The Perfect Year
A City, a Coast, Mythology, Reality, and the Vast Differences Between Them
Part 1: The Lead-Up
The call came out of the blue in the middle of the week from a longtime friend and fellow military officer. I was standing at my desk in my apartment in a building in downtown Dallas. I must’ve just gotten back from another day of drudgery in my new job.
It was May, 2021. I had been living in Dallas since the previous August, after starting a new job in the Cabell Federal Building in downtown Dallas. When I got hired, we didn’t have much time to find a place to live in Dallas. We had maybe a week to decide. It was a good-paying job in the federal government with good benefits. But as I would come to learn, that was all that was good about it.
This brief period of time became what we now call our “Texas Experiment.” It all seems like it flashed by, like a brief whirlwind dream. Or an illusion. Kind of like a David Lynch movie that when it’s over, you ask, “What just happened?” It lasted all of ten months. And it wasn’t just because I got recalled to active duty again.
So many strange things happened in those ten months that we were convinced it was a sign. Or a signal. A red light flashing.
We did not belong. Everything seemed to be off. Nothing worked. We never got comfortable with the crowds, the traffic, the noise, or the pace. Nothing was ever quite right.
I grew up in south Texas. I spent the first twenty years of my life in the Houston area. I left in 1988 to transfer colleges to another state. Until the summer of 2020, I had never gone back to Texas for more than two weeks at a single time. By the time we initiated the Texas Experiment, I had been away from the state for 32 years.
I still had some ties there. My parents lived there until 2005 and my brother and his family have lived there the entire time. We visited many times during my military career, usually over the holidays or when moving across the country during the summer.
But when my parents moved in 2005, the visits dropped off to almost nothing. The only incursions into Texas between 2005 and 2020 occurred when we went to Del Rio to meet my mother-in-law and her husband at the Amistad Reservoir over the holidays in 2006 and the numerous cross country trips we made as we drove east and west to different duty stations, along Interstate 40 across the panhandle, and along Interstate 10 east through El Paso, to Interstate 20, and through Odessa, Midland, Abilene, and finally through Forth Worth and Dallas, Longview and then — finally — into Louisiana. Pass through trips, as it were.
The entire time, Texas was my home state, my birth state, my home of record; the state we fully intended to return and retire to when I was done with my military career. I mean seriously, what was not to like? No income tax. Still-affordable housing. And the Texas people, laid back, friendly, and welcoming. In most places anyway. Diversity of people, and religions, and races, and ethnicity, and food, and culture, and literature, and languages, and … you get the point.
One thing about Texas that only a native Texan who has traveled around the country knows is that there are very few states where the difference between people and things in the cities of Texas and everywhere else is so stark and contrasting. If you go to Houston, Dallas, El Paso, San Antonio, Fort Worth, or especially Austin, you will have a completely different experience than you will have if you go anywhere else in Texas. It’s that sharp and absolute.
People think if they go to one of these cities, they have experienced Texas. And they are wrong. These cities are much like the ancient nation states — self-contained, urban, sort of echo chambers — and one can no more extrapolate his or her experiences in one of these cities to the rest of Texas as he or she can Paris to the rest of France, Dublin to the rest of Ireland, or Baghdad to the rest of Iraq. (I’ve been to all three of these cities by the way, and the rest of the countries in which they sit, for leisure and duty.)
For the aforementioned reasons, my favorite part of Texas is the Texas outside these cities.
When I was a kid, my family would make the trek up highway 59 from Houston to visit our family in southern Arkansas, and once north of Houston, we would pass through towns like Livingston, Lufkin, Nacogdoches, and Carthage, on our way through Louisiana.
When I was in college in Fayetteville, I ran up and down interstate 45 through Huntsville, Corsicana, Dallas, Sherman, and Denison, on my way up through Oklahoma.
