cdavidlake

Yeah, passing through on my way to Texas from NY I found myself enchanted with the Great Plains and decided one evening to take a walk near the motel I was staying in. Bad idea. Almost immediately I was set upon by swarms of what seemed at the time like living grass but were, in fact, grasshoppers. That’s my only memory of Muskogee. Oh, didn’t Merle Haggard come from there?

I think it may have been Gertrude Stein who said (possibly about Dallas) that “there’s no there there.” My sentiments exactly. I’ve been to Dallas many times and infinitely prefer the unpretentious overgrown cowtown that is neighboring Fort Worth. In Dallas one never gets a sense of “place”. Since the landscape has no relief to it whatsoever, a person in the city proper often feels like they’re entirely surrounded by concrete and steel dotted here and there with fake parks and landscaping. And they are. Where’s the nature? Dallas is a city in denial of its physical location – an Eastern city, really, which goes back to its roots in cotton. A vistor would never realize that they’re standing on top of what once constituted a part of the great Tallgrass Prairie – that sea of grass that extended all the way to present-day Ohio. The cowboys here are decidedly of the urban type, and yet cowboy culture is what the city – and Texas as a whole – markets to the world. The real “wild west” of popular imagination is roughly one state to the west, in my view. But Dallas and the surrounding Metroplex IS worth a visit if only for the fact that, yes, it is a stunning example of commercialism and sprawl run amok. Come in the spring and there’s also the off-chance that you might see a tornado.

What else could you want, amigos? :)