from the Mexican border all the way north to Oklahoma, is projected to be: Picture a concrete ribbon as wide as five soccer fields, with extra lanes just for trucks and freight trains and commuter rail. The plan even sets aside space along the road for oil and gas pipelines and broadband voice and data cables.

Allow me to reiterate the width of this blacktop beast: five soccer fields. Driving along, will one even be able to see the houses and barns on the other side of the road?

Bird Dogs and Pickup Trucks

Pickup trucks have been a part of the fabric of life in the American Southwest – and especially in Texas – for a long time.

What you almost certainly will see when that mega-highway gets built are lots of pickup trucks. Even though more Texans are city slickers than cowpokes these days, they love their pickups. Each year – at least in the years before the current national financial unpleasantness – they bought more than 300,000 of these small trucks with enclosed cabs and flat, open beds in back. Japanese automaker Toyota even opened a production plant in San Antonio with an annual production capacity of 200,000 heavy-duty Tundra pickups. But in the face of record gasoline-price rises and sluggish demand for gas-guzzlers, even in pedal-to-the-metal Texas, Toyota cut the output sharply. Still, out in the Back 40 – a term I’ll explain in Wild Words below – Texans still haul a lot of barbed-wire fencing, hay bales, bags of unshucked pecans, and hunting dogs.

So Texians find a lot to love about Texas. “Loved is a better word,” says my friend Bob Blachly, an Austin native and former VOA colleague. “Now it’s homogenized, not much different from anyplace else.” “But once,” he adds with a wistful sigh, “we were our own breed: independent, optimistic, self-reliant, friendly as all outdoors.”

Howdy-Do!

Galveston Island is – between hurricanes – Texas’s playland and antebellum retreat, reminiscent of the days when the city was known as the “Wall Street of the South.”

Friendly, indeed. “Texas” traces to Tejas, a Choctaw Indian word meaning “friend” or “friendship.” Texans touring New York or L.A., or Djibouti for that matter, might be detected by the trace of a twang, but they’re even more readily spotted by their outgoing nature. Texans practically own the “howdy” word, accompanying it with a crushing handshake and a hearty slap on the back. For a century now, “Howdy” has been the official greeting among “Aggies” at Texas A&M University in College Station.

Ah, Texas A&M, the onetime agriculture and mechanical school that bears the brunt of “Aggie jokes.” These were all the rage when I lived in Texas. (They’re less politically correct now.) Sample: “Did you hear about the Aggie at a stop sign? He’s still there.”

Antebellum Victorian mansions in what’s left of hurricane-ravaged Galveston may remind one of magnolia-draped Mississippi, and it’s hard to tell North Texas and western Oklahoma apart. But somehow you know when you’re you’re in Texas, perhaps because you’re sure to be addressed as “sir” or “ma’am.”

***

Down at the end of Texarkana’s Stateline Avenue, shown here in a historic postcard, a federal post office and courthouse straddles Texas and Arkansas. So do lots of tourists, for their vacation photographs.

Well, maybe it’s not so easy to tell when you’re one place in Texas. Up in the northeast corner, the city of Texarkana is actually a twin of another city in Arkansas, also called Texarkana, which butts right up against it along Stateline Avenue. They’ve even drawn the state line down the middle of the post office and federal building used by both towns. Upstairs, the judge’s chair is bolted to the floor so he or she is always sitting in two states.

Texarkansans consider it all one place, where eight railroads and four U.S. highways once converged. Yet the “beer joint” side of town, where it’s legal to sell liquor, wine, and beer, is “wet.” And the other side is “dry.” Shockingly, given the state’s saloon-and-gunfighter image, the dry side is in Texas.

And the Skies are Not Cloudy All Day

Tejas. Friendship. As the song goes, Texans are at “home on the range,” where “seldom is heard a discouraging word.” Their history of relentless entrepreneurship would confirm that Texans are doers. Work now. Work hard. Talk later. After, all, on the open range, far from town, neighbors still need each other’s help stringing fences, raising barns, or mounting posses to chase outlaws. (Well, maybe not the outlaw part so much any more.) Water, long before oil, was precious, and when a stranger stopped at your well after a long, hard ride, you welcomed him and offered a meal. Glad to help. No questions asked. Nothing expected in return.