And then many years later, after I had entered the Marine Corps, I made the never-ending trek to San Diego out west along interstate 10, through Sealy, San Antonio, Boerne, Kerrville, Junction, Sonora, Fort Stockton, Van Horn, Sierra Blanca, and finally, mercifully, into El Paso, before turning north and leaving Texas toward Las Cruces, New Mexico.
And of course, there is the magnificent desolation of the panhandle, crossing east or west along interstate 40, the only town of significant size being Amarillo, which from the approach gradually rises in the distance like some dystopian outpost out of The Road Warrior.
We visited each one of these towns at one time or another during our various travels back and forth across the state. It made us think we would retire back to Texas, somewhere. But the truth was, we were never able to spend more than a few days anywhere, so we never really got any idea of what it might be like to live there. Until the summer of 2020.
We have always leveraged every free minute to explore places. We did it when we moved to San Diego for my first tour there as a Marine back in 1999. We fell quickly in love with the city and its people. And when we returned to San Diego in 2005 for my third tour, we moved back into the same military neighborhood we had lived in before and picked up like we had never left. Our children spent their early, formative years there, soaking in the southern California sun, learning to surf, fish, and play baseball. We resided in San Diego for seven of the best years we have ever experienced.
And we did not just sit in San Diego. We traveled as far and wide as Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, Mammoth Lakes, Big Bear, Joshua Tree, Monterey, San Luis Obispo, and everywhere in between. My work took me north to Seattle, Portland, Corvallis, and Coos Bay.
By the time we moved again in 2008, we had dialed in most of the west coast from San Diego to Seattle. And then we got orders to a part of the country that we had never seen: the Atlantic coast of North Carolina. It was time to cross the country, again. And I did it twice; once with our oldest son, and then by myself a few weeks later.
We traveled through Yuma, Phoenix, Flagstaff, Winslow, Albuquerque, Amarillo, Oklahoma City, Little Rock, Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, Asheville, Greensboro, Raleigh, New Bern, and finally arrived at our new home, Morehead City, North Carolina.
Three weeks later, after flying back out to San Diego to check out of my former unit, I drove a different route. I went through the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas, hiked Angels Landing in Zion National Park, and then continued along interstate 70 east through Grand Junction, Denver, Hays, Kansas, Wichita, Tulsa, Fayetteville, and then back down to interstate 40 and the same route I finished on before.
We liked Morehead City too, spent time in New Bern, and Beaufort, and traveled up the Outer Banks to Williamsburg, and as far south as Fernandina Beach, Florida. By the end of that tour, we had dialed in the east coast from DC down to Jacksonville, and were getting a solid idea of where we might want to go when I retired from the Marine Corps, which was still in the distant future. We still has not had the chance to see much of Texas, but it was on our list of places to spend some time — enough so that we would have an idea if our plan to possibly return there was sound.
This was still back in 2011. Unforeseen events transpired that knocked plans off kilter; Between 2011 and 2020, we lived mainly back in Arkansas and I spent two separate mobilizations in the DC area and eastern North Carolina. The latter period was another year in Morehead City, where I again had the chance to get to know the area more deeply, and rekindled my affection for towns like Beaufort, New Bern, and Atlantic Beach. For the first time, we started to think we wanted to retire on the Carolina coast.
My one-year mobilization ended in August, 2019, and I returned to my then current job in DC. And as so often happens when I go back to DC after being in a place I love, the bloom came off the proverbial rose very quickly — off of the area, the job, and the entire situation.
And then, the pandemic hit.
By the late spring of 2020, for obvious reasons to anyone that remembers the way some state and local governments reacted, continuing to reside in the DC area was absolutely untenable. I got permission to telework from Arkansas, and began planning my DC job exit strategy.
And then, I was offered the aforementioned job in Dallas. I had applied for two openings for the exact same position in Texas, one in Fort Worth and the other in Dallas. Fort Worth was my first choice. The job I was offered was the one in Dallas.
Here, at last, at a time when we least expected it, was the opportunity to go to Texas and explore things, and see if we liked it; to see if after having been gone for 32 years back to the summer of 1988, it was still the place I thought it was, and to see if all those ideas we had talked about over the years about retiring in Texas were possible. So I accepted the job; if we didn’t take this opportunity, we might never know. And so, in August of 2020, we moved again. This time, to Texas.
