The Lone Star State – winter 2008

The Lone Star State
Entering Texas was big. Having previously lived with Texans and having also lived in Europe, I had some small notion of what “Texan” means to the Texans themselves and also to foreigners, or other “non-Texans.”

Large not only in territory, Texas is also large in personality and reputation. It is larger than the country of France (which is, itself, one of the largest countries in Europe), and in France, “Texas” often means “America.” The people of France, and of many other countries, often refer to the gun-slinging Texas cowboy as the “American cowboy,” or the symbol of all America. Texas conjures up images of the great frontier, of the Wild West, and of great, open spaces. It conjures up images of a certain attitude, of a fierce independence, and also of the American way of life. Texans themselves are proud to be Texan, and the Lone Star flag is often seen flying side-by-side with the American flag.

Stephane had been looking forward to discovering Texas for a long time. His only image of this vast “land of cowboys” had been from Western movies and the French media. The cowboy image didn’t disappoint. We were to see cowboys in their hats and boots trot down the streets of small towns on their horses and “park” them at the local grocery store or restaurant or saloon, as if parking their car (Where else could you see this?). Neighbors visited each other on horseback. Cowboy hats and boots and Saturday country dances were as popular as ever.

And then, of course, Texas is associated with ranches. While biking, we avoided the larger, busy roads by sticking instead to the small, back-country Farm Roads. And on such roads, we passed ranch upon ranch upon ranch…with horses and cattle, and always with the requisite dog who felt obligated to bark and chase after us. Luckily, most of them were stopped by fences, for most every property in Texas was bound in by a fence, clearly demarcating property lines.

Central and eastern Texas is the land of longhorns, Angus beef, cattle auctions, and Antiques with a capital “A.” There are a lot of plantation-style houses in the countryside, as well as poor houses with drafty roofs and windows taped shut against the cold. Small convenience stores with rusting tin roofs and peeling paint sold Fishing Worms and Deer Corn next to the bread and milk. Some customers do their shopping in pajamas and bare feet. Every town had many, many small churches…it sometimes seemed as if there were more churches than houses in Texas! And on the roads themselves, in addition to the trash and dead armadillos and raccoons, were a lot of logging trucks.

When one thinks of the Lone Star State, one thinks, too, of the gun-totin’ cowboy. And, according to our experience, almost everyone we met owned at least one gun! Certainly, gun and ammo shops were not a rare occurrence.

There is, too, the idea of “big oil” that comes to mind when one thinks of Texas. And that, too, didn’t disappoint. Soon after crossing the border into western Texas, which is largely characterized by wide, open spaces and flat and dry desert terrain, we smelt that “oil smell.” It was terrible. One of the first things that Stephane said just after crossing the border was, “Yuk! Texas smells bad!”

The hill country and strong headwinds of south-central Texas proved to be difficult on my weary legs, which were hurting all the way until we reached the swampy flatlands just west of the Louisiana border. It was difficult to stay motivated with everything hurting (I later found out, when Stephane tuned up my bike, that my back hub was too tight and so I had to make twice the effort to go half the distance!).

We learned a lot by talking to the local folk. For example, a lot of people are still pretty self-sufficient, growing their own vegetable gardens, slaughtering their own cattle, raising dairy cows and chickens, and hunting their own deer and small game. Hunting wild hog was good sport down here, and I got a belly-wrenching laugh more than once when I told the locals I’d never eaten wild hog before, much less seen one! It was as if I’d said I’d never seen a car before! They all looked at me incredulously, “You’re from WHERE?”

It worked like this: the locals go out and hunt the hogs with bull dogs, and then “hog-tie” them while the dog holds the beast down, and afterwards cage and feed it corn for two weeks (“to clean the wild out of ‘em!”) before slaughtering it. Then, the hog meat is combined with deer meat in a “smoker” – a sort of small furnace next to the house. The meat is fed into a grinder, which pushes it into a sausage skin (the skin is bought), then hung over a wood fire in the furnace and smoked for 7 to 8 hours. A majority of houses in these parts have smokers. Mobile BBQ trucks and smokers offer BBQ, brisket pork, and “Redneck Baked Beans” for sale in the small towns.

Mexican restaurants are pretty common, as well (one-third of the Texas population is Mexican), as are fried chicken restaurants, where customers discuss different recipes for fried chicken, where a small coffee costs only $0.30!, and where non-smoking restrictions are in effect only a couple of hours a week!

