Let’s get this disclaimer thing out of the way right here: this post and the entire series of Texas posts of this trip did not get published until February 2023 because they were nearly lost in time. No notes exist; well, at least they’ve not been found if they do exist. The photos are of middling quality because they were shot on my phone. So, that’s that.
We are on North Shoreline Boulevard in Corpus Christi for sunrise. Nothing else is known about the start of this day.
I can only wish that somehow I’d already learned that the impressions made on these days would mean a great deal to me as I’ve grown older. There’s a tragedy about the lack of foresight under which we humans operate, and we fail to apprise one another of the better lessons from which we could benefit. Photography and writing are far too important to our older selves to lay fallow and neglected until it’s too late to drag them forward.
It’s been countless times I’ve watched my wife standing at the edge of the ocean, just looking out into it all. I don’t know where she is during those moments of being lost in the sea; maybe I hope she’s nowhere and simply drifting in the contemplative space of something like a meditation. What I do know is that I love bringing her to these locations for us to find whatever we end up taking with us.
We’re out in the middle of nothing, a place that looks a lot like we’re not anywhere. The closest big city is Houston, about 100 miles away, while in the opposite direction to the west is San Antonio, about the same distance; 150 miles behind us in the South is Corpus Christi, and it’s about the same distance as Waco. Highway 77 is a two-lane affair. Schulenberg, where we are stopping for lunch at the Oakridge Smokehouse Restaurant, is a tiny dot on the map with a population of only about 2,600, and yet the parking lot to this joint is packed. How is it possible that this out-of-the-way roadside BBQ is better than anything I’ve ever had in Phoenix with a population of over 3 million?
It’s flat out this way. With Dallas, Texas, more than 200 miles away, I wonder how tall a building would have to be there for me to see it from here. Catch some air here; this next part is not here due to time travel; it’s not that flat in Texas. I told you that I’m writing this in 2023, and this will be my first reference to ChatGPT and Microsoft’s implementation of it with Bing, chat specifically. I asked it how tall a building would have to be for me to see it from 200 miles away; ChatGPT (a.k.a. Sydney) supplied me with this formula: x = √ (a² – 2ad + d² + r²) – r, and then it did the math for me telling the building would have to be at least 1.26 miles tall or more than 6,650 feet. Now I know.
This is Rosebud, and I’m pretty certain that it will never be the metaphor for someone’s distant, lost youth as it was portrayed with a red sleigh in the famous movie that shares its title with the name of this Texas town.
Believe it or not, we’ve been out on the road for nearly 8 hours by this time. No, we are not pulling over to relax in the World’s Largest Cedar Rocker in Lipan, Texas; nope, we are here for what’s just below.
If you want to think there’s anything else to eat in Texas, you’d be wrong, and once again, we are at some out-in-the-middle-of-nowhere joint, this time called Natty Flat Smokehouse.
Maybe these dark skies should have been offering us clues, but we just kept driving north.
Our stop here at the Baker Hotel in Mineral Wells, Texas, will be the last image of the day. Shortly after this, we ran into the rain, and not just any rain. This was the kind of heavy downpour that made us pull over more than once when driving was becoming too sketchy. As soon as the rain would relent even a little, we’d pull back onto the road and drive on; we were hoping to make it to Oklahoma City. We never did and instead ended up in Lawton, Oklahoma. Exhausted from the stress of driving in the torrential rains, we grabbed a room at Motel 6 and learned how lucky we were as it sounded like we had been the last ones to cross the Texas and Oklahoma state line, which crosses the Red River, which was now flooding over the road we had just come up. As far as going to Oklahoma City, that wasn’t going to happen, with the roads to the north unpassable due to the accumulation of high water. This was a change in plans we’d never anticipated.