As with every place we had ever lived before, we set out aggressively to get around and explore things, to find what we both call, our “happy places.”
We are both avid road cyclists. The first weekend we were in town, we decided to take the train out to White Rock Lake to ride around the lake and then back along the Santa Fe Trail through Deep Ellum on our way back to our downtown apartment. Within a few minutes of boarding the train, some guy approached my wife and began complimenting her road bike. He started touching the bike and acting weird. I thought maybe he was mentally disabled so we tried to be nice by asking him to stop grabbing the bike. He kept saying, “I want this bike.” Finally, I had to physically approach him and tell him to stop. Forcefully. Here I was, on my first Saturday in town, just starting a federal job, and I am wondering if I am going to get into a fight with some random dude on the train who is trying to steal my wife’s road bike.
The guy backed off and sat down. Then out of nowhere from behind me, some crazy woman with a fold out knife starts waiving it around at the guy, yelling, “See! I told you! You better leave people alone!”
Holy shit. What had we gotten ourselves into? We both took our bikes and quickly walked them to the other end of the car and got off immediately at the next stop.
“What the f — — was THAT?” my wife asked in disbelief.
“I have no idea. But I guess that’ll be the first and last time we take the train anywhere.”
Indeed, every other bike ride we took over the ensuing ten months would start right outside our apartment building door downtown and wind over to the trailhead at the Katy Trail, near the basketball arena. But we quickly found that the Katy Trail was way too crowded and not really meant for anyone on a bike; although a walking trail was paved to the right of what was supposed to be the bike trail, inattentive walkers on cell phones and pets would just meander all over the place, sometimes in the way of bikers, causing general mayhem.
Eventually, we learned to navigate around the Katy Trail until we were able to connect into the Ridgewood Trail out to the lake, and then connect on to the SoPac Trail and then finally into the White Rock Lake Trail that went around the lake. Our go to place during these long bike rides was the District 9 Draught Haus on the northeast side of White Rock Lake. But we soon learned that — for us — it was the lone outpost we enjoyed along the entire 22 mile loop.
We explored Oak Cliff, Uptown, Highland Park, Old East Dallas, University Park, the Design District, West Dallas, Old Lake Highlands, White Rock, and many other neighborhoods. We carried the bikes west and ventured through Grand Prairie and Arlington, and over to the southwest side of Fort Worth. We found the trailhead for the Trinity Trail and rode it east from there along the winding Trinity River through downtown to the east side of town and back, a total of 28 miles.
And we ventured out of the city as well; north to the college town of Denton, west to Weatherford, and as far east as Texarkana.
And of course, we went south. It was our first opportunity to check out some of the mythological parts of Texas with our own eyes.
Our first weekend trip took us south to the fabled Hill Country. We hit Waco first, a town I had only seen while playing football and baseball games at Baylor University. We continued down along interstate 35 and turned west on interstate 14 until we connected into U.S. Highway 190 to Lampasas. There we took U.S. 281 south to Marble Falls. We had dinner at Hell or High Water Brewing in Liberty Hill.
The trip was fine. It was good weather in the early fall. We enjoyed ourselves. But we were not so overwhelmed we wanted to go back anytime soon.
Three months into the new experiment, I wrote my first set of observations about the area. We were having a hard time finding our stride, and we wondered when and if we would eventually get comfortable. We felt out of place.
And although I had always heard so much about the Hill Country while growing up in Houston, the one area in Texas I really considered a possible retirement area was deep south Texas. Still, that trip would have to wait until we made it through what we figured would be a mild winter.
But we were wrong.
I can still remember Sunday, February 14, 2021. I remember it because at the time, in my new job and like so many organizations were still doing, people were teleworking. I was scheduled to be at work the week of February 15. So I drove back into Dallas late on Sunday the 14th. And overnight, I witnessed a winter hell break loose.