We usually make our own sandwiches for lunch, but just before the border, we ate at a truck stop. It was in a small, one-horse town, and the waitresses were so excited to have out-of-towners, especially from such a distance, that they gathered all around to talk to us and then to call the reporter from the local paper, who came out and interviewed us for her front-page story that week. Our very large waitress, Monique, (who told us to remember her as “fat and sassy, spelled Pretty Hefty and Thick!”), was surprised that we had never eaten fried catfish, fried okra, or fried hushpuppies before (they sure do love their fried food down here!), and was so happy that we would have our first taste at their restaurant that she brought everything out “on the house.” “How ya doin’, baby?” she kept asking. “Is there anything else I can get for ya, baby? I’ll take care of ya, baby!”

The people of Texas were good to us. We were invited into people’s homes for a hot shower and a warm bed pretty often. It was January and it was rainy, and I think some people just plain felt sorry for us that we were camping out in sub-freezing temperatures at night, especially when the rain fell in buckets. And it was cold and sometimes icy, but it was nowhere near as cold as our first winter in central Europe. So we kept the comparison in mind and thought we were doing pretty well. The rain wasn’t fun, though. On the nights that we did camp, the sound of the pelting rain on top of the tent was practically deafening.

During one week of almost solid rain, we stayed in the town of Round Top for several days. We had stopped in the town to look for a grocery store, but the town was tiny, with a population of only 77 – as a sign at the entrance of the town proclaimed. That didn’t even make sense, as this small town had a chamber of commerce, shops, restaurant, pretty B&Bs, and even an art gallery and the country’s number 3 rated concert hall. How could a town of 77 support such businesses? The answer was that Round Top was not only located right smack in the middle of a huge antiques fair, but was also approximately equidistant between Austin and Houston and was considered a country getaway for the wealthy from both cities, who had weekend homes in the town.

To continue, we were looking for groceries. We were later to find that in this part of the state, small town groceries were always located inside the gas station. There were no grocery stores, per se. But we didn’t know this yet. We approached two people to ask about the store, and were told that they were the owners of the town’s only restaurant, the Round Top Café. Tara and her husband Rick told us to go inside the restaurant and she’d tell her dad, who managed it, to serve us lunch.

Bud “the pieman” Royer was sitting at the front table by the cashier when we walked in, orchestrating and managing the steady flow of patrons who waited for one of the restaurant’s tables. Bud himself was a real character, real strong on personality. In his fifties and sporting a long salt-and-pepper beard and ponytail, his large frame was covered in copious amounts of turquoise jewelry and an artsy apron sewn piece-meal by a friend. He wore a cool turquoise string of beads from which he hung his glasses and a large turquoise necklace. But the show stopper was the oversized rings he wore on each finger.

Bud invited us to join him, which we did. He handed us the menu and told us to choose whatever we wanted. When Stephane chose a hamburger, Bud retorted, “You can get a hamburger anywhere!” and promptly proceeded to order mouth-watering delights for us: jalapeno and grilled shrimp BLT, a perfect grilled red snapper topped with shrimp sautéed in a white wine and olive oil sauce, and a succulent grilled pork tenderloin topped with a peach and pepper glaze, all accompanied by black beans, corn, and homemade mashed potatoes. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten so well (The last meal we’d had, we’d been hiding from the rain inside our tent, eating pasta in our sleeping bags, trying to stay warm!). Bud told us to stay at the restaurant as long as we liked, as they were predicting more rain for that week. And he fixed up grilled quail and marinated vegetables, along with some of his famous chocolate chip pie for dinner for us that night…as if we could possibly eat any more!

Eating at the Round Top Café was an experience. For it wasn’t just the menu that was creative. The restaurant itself was like a living work of art in progress. The walls were decorated with framed newspaper and magazine articles (we weren’t the only ones impressed by the food!), a letter of recognition from the State of Texas Senate, family photos, paintings, and all sorts of memorabilia. A statue of Elvis sat prominently facing the doorway and a beat-up statue of Superman in a Zorro mask and yellow ‘fro sat in the corner. Texas football helmets sat next to Santa and a plastic crocodile with the leg of a man hanging from its jaws. Willie Nelson posters and memorabilia were plastered to one door and strings of Christmas lights hung from the ceiling. The head of a longhorn (“hunted bull!”) hung across from the counter, adorned with star-shaped sunglasses, a straw hat, and baseball caps and a rubber chicken hanging from its horns. And there were the row of T-shirts featuring logos, such as “I did not have pie with that woman” and “Depends what your definition of pie is.”

We stayed at the restaurant for a couple of days and then rode to Tara and Rick’s house in Brenham (the next town over) and stayed with them for two days. We were waiting out the worst of the rain, but it was good timing, too, for we had fun helping to redecorate the Café’s ceiling with the three of them.

Visiting the Lone Star State was a real experience for us. Perhaps what will stick with us the most are memories of cowboys riding horses through town, the ubiquitous ranches, the BBQ meat and smokers and stories of “hog-tying,” and the genuine folk and colorful characters that we met along the way.