Texans knew all about “diversity” before it became a buzzword. The flags of six nations, including France, Spain, Mexico, the brief American southern confederacy, and, for nine years ending in 1845, a sovereign Republic of Texas, have flown over the land. The state and the Dallas football team get their Lone Star symbols – and Texas its nickname – from the star on the Texas Republic’s flag.

At one time in Texas, one could count 25 distinct tribes of American Indians, including fierce Comanche and Apache raiders, as well as thousands of African slaves. “Seminole Negroes,” the product of escaped black slaves and renegade Seminole Indians who hid together in Florida swamps and later settled in Texas and Oklahoma, became legendary scouts for the U.S. Army during the western Indian Wars of the late 1800s.

We’re Rich! We’re Rich!

When Anthony Lucas, an Austrian-born mining engineer, struck oil on Spindletop Hill, the gusher spewed for nine days until the well was capped.

The “discovery” of oil with the eruption of the 60-meter-high Lucas gusher, at the Spindletop oil field near Beaumont on January 10, 1901 at 10:30 a.m., turned Texas into a boom state and changed it forever. I put “discovery” in quotation marks because oil had lain in plain sight in pools, under the very noses of Texans, for decades. Indians used it for potions, and it annoyed settlers who, searching for water, had to drill through it. But “black gold” would bring fortune, international fame, and larger-than-life characters to cities like Dallas and Houston, which became shooting stars in the exploding Sunbelt.

Spindletop ushered in an Energy Age, a population explosion, and a dramatic spike in Texas’s political power. Texans soon ran big energy companies (that “big” word again), the Congress of the United States, and the White House after Lyndon Johnson succeeded to the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in 1963. And in 1992, H. Ross Perot, a billionaire Texas businessman, ran the most successful – in percentage of popular votes – third-party campaign for president in American history. (Gasp! He is a Texan who is not so big. Perot stands just 1.68 meters tall.)

You Want Variety?

Each spring, “bluebonnet trails” in Central Texas attract thousands of wildflower enthusiasts. The flower (or its cousin) also pops up in a cheery red in some places.

One could certainly carve up Texas on a map the way we draw the cuts of meat on a steer: piney woods in the humid northeast, tallgrass prairies along the Oklahoma border, flatlands and mesquite-scrub plains west of the Pecos River and in the “Panhandle” that reaches northward to the Colorado Rockies, enchanting hills ablaze with bluebonnets each spring in the hills around San Antonio, Louisiana-like bayous to the southeast, brush country and vast rangeland in far-south Texas.

Out of graduate school, I lived for two years in Wichita Falls, across the Red River from Oklahoma. It’s a sister city of Fürstenfeldbruck in Bavaria. That’s apropos of nothing, but it’s fun to write “Fürstenfeldbruck.”

Wichita Falls is a military town (Sheppard Air Force Base) – kind of down on its luck andrough around the edges – but God-fearing. Lubbock, to the west, may have the most churches per capita in the nation, and Houston the largest church, but Wichita Falls holds its own with the Lord. Its nickname is “The City That Faith Built.” And it’s a good thing, since some of the meanest tornadoes in U.S. history have dipped out of roiling black clouds to level parts of the town. One twister in 1979 left 20,000 people – one-fifth of the city’s population – homeless. When I lived there in the 1960s, we got only hot, relentless winds from the west, carrying what seemed like half of the Panhandle’s gritty soil. These red-dust “blows” turned our car and house and hair a hideous salmon hue. Wichita Falls was also the first and last place in my life where a fist-sized tarantula spider walked across my kitchen counter.

Flat, Dry, and Far Away

A quirky sight on the Cadillac Ranch along historic U.S. Highway 66 near Amarillo is a graffiti artists’ delight called the “Ant Farm.” Beyond it is nothing but Panhandle flat land.

A quick word about the Texas Panhandle. As big as the entire state of Indiana, it remains unabashed cowboy country. Cowboy hats, trophy belts, and boots are as thick as grasshoppers in Amarillo. In the logo of the city that calls itself the “Real Texas,” two boots take the place of the double-L’s in Amarillo’s name. And little wonder: In 1893, its population was officially listed as “between 500-600 humans and 50,000 head of cattle.” One-fourth of the nation’s beef is shipped from Amarillo, and at the city’s Big (what else?) Texan steakhouse, diners eat free if they can finish a two-kilogram steak the size of a small roast, plus bread, a salad, and a small dessert in an hour.