The morning of the 15th dawned to arctic temperatures and freezing rain. A low of 4 degrees broke the old record of 15 set in 1909. A high of only 14 degrees broke the old low max high temperature for that date set in 1909. I was told the entire federal building was shut down and to stay home. From my perch in our apartment in downtown, I watched the city, covered in ice, frozen and still. Cars were abandoned. A few people skittered around on the empty streets and sidewalks below. Power went out all over the area and all over the state. I was lucky it hadn’t gone out in our building.
I didn’t leave the building Monday. There wasn’t any reason to, any nothing was open anyway. Most, if not all, grocery stores were closed. Nobody could get to work to open them. Some of them were without power.
I was lucky that we had restocked the apartment during our last two weeks I had been there working, and so I had enough stores. But I was essentially trapped in the apartment. I had parked my truck on the third floor of the building’s parking garage, and it would have been foolhardy to try to drive anywhere with all that ice and snow on the roads. And even if I was able to do so, I doubted my truck would be able to make it back up the steep grade of the ramp from street level without slipping back down on the icy surface. I decided to stay put and ride it out.
Tuesday and Wednesday were no better, as ice and snow continued to fall. Temperatures didn’t budge upward. Thursday and Friday slowly saw things level out. The ice and snow stopped. The temperatures finally began to rise, but everything was still frozen. My office was closed the entire week and most of the next. I can recall driving out of Dallas after work on Friday, February 26, wondering again what I had gotten myself into.
The area seemed to be a place of extremes. When we had moved to the area the prior August, it had been well over 100 degrees each day. This wasn’t that shocking; I had grown up in Houston, and 100-plus temperatures were common during the brutal Texas summers. But 4 degree ice storms followed by weeks of sub-freezing temperatures during the winter were not.
The historic Texas winter storm of 2021 became the first billion dollar weather event of the year. And it made me realize I hadn’t escaped the grip of cold, icy winters. Not even in Texas. I added the experience to my growing list of strange things that had occurred in the first seven months we had lived there.
As winter finally began to loosen its vice grip on north Texas, we planned the aforementioned trip down south, waiting for the temperatures to warm up. Our targets were Rockport, Corpus Christi, and Port Aransas, the last town the subject of some amount of lore in publications like Texas Monthly, a magazine I subscribed to until a few years ago, when it took a turn for the worse. These publications are very good at sustaining the reality and mythology of Texas, just as something like Southern Living sustains the reality and mythology of the South. The truth is, the only way to separate reality from myth is to go to a place yourself and explore it.
And so, in March, we did.
We were headed to Port Aransas for the first time, via Corpus Christi. We drove south to Waco, then picked up U.S. highway 77. We went through towns like Rosebud, Cameron, Lexington, Giddings, La Grange, Schulenberg, and finally, Victoria.
South of Victoria, we jogged east to state highway 35 and followed it south into Rockport.
Past Rockport, we connected onto U.S. Highway 181 and took the Harbor Bridge across Corpus Christi Bay and turned straight down Shoreline Boulevard until we found Rebel Toad Brewing, and then a few blocks down, Neuces Brewing.
Once done, we continued down Shoreline Drive, which turned into Ocean Drive, as we followed Corpus Christi Bay south. We eventually headed back out to highway 358, because I needed to stop at the venerable Wind and Wave Sports to ask the locals where the best surf breaks were in the local area.
After perusing their outstanding inventory, the following conversation took place between the kid running the register and me.
“Where is it good around here?
Go down to the Packery Channel Jetties. It’s supposed to be offshore tomorrow morning and it’ll pick up. They can get 5 to 6 feet out there if you hit it right.
Yeah, I’m just on a longboard.
That’s perfect man. So your best chance down there is just to get out on the outside, be patient, catch a good one, and ride it all the way in.
Where do I line up?
Go out off the north jetty. It sorta acts like a point break on that side. That’s a pretty consistent little right hander. But I’d stay out of the channel itself because the riptide in there can get pretty wild.
