Don't Mess With Texas

Texas is big. They say everything is bigger in Texas. Now that we have been there, we can say this is because the state itself is huge! The first exit number when you cross into the state from Louisiana is 880! On the second day of our trip we were in Louisiana for about 20 miles and then in Texas for the rest of the day. We drove 640 miles in total. For those of you who have made the trip, that’s the same distance from Louisville to Tallahassee – almost all of it in one big state.

About 250 miles into Texas we stopped between Houston and San Antonio at a rest area somewhat close to the city of Gonzales. We stopped mostly for Asher. He got to get out of his carrier and run about. He really seemed to enjoy himself – more than usual. He bounded off the grass and into the brush. He scratched at the leaves and the dry soil with unusual vigor and he was really determined to secret himself down in the weeds and debris. There was a sign warning about the “Native Texas Landscape.” This was next to cactus and was likely supposed to be funny. But cacti turned out not to be the only dangers; when we pulled Asher put of the weeds he was covered in burrs!

Inside the rest area’s main building there was a bit of palisade wall, a model of a fort, and some informational displays. Above the “fort” a highly starched flag was “flying.” It depicted a cannon, a star and the words “come and take it.” As it turns out, there is an interesting nugget of history about this flag. Long before it was the Lone Star State, Texas was Tejas – a part of the Mexican state Coahuila y Tejas. Long-standing tensions existed between the “Texians” (American settlers in Mexico) and the Mexican government. Chief among these tensions was the failure of the Texians to obey Mexican law by freeing their slaves and converting to Catholicism. These tensions reached a new level in 1835 when the Mexican president, (no joke) Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón dissolved the federalist (favoring individual state’s rights) Constitution of 1824 and declared a more centralized government. Several Mexican states rebelled, including Tejas. The Texians had been given a small, bronze, Spanish-made cannon by the Mexican government some years earlier when relations were better. In late September of 1835 the Mexicans sent a small military detachment to recover the cannon from the noisome settlers. When the Mexican force arrived at a ford of the Guadalupe River near Gonzales they found the river too high to cross and the cannon in possession of a Taxian militia flying a flag announcing their defiant sentiment: “come and take it.”

A bit of a stand-off occurred over the next few days with the Mexican army eventually moving off to look for another ford. On the morning of 2 October, the Texian militia, having crossed the river the previous night, attacked and repulsed the Mexican troops. While the battle resulted in only one (Mexican) casualty, Stephen Austin’s prediction that only war could secure Texan freedom seemed confirmed. In this way the Battle of Gonzales served as “the Lexington of Texas,” when the shooting really started. In March 1836 the Republic of Texas formally declared its independence (joining the U.S. was something of an afterthought). Attention then turned to a group of resisters holed-up in an isolated mission called Alamo…

Back in 2008 and near the Alamo, in San Antonio, and also in Houston (where Texas won its war for independence) we hit major traffic slow-downs. Complete-stop-on-the-highway type slowdowns. And this is on the by-passes! There were other slow-downs too in seemingly random places throughout the state. They never lasted too long and there was never any obvious reason for them but they really cut into our speed. It’s not exactly easy to get a trailer up to any kind of respectable speed in stop-and-go traffic. This was not the furthest we drove in any one day, but it took the most time because of the terrible, terrible traffic. Good thing once you are past San Antonio, there is almost nothing. We made good time after that, rushing on through the desert night. Matt couldn’t look, as he was driving, but Maya saw an endless expanse of stars in the dark sky. Out there “the Lone Star State” seems a gross misnomer.