The historic sign outside, and the steaks inside, the Big Texan in Amarillo live up to the name.

Almost no one succeeds. I’m a big guy, was plenty hungry, and had deliberately skipped lunch the day I gave it a shot. I got about halfway through the hunk of steer before capitulating with a groan. It was little comfort to learn that it’s little old grandmothers and tiny young women, mostly, who have polished off the whole slab of meat. My internist will have to explain that one to me.

So the Panhandle is cowboy-real. For cowboy chic, you’ll need to hit Dallas or Austin or the Fort Worth line-dancing clubs I mentioned a couple of posts ago. The only similarities between today’s edgy, pulsating “alternative cowboy” music and the gentle old western yodels of Gene Autry or the Sons of the Pioneers are the boots and hats.

Playin’ With the Big Boys

Shimmering Dallas is the economic hub of a 12-county “Metroplex” that also includes the legendary “cow town” of Fort Worth, about which I wrote a while back.

Today’s Texas cowboys have plenty of company when they get to town. Six of America’s top-20 cities are now in Texas: Houston (4), San Antonio (8), Dallas (9), Austin (16), Fort Worth (18), and El Paso (20). And three of them – Houston, San Antonio, and El Paso – regularly rank among the nation’s fattest cities as rated by Men’s Fitness and other magazines.

They have large Latino populations for whom homemade tamales and enchiladas prepared in lard and covered in cheese and rich, fatty gravy are everyday, irresistible fare. Irresistible to gringos, too, I can attest. And there’s a paucity of public parks for exercise. Little wonder: these are stifling-hot places where a “run in the park” has a great deal less appeal than a brisk trot through the Boston Common.

The River Walk provides a respite for conventioneers. A full story beneath street level, the enclave was created over several decades along the San Antonio River.

Word from the U.S. surgeon general that 30 percent of San Antonians are obese prompted that city’s director of health to launch a “Don’t Super-size San Antonio” campaign. (Super-sizing is a term for ordering Texas-big portions of fattening fast food.)

The beautifully shaded River Walk, San Antonio’s biggest attraction save for the historic Alamo, looks like the ideal, relatively cool strolling paradise at which to get some weight off. But it’s more of a fairyland – a Venice of the American West – festooned with lounge chairs and umbrellas.

Mexican mariachi bands serenade as tour boats glide past its cobblestone walkways, and tourists sip Shiner beer and stiffer drinks,

Space Center Houston is a showcase for America’s space program. This interactive visitor center for NASA’s Johnson Space Center includes this shuttle mock-up.

including prickly pear margaritas made from the fermented juice of the cactus pear. In times like these, who wants to jog?

Texas leads the nation in oil, beef, and cotton production. And you surely know about its vital role in the space industry: doesn’t every astronaut’s call from space begin with “Houston . . . .”?

Look under “Texas crops,” and you can hardly see an end to the list: Beets. Spinach. Oranges. Pistachio nuts. Marijuana. (Just checking to see if you’re still with me.) Texas has more floral varieties than any other state, and a greater assortment of reptiles than anywhere else in the land.

Meet Dasypus novemcinctus

In San Angelo, “Jalepeño Sam” Lewis raises armadillos for racing. Not that they move very fast. One wag called the little burrowing animals “anteaters on the half shell.”

That brings me back to my friend Bob, who grumps, “They’ve commercialized everything in Texas.

Even armadillos are tourist attractions. We knew them as road kill.” (Some, even more unkindly, call them “Texas speed bumps.”)

Stop! Don’t write to remind me that armadillos are not reptiles. They’re homely little mammals with pointy snouts and leathery skin.

(Their scaly likenesses do make cute stuffed animals, though, Bob.)

***

And getting back to the Bush family and their love of the Texas lake country: Just as Lyndon and

Big Bend National Park includes the most scenic portion of the Rio Grande River, which forms more than 1,500 kilometers of the border between Mexico and the United States.

