Here's what I knew about California, with no plans to ever visit it: it's full of smog, every building is soulless and pre-fabricated, it's got all the culture of a blank fax, and you can't get anywhere without a car. It's very nice wrapping paper around an empty box.
Then I went to Texas. Fort Worth, specifically. I was hoping it would live up to my expectations. My expectations were off by a few states.
The temperature getting off the plane at Dallas/Fort Worth airport was exactly the same as in Newark. The east coast was having a bit of a heat wave, so I left 80 degree weather to come to 80 degree weather, despite the two thousand mile difference. I had no complaints about the weather, but a little variation would be nice. The whole point of travel is to be somewhere different.
Technically, the point of this particular bit of travel was to take notes on the Quality Assurance Association. 8:30-4:30 of my Monday and Tuesday would be that. I was choosing to look at the rest of the time as vacation, and thus was trying to find as much different in Fort Worth as possible. New Jersey and Texas are as culturally separate as you can get, so if I couldn't find much difference here, I might as well give up on travel altogether and just go live in a Starbucks.
I debated about getting a rental car. It was company money I'd be spending, but it would be a lot of cash for something I probably wouldn't be using much. I opted not. I took a shared shuttle from the airport. My La Quinta was a solid hour away from the airport. The ride cost $30, which was pretty much the price of a rental car for the day. I was in Texas from Saturday to Wednesday, and there'd be a similar charge for my ride back to the airport on Wednesday, so I had to do some serious non-usage of a car in order for my rental car decision to be the cost-conscious one.
I had plans on going out Saturday. I went so far as to reserve a spot at an improv show in downtown Fort Worth, thinking I could walk there. Downtown was now 15 miles away. I could get a cab there and back, but the round trip would be about $150 (cabs are more expensive than airport shuttles) and it would blow my rental car cost-effectiveness out of the water. Plus, I doubted I'd be able to charge it to the company. So I watched TV.
I was in a recently built section of Fort Worth, on the side of a major road. Chain restaurants, Ford dealerships, supermarkets, strip malls with beauty salons and cellular phone stores, all with plenty of parking and not a house for miles. Every state has these, and they're growing like Robert Downey Jr.'s rap sheet. There was only one place to hang out I could find, and that was a Starbucks. So I watched TV.
We spend the first sixteen or seventeen years of our lives unable to drive, and a lot of time after that with cars aren't available to us. During these times, we find shortcuts and alternate routes to get from point A to point B. We might even get so desperate that we'll take public transportation (but only as a last resort). If you don't have a car, you're either a kid, old, or poor, and America puts your needs somewhere below the Don't Hurt the Blue Whale's Feelings society. I didn't know anyone in Fort Worth to bum a ride from, I didn't bring a bike, and there wasn't a single bus outside of airport shuttles. The next four days would be within walking distance.
I tried to get the most Texas exposure I could. I put the clock radio to a country station. I tried to appreciate that the La Quinta puts golf pencils in their rooms instead of pens. Every American flag was matched by a equally sized Texas flag, and I gave a good long stare at each one. I noted the bakery truck with the "Texas Born, Texas Bread" slogan. I went outside and stood in an unwatered field, checking out the dry ground and thigh high scrub grass. Birds hang out in this grass, noisy ones that screech and shriek when you get near them. This part of the country didn't normally have trees, so evolution favored birds who liked to hang out in scrub grass.
Squawking birds aside, this was getting to be a stretch. Fort Worth was greatly resembling anywhere else in America. Manhattan has more location-conscious signs than Texas, but since I never tried to max out a Manhattan trip, I never gave those signs much thought. It took a full six hours for me to see my first cowboy hat. I spent four nights there, and didn't see a single gun. No bar fights, no mechanical bulls, no white convertibles with horns on the front bumper, no "Yee-Ha"s, not even a "Howdy". The only "Don't Mess With Texas" shirt I saw was at the airport gift shop. The weather was nice, but it was exactly the same temperature at home. I wanted a big Texas steak, and the only steakhouse I could find was an Outback.
One of the few areas with definite difference is fast food. A McDonalds is a McDonalds is a McDonalds (ditto for the Outback), but a lot of fast food chains are regional instead of national, so there's whole new realms of mass produced grease to sample from. I still haven't been able to get to a Waffle House, Jack in the Box, Taco Bueno or Bob Evans in my travels, but I've hit Fatburger, Shoney's, Carl's Jr, and Western Sizzlin, and all have been cultural eye openers.
Kitty corner to my hotel was a Sonic, a drive in restaurant. (They had a few tables set up under a roof for the rare walk in traffic.) I went there twice, and got to try a chicken fried steak sandwich, Frito chilli pie, a banana cream pie shake, and soda with my choice of flavorings. (Warning: the flavoring is mixed with food coloring, and the powerful food coloring is largely unaffected by the human digestive system, so expect a colorful surprise about twenty-four hours after drinking a Blue Coconut Sprite.)
Whenever I'm in another city, I hit local supermarkets for regional private label. I could see a Costco from the road, so I tried to visit it. We had Costcos in New Jersey, but I had time to kill and it was there. Warehouse stores are usually the hardest to visit, since they have someone checking IDs at the door to make sure everyone's a member. Costco of Fort Worth went several steps further. It had no sidewalk leading there, it was built on the edge of a thirty foot brick wall, and that wall was on the edge of a river. I couldn't believe it: the store was situated like a medieval castle, complete with moat. The only way to get there, aside from a raft and a grappling hook, was to wade through thigh high grass until the overpass crossing the river, and then run through oncoming traffic because the road didn't even have a shoulder by the bridge. Is walking so rare in this country that major stores would rather have walk-in traffic risk their lives than pony up a few bucks for some lousy squares of concrete?
Monday morning, I found a red folder slipped under my door, from the Quality Assurance Association. Time to go to work. The folder had driving directions to where the meeting would be. Most every other QAA meeting was held at the hotel where the out of towners stayed, and only once in the small print for the Fort Worth meeting was it written that the physical meeting would not be at the hotel. It was assumed everyone would have a rental car. It was 5 miles away, on roads with no sidewalks, so walking was out of the question. The meeting started in an hour. I had to hang out in the lobby and look for other people with red folders, hoping they had transportation with an empty seat.
Most people attending the meeting had rental cars, so I bummed rides with them for two days. Experienced business travelers had long ago realized how hard it was to travel anywhere in this country without a car. Plus, they hated extensive traveling, so they rang up giant bills on the road in an effort to discourage their employers from sending them on the road again.
Riding in someone's car on Tuesday, I looked out a window to an less developed section of Fort Worth. A dirt road, old storefronts, awnings over every store, and it looked kinda deserted. It was probably a hallucination, but I might have even seen a lasso. If I had a camera, I would have bolted from the car. Texas was real, it existed and it was right outside my window. Too bad my itinerary didn't include it. We drove on.
I got back on a plane Wednesday morning, feeling very unfulfilled. I never got my big Texas steak. I didn't see a single giant belt buckle. The closest thing I got to an authentic Texas experience was watching Wild Wild West on HBO. I stepped off the plane in New Jersey to the exact same weather I had in Fort Worth. I went home and watched TV.
The melting pot of America has been simmering just a little too long. The carrots and peas are mushy and soaked with gravy, while the meat has long since disintegrated into little chunks the same consistancy and flavor as the potatoes. Every ingredient that gets thrown in the pot affects the flavor a bit, but the pot affects the ingredient a whole lot more. Every meal is alike, no matter where in the pot you scoop from. There's a lot worse things in the world to complain about than American life all tasting the same, but it doesn't lessen the disappointment when all we're looking for is a big steak. Within walking distance, of course.