Lufkin, Texas

On the way to Houston with that barbed wire I stopped in Lufkin and wrote this:

September 26th, 2007
I have not been writing much of late because I suppose I am bored. Although I am sure the details of loads and cities and industry are interesting on some level I can’t get excited enough to write about them. This is not to say that I am bored throughout the day, in fact, most of the time I am having a fine time. I appreciate the time to think and write (if I can find something to write about) and read and try and reconnect with why I like to travel and why I like the US.
It occurred to me the other day as I was driving through Missouri (or was it Arkansas) that I first got excited about traveling through the country when I went away to college in Iowa. I have known that this was the ignition for my travel interest but I did not know why. The other day I realized that it was because all these places. (Illinois!) They were so far away. So different. It was a mystery to be uncovered and pieced together. Curiosity drove me further west until I got to the ocean. At some point it got less interesting and less intriguing. Everything felt familiar. Especially after I started driving trucks (the first time). And what feels familiar is not far away and is not very intriguing. This was exemplified in my roadtrip this summer with my sister. Even places I had not been before (all the fantastic parks in Utah) were sort of de rigueur. Meanwhile my sister was captivated. It wasn’t much fun.
What I had done, I realize now, is smear this familiarity over the whole country. In feeling familiar with the country I was making huge assumptions that I had seen all there was to see and that nothing was far away. Not true! Arkansas is far, far away from Maryland. Maybe not to a trucker but on the quotidian level not many people travel like this. The people, the accent, the food the culture, while superficially similar, are not. I don’t know about you but I, and I know it is tired, I blame television. Everybody sees the same things, wants the same things, has the same cultural touchstones but if we look deeper we find there are things that are not common ground. A person from Texas is unlikely to know what a skipjack is and a person from Maryland is unlikely to have any concept of what it is like to live in a border town on the Rio Grande (even if they both know what happened on last week’s episode of Heroes.) It is these things that we must fight to preserve if we are not to become a dangerously homogenous nation.
So my blog isn’t going to be all about trucking. It also has to be about the places that I go that are not on the interstate. One of the things that I promised myself I would do when I returned to trucking was have more discipline, especially as it relates to food and physical activity. It is too easy to literally not move all day and then eat the junk from convenience stores and fast food restaurants. To meet the physical activity requirement I have been taking long walks at sunset in the various places that I stop for the night. Sometimes this is a daunting prospect but like my walk in Allentown I am commited to making these unwalkable places walkable. One thing I have noticed so far is that people can not seem to leave you alone. Either they look at you like you’re insane or (usually in the case of young me) honk or holler at you, or just give of a general air of distrust. Why would somebody be walking here? They must be a murderer, rapist, child molester, etc…
Yesterday I took a walk in Lufkin, Texas which seemed an especially hostile place to walk. There seemed to be sideways glances everywhere. People didn’t politely pull to the opposite side of the street like usual and I believe that in east texas it must be a requirement to own a blood thirsty murderous dog. I walked up one street and finding it too poor and mexican (poor and Mexican often means more murderous dogs, not trying to be too overtly racist here just a sociological observation, perhaps it is sociology that is racist (ho Ho!) I turned around and walked the other way in a loop about 3 miles long. The first leg of the loop led past low ranchers, every one with a port-cochere and a lot of lawn furniture. I suppose people in this area like to sit outside and really soak in that steamy gulf air. The poverty here was slightly less severe and generally more Caucasian and there were some dogs but they were mostly chained up or behind fences. One, as I reached the far corner of my rhomboid loop seemed nasty (and had big testicles) but was so intently focused on rooting something out of the grassy ditch that he did not even register my presence.
As I rounded the corner the landscape opened up and stopped being residential, well at least in the typical sense. There was a big jail, The Angelina County Correctional Facility or something like that. Across the street from this were a few very small buildings (sort of like the kind you might buy at home depot to keep your lawn tools in.) that were set up as bail bonds businesses. One advertised on a big yellow banner that it was voted best bail bonds service in the Best of Lufkin awards 2006.
The last side of the rhombus was the frontage road on US-59 that led me back to the small truckstop where I had parked.
Texas is madly fond of these frontage roads and in fact it really constitutes an entirely different way of thinking of a highway than the more typical exit on to a cross street model. In this model you exit veering off only slightly onto a small road that is one way in the direction you are traveling and parallel to the larger road. Traffic already on the frontage road must yield to traffic exiting the freeway and entering the frontage road (or vice versa). On this road are many businesses (like truckstops and fast food restaurants). All cross streets can freely intersect with the frontage road at T-intersections. Larger cross streets will intersect at grade with the frontage roads and cross over or under the main highway. At these under or over passings there is also usually the opportunity to make a U-Turn and go the opposite direction on the Frontage road on the other side of the highway (or subsequently to join the highway in that direction soon thereafter.)
(Did that make any sense?)
So I was walking south on the shoulder of the northbound frontage road and passed a rather sizeable high school with a rather impressive football facility. It is Texas and (I found out later) Lufkin is especially well know for High School Football within the state. I got back to my truck and by this time I was quite sweaty. It was about eight at night and just getting below 90°.