Whenever I travel to another part of the country I can’t help noticing how much our society is homogenized. If the last thing you remember seeing at home is a McDonald’s, the first thing you spot might be a McDonald’s in another city 1,500 miles away. Penney’s, Kohl’s, K-Mart, Home Depot, what have you, they’ve all spread their tendrils into fertile shopping ground. Yes, there are unfamiliar stores unique to each town, but “big box” chainstores make their presence known everywhere. I’ve often wondered what it would’ve been like to travel 100 years ago when the businesses were all independently owned.
The scale of the King Ranch operation in Texas places an overload on the imagination. They tell us it totals about 825,000 acres. Wanting to make some sense of that figure, I thought the acreage in a township might help me understand its size. Given that a 36 section township equals 23,040 acres, some simple division told me the ranch’s area would cover almost 36 townships. Ransom County has 24 townships which means the King Ranch would cover it with another half county left over.
As we drove around the ranch, I remembered the time a few years ago when we crossed a bridge twenty-four miles long over Lake Pontchartrain headed towards New Orleans. There in the middle of it, one could look around and not see any land on the horizon, just water. I thought of it because in the middle of one of the ranch’s huge black fields, I couldn’t see anything else on the horizon except dirt. “Don’t you have problems with wind erosion?” I asked one of farm managers. “Yes, but if it blows, we just go out there with a tiller and dig up a little moisture. That usually stops it.”
We North Dakotans took special notice of all the ship traffic in Corpus Christi Bay, the fifth largest port in the United States. A big attraction for many of us was the decommissioned World War II aircraft carrier named the USS Lexington that rests permanently there as a museum. I thought its flight deck was large, but as new ones go, it probably measures considerably less. Inside the ship, so-called stairs didn’t seem much different than ladders. It got the nickname of "The Blue Ghost" because Tokyo Rose, the Japanese propagandist kept broadcasting claims that the Lexington had been destroyed. But it always returned to the battle zones so the Japanese began calling it a ghost ship.
The Texas State Aquarium stands within easy walking distance of the Lexington and it was at the manta ray exhibit that I experienced one of them sucking my fingers. After the attendant informed us with facts about the creature, she brought out a bucket of minnows and invited us to feed the manta rays. After thinking about that for a bit, I manned up enough to accept the task. I reached in and held up the wriggling fish whereupon a bird swooped in, snatched it, and perched to eat it a few feet away. I successfully guarded the second minnow and lowered it into the pool whereupon a gentle, velvety mouth sucked the minnow away from my fingers. I thought of teaching little calves to drink out of a bucket.
In the neighborhood where the tall silvery SpaceX rocket pointed to the sky, we encountered Border Patrol agents who checked us out. It was an area where illegal aliens crossed the Rio Grande quite easily so a brawny contingent of flak-jacketed, pistol-wearing agents made us stop. While crossing the border coming from Mexico, U. S. agents really gave us an inspection and even x-rayed the bus. It was reported some bus drivers had been bought off by the drug cartels and were willing to transport drugs for them. After about an hour delay, we finally drove on.
Brownsville hosts a branch of the University of Texas. While driving through its campus, our bus guide related a recent time when the school went into lock-down. Bullets were flying and landing on the campus from a gunfight just across the border.
We could end here with more anecdotes about such things as how the Fort Worth Stockyards no longer serves as a cattle market, but instead has become a market for tourists. Remember the song with the line, “Let’s go to Luckenbach, Texas with Waylon and Willie and the boys.” Luckenbach has a population of three people. We couldn’t enter LBJ’s ranch in Texas hill country because of the government shutdown. Waco makes a big deal of Chip and Joanna’s contributions from their popular tv show Fixer-Upper. We learned that northerners spending the winter in Texas are not snowbirds but winter Texans. Tulsa, OK admits to loving the money brought by the oil industry and loves to show the magnificent buildings that it has built.
I’ve filled my space and could go on with many stories, but Nancy McClure wants to speak again about her life in the sandhills near Sheldon, and then we’re off to new topics.
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