Lady Bird Johnson could not wait to get home to the LBJ Ranch on the Pedernales River down hill-country way, it can be noted that Texas has not a single snow-covered peak, no incredible waterfalls, no rain forest or particularly memorable babbling mountain stream. There are striking red-rock canyons down along the Rio Grande River in Big Bend National Park, but that’s forever from anywhere. Carol and I found it once and photographed it, and I think we’re still paying for the gasoline it took to get there.

No doubt the Bushes and the Johnsons, and even my friend Blachly when he’s in a better mood, have been drawn not to the grandiosity of Texas, but to its “small packages,” as photographer George Oxford Miller wrote in 1991. He found “fields of flowers unblemished by footprints, air unadulterated with human additives, stars undimmed by city lights, and the uninterrupted sounds of nature.” Simple pleasures in a brash, beautiful – and big – place.

***

Did you ever read a Zane Grey western novel or see an American western movie? What impressions did it leave?

***

On my last post, Giang commented:

"Dear Ted,
"I like your blog. I also like to make blog but I don't know some technic to make a nice blog like yours. So, would you like to show me some technic.
Thank you."

Here's what I told her in reply:

"Thanks, Giang. I created my blog using Blogger.com. Creating a blog using Blogger.com doesn’t cost money. You simply need to set up a Google account and choose a name for your blog. Blogger.com offers several templates for you to customize your site. You can pick the color, theme and layout of your blog. You also can add extra features like photo slide shows – check out my wife’s photos of Texas on my current homepage. We have modified the basic Blogger template using HTML code. This takes some time to learn, but you can find out about HTML by searching the Web or checking out the Blogger.com help center for suggestions. Good luck with YOUR blog, and please tell your friends about MINE!"

Keep those questions and suggestions coming!

--Ted

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Back 40. Undeveloped land next to a cultivated spread. The “40” refers to acres, though the actual size is often smaller or larger. Why 40 acres – about 16 hectares? The use of that figure may trace to the “40 acres and a mule” promised to freed African-American slaves at the end of the U.S. Civil War of the 1860s. Very few former slaves ever got such land or mules.

Dirigibles. Slow-moving, lighter-than-air craft filled with a lifting gas and steered by rudders and small propellers. Those without skeletal frameworks are called “blimps.” Rigid, hydrogen-filled airships such as the massive Zeppelins of the mid-20th century all but disappeared following several terrible explosions. Today’s dirigibles are filled with inert helium gas.

Festooned. Lavishly decorated. The word traces to the noun festoon: a garland of leaves or flowers. So if you want to literally festoon something, string a pretty chain of petunias or pine branches along it.

Paucity. A scarcity. Usually people understand you better if you just say you don’t have very many of something.

Posse. A group of citizens called together, usually by the local sheriff, for a common cause like chasing down desperados on the run. The word derives from the common English law posse comitatus, or the right to conscript male citizens 18 years and older to assist in keeping the peace.

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Where the West Begins

A family poses before their Custer County, Nebraska, sod house in 1886. A “soddie” was one of the few options on the plains, where trees were scarce.

In “The Ballad of East and West,” Rudyard Kipling wrote what may be his most quoted line: “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” The son of a teacher during British colonial rule in India, he was writing about the gulf between world cultures. This was 1889, three years before Kipling and his wife, Caroline, would move to her homeland and settle in a house they built in Vermont.

The East is East/West is West line fit the American experience of the time. Whole families -- not just young males -- had responded with elan to Indiana editor John B. L. Soule’s admonition of 1856: “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.” New York publisher Horace Greeley more famously captured the “Go west, young man” part of the quote nine years later, but the genesis belongs to Soule.

The Wild, Wild West

The main channel of the Mississippi River stretches from Minnesota to Louisiana. The other tributaries shown, including the Ohio River to the upper right, flow into the Mighty Mississippi.

While Kipling was writing “Jungle Books” in his “Naulakha” mansion in New England, the American West was rip-roaring for real. It was the height of a cowboy and outlaw and Indian-killing period that Zane Grey would immortalize in internationally popular novels. The big-city East, or “Back East” for those who had dared to build sod houses “under starry skies above” on the western prairie, had been thoroughly explored.

At least it was easy to tell where Back East began. As Christopher Columbus’s lookout discovered, the American landmass commences at the Atlantic shore.

But where does the West begin?

