Texas Landscape

It’s July 4^th weekend. Everyone’s enjoying the long weekend, as July 4^th falls on a Monday this year. The temperature is around 100ºF (38ºC) and humid – too hot for most people to be outside. For some reason that I don’t know, East Texas is at its hottest around 5pm; it’s different in West Texas, where the desert doesn’t retain the heat in the same way.

As I look out of my hotel window, I see the flatness extending for miles, punctuated only by the water towers that are a feature of everywhere in America that I’ve ever been, and the occasional high-rise building – usually confined to downtown Dallas and Fort Worth. The electrical power plant behind the hotel, eight floors down, is the nucleus of single-file marching armies of pylons that stretch to the horizon. Despite the apparent, from ground-level, “concreteness” of the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, large clumps of green foliage are visible in every direction.

Because it’s a holiday weekend, the parking lot is mostly empty. The participants of yesterday’s wedding have left. But a large camper occupies two opposing spaces, and a graffiti-ridden dumpster sits in the middle. What few cars and trucks there are, are parked in the shade of any available tree. Larger, articulated, trucks are parked behind an adjacent shopping plaza that is otherwise empty.

In the grounds surrounding an adjoining apartment complex, a barbecue is set up. Occasionally, somebody comes down from a third floor apartment to check on its progress. The metal barbecue tongs, having been sitting in the sun, are too hot to pick up at first, and the guy drops them quickly, and manoevres them awkwardly into the shade, where they sit for a few minutes before he can pick them up.

In the parking lot, a man is pacing backwards and forwards, but always keeping within the shade of a tree. He’s clearly troubled. He stops, and raises a hand to his brow, possibly wiping the sweat from his eyes. For a moment he seems to forget about the heat, and keeps walking into the full sun; suddenly he realizes, and moves back into the shade. He looks back towards the hotel, and stands with his hands on his hips. Then paces again. As he leans back on a parked car, still within the shade, a car pulls off the main road and stops alongside him. He gets in, and they drive off.

Our lives are often such a casual brush with our fellows. And this is part of the reason why, having just seen “War of the Worlds”, I’m so disillusioned with “Hollywood blockbusters” that seem to think you can replace emotions with special effects; and also why I will never regard Tom Cruise as an actor, but rather as one of the relatively new genre of “celebrities”. Laurence Olivier was an actor, Johnny Depp is an actor, Judy Dench is an actor, and there are many more. Tom Cruise is not one of them.

Oh, and while I think of it, somebody should tell “Sir” Bob Geldof that he couldn’t sing when he was with the Boomtown Rats, and still can’t. Power to him – just don’t sing!