Places I'm Visiting: Dallas and the Southwest

On the spur of the moment, my wife and I decided to visit my son, who is currently living near Dallas, Texas, having been drawn to that location by his enrollment in the music school at University of North Texas. I’ve never really been to Texas before. I spent a day in Galveston once on a business trip. I once drove east out of Houston on a road trip that ended in Savannah, Geogia. I’ve mostly passed through Texas rather than visited Texas.

My first college roommate was a Tulsa, Oklahoma native. Both Texas and Oklahoma – about as far as you can get from the two coasts of the US, where I have spent most of my time in the US – seem a bit exotic to me. My impressions of this part of the world have been created by news clips, by movies and television shows, and by stories I’ve heard – not especially reliable sources. 

We set out from San Francisco on a flight to Dallas/Ft. Worth. I happily gazed out the airplane window as we crossed from California into Nevada then over bits of Utah, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. 

I’m one of those who is perfectly happy with my nose against the window for an entire flight. I don’t understand people who seat themselves, pull down the window shades, and completely ignore everything outside. I enjoy watching the changes in the terrain. I enjoy seeing the lakes with one flat side that gives away that they’re manmade, created by a dam. I enjoy tracing the courses of rivers and the canyons they cut. 

I particularly like seeing oxbow lakes or finding sharp turns in rivers that allow me to imagine how an oxbow lake will form in the future. Flat desert areas. Snow-dusted mountains. Circular patches of green created by irrigation booms that rotate around a central pivot. Dense developments of houses that seem too large – much too large for the tiny plots of land they’ve been built on, set close side by side. 

As we approached Dallas, we flew over Dallas Love Field, the airport that served Dallas and Fort Worth until the airport in use today took over that role.  On the ground in Dallas, I watched airplanes landing and taking off as we taxied to our gate – those leaving the airport disappearing into a low layer of light clouds.