Though it’s only one-third of the way across America where the Mississippi River snakes its way southward nearly all of the way from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, “Ol’ Man River” once filled the bill. And it was fitting that the “twain” of East and West actually did meet there, since humorist Mark Twain and his fictional characters Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer hung around that wide river. Nearby, outside St. Louis beginning in 1803, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark pitched the staging area of their epic exploration of the Northwest.

Arc de St. Louis

The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is not only the symbolic entryway to the West. It’s also an engineering wonder.

Right downtown in St. Louis, Missouri, today, the 17,000-ton, stainless-steel Gateway Arch, designed by modernist architect Eero Saarinen in the 1960s, stands as the symbolic “Gateway to the West.” The structure carries a clunky U.S. Park Service name -- the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial -- as a nod to the third president, Thomas Jefferson, who dispatched Lewis and Clark.

If you take the claustrophobic tram inside the catenary curve to the top of the Gateway Arch 192 meters above the river and peer westward through the window slits, you’ll see the land flatten beyond St. Louis. On a clear day you can see fifty kilometers across Missouri.

But none of this helps us find the place where East greets West today, since they really don’t meet anymore. They just sort of blend together because something we call the Midwest grew in between them over time. We pretty much agree on where that begins-- I can confirm it because I lived my first eighteen years there. The Midwest begins where the land starts to flatten, in Ohio, just past hilly, industrial, eminently eastern Pennsylvania.

America’s Breadbasket

This 1867 lithograph of Suttler’s Store in Dodge City, Kansas, by Theodore Davis, appeared in Harper’s Weekly magazine. It certainly shows the rough-hewn conditions on the western prairie.

“Middle America,” we often call the Midwest. The “heartland” of tidy farms, ordinary small towns, obligatory white picket fences, and a scattershot of vigorous metropolises. The heartland rolled right over St. Louis, through Missouri and Iowa and Minnesota and past the Missouri River on the western edge of those states. Somewhere beyond, into Kansas and Nebraska, the Dakotas, and even distant eastern Montana, Midwest meets West.

But where? Where does the West begin?

Kansas, perhaps? It’s a head-scratcher when you’re trying to put that pin on the map. Can Kansas be “western” if it’s corny in August, as reported in the song “A Wonderful Guy” from the musical, “South Pacific”? A tornado in Dorothy’s dreams

South Dakota’s Badlands, where outlaws and American Indians hid from their pursuers and where gold attracted a rush of prospectors, is on the cusp of the West.

swept her and her dog Toto from the dull surroundings of a Midwest-style Kansas farm to the fanciful land of the Wizard at Oz. Bustling Kansas City -- two of them, actually: one in Missouri and one in Kansas -- are no more “western” in look and feel than Chicago or Columbus.

Yet Dodge City, the quintessential Old West Town -- which was home, for awhile, to legendary gunfighters Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp -- is a Kansas town. Is that where the West begins?

Or is it up in the sweeping sandhills of western Nebraska, the narrow and oil-rich “panhandle” of western Oklahoma, or the rugged Badlands in the far reaches of South and North Dakota?

To Go West, Look South First

Judge Roy Bean held court in this saloon in Lantry, in far-west Texas. Justice there was swift and sure.

No, the West starts well below those places, down in Texas. Just ask the people who live there.

Cowboy culture grew up on dusty Texas cattle “spreads” like the King Ranch, which happens to be larger than an entire U.S. state (Rhode Island). Mounted, do-good Rangers took the law into their own hands in Texas. Tumbleweeds tumble in Texas. America’s most enthusiastic “hanging judge,” Roy Bean, held court in a saloon there. The “Singing Cowboy,” Gene Autry, filmed “Round-Up Time in Texas” and many other movies in that “home on the range.”

Since Texas is such an enormous place -- only Alaska is larger among the states; it’s almost 1,300 kilometers from Beaumont to El Paso in Texas -- we must hone the search for the Start of the West still further. And we found it:

Not ‘Big D,’ but in that Neighborhood

Line dancing at Billy Bob’s, often in between rides on a mechanical bull, is a lot of fun and good exercise to boot.

It’s that dot on the map to the west of sophisticated Dallas. Fort Worth is where the West begins!