OK man thanks, I appreciate it.”
My wife, who overheard this exchange, asked me, “What in the world were you guys talking about?”
We continued on out across the JFK Causeway to the island, then along 361 north to our lodging for the next few nights in Port Aransas. Why “Port A,” as they call it? Because I had heard and read that there was great stuff in “Port A,” including another good surf break, and I wanted to see for myself.
Port A was a little crowded. But the first of what would turn out to be only two nights was fine. We had dinner at a cool little place called Lelo’s Island Bar. If you ever venture down to Port A, you should check it out.
The next morning, very early, I got up, kissed my wife good morning and told her I would see her shortly, as I headed out to the Caldwell Pier, where I’d heard the break was pretty good.
Storms had rolled into the area overnight. It was dark, overcast, and spitting rain. When I got there with my longboard, it looked like this.
I had the place to myself of course. I paddled out and caught a few very small waves. The water was choppy, churning, and sandy. It was fine.
That afternoon, I returned to the surf shop and met the same kid from the day before.
“I was at the Caldwell Pier this morning.
Really? How was it man?
About three feet maybe. Spitting rain. Wind wasn’t too good. Onshore and pretty choppy.
Yeah, the sandbars are all jacked up right now dude. Weather’s stirring it up.”
That afternoon, someone in our lodging decided to jack up the volume of their music next door to a thousand. We voiced our complaints to the manager, to no avail. We got the rest of the week refunded, and left that place about 3 in the afternoon before all hell broke loose. Port A, it seemed, was a haven for people who wanted to check into lodging and get their loud on. We were two days into what was supposed to be a week-long stay, but we were now headed out. There was one more thing I needed to do before we left though.
After spending the night in different lodging, we got up the next morning, checked out, and headed out to the Packery Channel Jetties, where the waves were decent. It was still gray and spitting rain, and the water was still choppy. But it was fine. The other guys surfing with me were all cool.
I got out of my wetsuit and jumped straight in the car, sitting on a big beach towel. We drove away and headed back north as close to the coastline as possible. Maybe we were missing something. We figured we would follow state highway 35 northeast along the water — or at least as close as we could get to the water — to see what was between Corpus Christi and the Houston environs.
At Port Lavaca, heading across the bridge over Lavaca Bay, we spotted a strange apparition across the water in front of us; a chemical plant of some sort with a burn off tower ablaze. It was a reminder of the large petrochemical industry presence along the Texas Gulf Coast.
We kept going and didn’t stop, around my hometown of Houston, and north on 45 until we were carefully ensconced back in our downtown Dallas apartment. The trip had been mostly forgettable, save the exchanges with the kid in the surf shop and the two sessions at the pier and the jetties, even though I did them in the rain.
In early May, we decided to give things another try.
The target this time was the Hill Country again, Fredericksburg and the vaunted drive along Devil’s Backbone, from Johnson City south on U.S. Highway 281 to Blanco, east on state highway 32, north on state highway 12 to Wimberley, west on farm road 2325, and then west again on farm road 165 and back into Blanco.
I had read that this approximately 55-mile loop was one of the most scenic drives in the state of Texas, along ridges, plateaus, and hills. From all the talk, I envisioned something similar to what I had experienced out west in the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, and the Coast ranges, and in the mountain ranges of the eastern United States; the Smokies, the Blue Ridge, and the Appalachians.
The Friday afternoon we arrived in Fredericksburg was sunny and pleasant. We had a nice stroll up and down the main drag, East Main Street. Fredericksburg is as reported; a quaint town with a lot of late-19th century limestone architecture, including the old Gillespie County Courthouse, which was built in 1881. It also has several good bakeries, shops, restaurants, and drinking establishments.
Unfortunately, however, some violent storms arrived in the area overnight, and we woke up to pouring rains. We had planned to drive over to Johnson City, and then do the Devil’s Backbone drive with stops in Blanco and Wimberley. But we had to wait for the storms to slacken. Finally, around noon, they did.
