"Turn Around, Don't Drown"

(Bad Hat sent our Chief Correspondant to Texas, to report on "what's good about Texas." Here's his report from Austin.)

On assignment, my ass. I can report the road is still long, mostly straight, the Southwest is beautiful and hot, road signs in Austin, Texas read "high water on road possible this week; turn around, don't drown".

Oddly, most everyone in Texas seems quite nice. Why they vote for dickheads is beyond me, but Texans seem intensely patriotic. I have NEVER seen so many "historical markers" in my life, all of them chipped in stone like chunky tombstones, celebrating something or other from Texas history, or the expurgated version of it. Lots of Texas, to my surprise, is thickly wooded with stands of live oak. Like California. Like Oregon used to be. Back when the Indians "farmed" enormous tracts of land by burning off everything except the oaks, so they could harvest the acorns and make some kind of foodstuff from it, after a lot of work. It was an economy that apparently lasted for six thousand years or so and then just collapsed in a few decades when Europeans arrived and changed everything. All that is left are enormous tracts of oak, many of them spaced in a way that suggests they were planted. I'm not sure anyone wants or cares about the acorns any more. Wild boar, introduced from Europe by wealthy sportsmen, seem to like them, and it gives their meat a wonderful flavor, but somehow it isn't the same as the thriving and complex Indian cultures. Which their descendants, adaptable sorts, celebrate by running extremely successful casinos, which if you think about it is roughly equivalent to slash and burn agriculture.

Arthur