Once again, we know this because Fort Worth says so. That’s its immodest slogan. (Texans boast so openly that there’s a whole genre called “Texas brag.” Not only is Texas the biggest this and the best that and the doggonedest something else, it’s even the only state that’s allowed to fly its flag at the same height at the U.S. colors. As any Texan will grandly tell you, it, too, was once a sovereign republic, if only for nine years, 11 months, and 17 days in the early 1800s.)

This downtown carving depicts the Chisholm cattle trail, which ran from the Mexican border north to Kansas. Fort Worth, with its saloons and huge stockyard, was a popular stop.

Fort Worth emerged from the prairie sod as a classic “cow town,” a cattle-drive stockyards stop on the great Chisholm Trail. There, cowpokes shook out the dust after the weeks-long drives and went a bit wild. Shootouts were so common that they called Fort Worth’s prostitution district “Hell’s Half Acre.”

Fort Worth has funneled some of its considerable wealth into nonpareil art museums and shimmering performing-arts palaces, and Cowtown U.S.A. somehow grew into the nation’s nineteenth-largest city. But uptown cowboys in white and black Stetsons still holler at rodeos and ride mechanical bulls and line dance to the “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” at clubs like Billy Bob’s.

Ruler at the Ready?

Unlike huge, red dairy barns in the Midwest, western barns were smaller, often unpainted, and strictly utilitarian. This one is in Idaho.

So on your U.S. map, draw a line straight north and south from Fort Worth and consider it the Start of the West. To the west of that Landphair Line, traffic speeds up and thins out; settlements grow so scarce that, from the air, we call it “flyover country”; cattle abound and rainfall is scarce; large lizards outnumber household pets; fences have barbs; barns, which are often flat and unpainted, shelter more hay or horses than cows; coal trains pulled by four or five locomotives stretch to the horizon; spittoons are not entirely out of fashion; beef and ground corn and hard whiskey are the food groups; politics turn rightward; and “government” is an epithet.

I’m pretty sure Rudyard Kipling never made it past this Landphair Line that starts the West. But he might have liked that land had he done so. Not only did he write swashbuckling stories like Gunga Din and Captains Courageous, but he was also a graduate of a school in Devonshire, England, that sits in a seaside village called -- I’m not making this up -- “Westward Ho!”

TODAY'S WILD WORDS

(These are a few of the words from this posting that you may not know. Each time, I'll tell you a little about them and also place them into a cumulative archive of "Ted's Wild Words" in the right-hand column of the home page. Just click on it there, and if there's another word in today's blog that you'd like me to explain, just ask!)

Boot Scootin’ Boogie. A 1992 Brooks & Dunn country hit song, still popular in cowboy bars and dancehalls. Its lyrics instruct dancers to “heel, toe, docie do,” which takes its own explaining. Docie do, or properly do sa do, is a move, especially in squaredancing, in which the dancers turn back-to-back rather than face-to-face.

Catenary. If you take a string, hold an end in each hand, and let it drop freely, the string droops to form a shape called a “catenary.” If you could solidify the string and flip it upright, it would form a catenary arch like the Gateway Arch.

Sod houses. “Soddies,” as settlers on the Great Plains called these houses, were made from clumps of coarse bluestem grass in rich soil that were held together by their intricate web of roots and sliced into long strips with a “breaking plow.” Lacking enough trees for wood to build a complete house, pioneers stacked sod in rows to make the walls, then laid more strips atop precious boards that formed joists and the outlines of the attic. Finally, cloth was hung below the ceiling. It caught most, but not all, of the dirt that sifted down onto the family below.

Stetson. The brand name that has become almost a generic term for a western hat, just as the names “Coke,” “Xerox,” and “Scotch Tape” have come to stand for genres of products. Felt Stetson hats have broad brims that keep some of the sun and rain off a cowboy’s face and neck. Those with an especially high crown are sometimes called “ten-gallon [38-liter] hats” because they look like they can hold a whole lot of water. In fact, only three or so liters will fit in one.

Tumbleweed. A short Russian thistle shrub, common in many parts of the world, that dries and breaks away from its roots in autumn, then rolls like a ball in the wind across the plain. Tumbleweeds stick in barbed-wire fences and are sure to blow in front of your car when the dust kicks up, scaring you half to death. In one of their first hits, the Sons of the Pioneers western group sang that they belonged on the range, “drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds.”

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