We made the loop by heading through Blanco, then over to Wimberley, then back through Blanco. It was overcast and foggy in many places, but we got several visuals of the surrounding topography. We stopped in Wimberly and had coffee on an outdoor patio, but we had to sit under an overhang, dodging the rain that had started up again.
If you’ve grown up and lived your entire life as a flatlander, a few hills look like the Rockies. But if you’ve been to Yosemite, the Sierra Nevada, the Appalachians, the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Smokies, the Coast ranges along the Pacific Coast, or the peaks of Central Asia, it’s a little underwhelming in comparison. That’s not a criticism; it’s just a hard truth, unfortunately.
We headed back to our lodging near Fredericksburg. Almost as an afterthought, we spotted Luckenbach — immortalized by Waylon Jennings in his 1977 hit — on the map along ranch road 1376 between Blanco and Fredericksburg. We figured since we were in the area, we might as well check it out. It was raining again, and when we pulled into the town, it almost seemed like we were in the wrong place. There was nobody around. The place was deserted.
Waylon Jennings admitted he had never been to Luckenbach, Texas, before he recorded the immortal country hit:
“I’ve never been to Luckenbach, Texas, in my life.
I thought maybe I had gone through there one time. But funnier than that, the guy that wrote “Luckenbach, Texas,” has never been there… neither one of them.
I know some people from there, but I’ve never been there.”
We tried to reconcile what we were seeing with the lyrics of the song and the many stories I had read over the years about the place. And then it hit us; was what we were experiencing over the last nine months or so a lesson in the distinction and difference between mythology and reality?
As John Davidson of Texas Monthly once observed, a lot of people — particularly songwriters and musicians — reinvented the myth of rural Texas. One of them, Jerry Jeff Walker — who was a native of New York — brought cult status to Luckenbach when he recorded his album Viva Terlingua in the town dance hall and used photographs of Luckenbach on the album cover.
And as Davidson noted in his Texas Monthly piece, neither of the songwriters from Nashville — Buddy Emmons and Chips Moman — had ever been to Luckenbach. Guy Clark — a singer and songwriter who actually was from Texas — told them about Luckenbach in Nashville, and the songwriters decided it was what you heard “Texas was supposed to be.”
Indeed, Jeff Gage of Rolling Stone examined the mythology of the song and concluded that Jennings created an “outlaw fantasy,” and that the song “pined for a simpler way of life that may have never existed.”
We left the town in the rain, wondering if it was the perfect microcosm for the aforementioned mythology that existed on a much larger and more widespread scale.
We got up the following Sunday morning and drove north from Fredericksburg along state highway 16, through Llano, San Saba, and Comanche, then turned northeast on U.S. 377 through Stephenville, and eventually into southwest Fort Worth. The day had dawned sunny, but on the outskirts of the Metroplex, it was pouring, again. It was a perfect metaphor for everything we had experienced, it seemed.
We pulled back into our downtown fortress, discouraged, and a bit melancholy. We had made every effort possible. We had traveled. We had explored. We had given it every chance.
It was now May. We had pretty much covered the places we wanted to see and visit. And nothing had lived up to the mythology. Was it all my own fault? Had I set the place up to fail? To never have the chance to live up to the expectations I had created over the years? Had I unfairly set the bar so high in my mind that nothing could attain it?
Growing up in Texas, I had been to every part of the state, from Beaumont in the southeast corner, to Amarillo in the panhandle, to Texarkana in the northeast, to El Paso out west, to Del Rio down along the Rio Grande, and everywhere in between. But this time, almost all of our experiences had been so strange, it was as if someone was trying to send us a message; “Maybe we just don’t belong here.” Something seemed to be off everywhere, and the outlook for our future there — in my mind — was not bright or promising.
To be continued.
Glen Hines is the author of six books, including the recently published Welcome to the Machine, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing has been featured in Sports Illustrated, Task & Purpose, the Human Development Project, and elsewhere.
