Home State

There's a comment from SwirlyGirl on my site. It's not about death or cycling or marital combat, but about Texas. I forgot I have a whole section of this blog dedicated to my Texas time, so I went back, reviewed what I wrote, and discovered I didn't have one good thing to say about Texas.

SwirlyGirl sees more good things in Texas than I do, and that makes sense. After all, she lives there and I don't. This got me to thinking of people's thoughts about their home state that I have heard over the years. I can't help but contrast Texas' hot and flat landscape to the hills, mountains, and trees of northwest Oregon. Even our high desert, to the east, doesn't seem to have been ravaged by the sun as Texas appeared to be. Texas may boast of Lance Armstrong, but we are the cycling nation's strong arm. We are the best place to ride, and we are striving to make it safer. Texas seemed, to me, to be the shining buckle in the bible belt; buffeted and polished by nature's wrath -tornadoes and hurricanes. I can see Texans looking at us from ravaged homes and overturned trailers to say, "but it rains so much up there." And any good Christian from Texas, I've met plenty, will tell you that Oregon is a bunch of heathens. We're running around here like savages, hugging trees and worshipping every pagan god known to man.

My view of Texas, which comes from examining a very narrow slice of a pie of varying flavors, reminds me of what a friend said of Vietnam. He was stationed in the Delta, an area that was flat like Texas, allowing him to see everything. He told me the guys in the Delta would say, "it's all in the open." They didn't want to be in the jungle saying, "there's too many places for someone (the enemy) to hide." The guys in the jungle had the opposite opinion, "I can hide. How do those guys in the Delta survive, out in the open like that?"

Perspective is a funny thing.