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Wayside_Wisdom Heard Along the Way
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BIGGER-IN-TEXAS WEATHER "Everything’s bigger in Texas," conventional wisdom says. In the Lone Star State, egos are bigger; the star on the state flag is taller; hamburgers are whoppers; trucks are more powerful; fish caught are longer; lies more outrageous; and North is farther from South and East more distant from West than anywhere else in the known world! Well, we’ve discovered that even the weather is bigger in Texas! The August sun is hotter in Laredo and the wind feels colder in January in Amarillo than any reasonable person would care to experience. Once every hundred years it snows in the Valley and Gulf Coast hurricanes are guaranteed disaster-makers every decade or so. (Katrina of 2005 apparently got a little off course to the east!) Texas droughts are legendary, too. First the creeks dry up. Then the rivers trickle down to nothing. The grass dies of dehydration and the cows start giving dried milk. Month after month the scorching sun bakes the life out of the earth, returning it to dust. The wind blows and a new Texas land-rush begins: everybody’s parched lawns rush off to somewhere else! The dust blots out the sun, causing a wicked few to repent. It coats the skin until you feel like walking sandpaper. Dust particles feel like boulders in your eyes and grit between your teeth. At the end of the day, you wash your day’s "suntan" down the drain with your evening shower! Then the rains come. Not soothing, refreshing showers but a downpour, a gully-washer or a flash flood maker. The dusty earth turns first to mud; then to glue, then to ankle-deep rapids. Suddenly the road on which you are driving becomes a waterway, covered with lakes of unknown depth. Settle into a campsite between showers, if you’re lucky. As the sun goes down, the weather radio alarm begins to whine out its "weather alert" bulletin. Frequently, all night long, it plays its little no-doze night music, warning of dangers and disasters lurking outside in pitch blackness! Rain pelts the metal roof over weary heads; a nocturne of insomnia from dusk to dawn. Sunrise reveals that the world – and we – have survived. The rain is now gentle. The grass is green, and the birds are singing! We’ve traveled from Texas drought to Texas deluge in just a few weeks! Now we’ll head for Oklahoma as quick as we can! Maybe there we’ll find some reasonable and average weather. But we’ll come back to the Lone Star State after a few months’ absence. We’ll be back because, you see, the longin’-for-Texas is bigger, too, just like the weather and everything else! 3/26/06 - mshr |