a whole bunch of thoughts about texas (was what I expected)

welcome to A Teetering Vulture! a newsletter about various science stuff as well as the life happenings of its author, Taylor.

Despite my best efforts to acknowledge it in its entirety, my brain initially conceptualized the road trip my twin and I would take in late July and early August of this year as principally a Trip Through Texas. Even though we would spend time, even if only a little bit of time, in eight states, my mind kept wanting to say: but you’re going to Texas. You’ve never been to Texas before, and Texas is ginormous. Surely that will be the most remarkable part of the trip. Texas.

It turns out, of the over 1000 photos I would take during our trip, only eleven would be taken in Texas. An abysmal eleven. The reason lies in the size of the state: if you ever want to leave it after entering it, you have to traverse it, which means a whole lot of driving, which means not a lot of time to take (meaningful, not just views of the roadside) pictures. And ultimately this trip was not one solely of leisure and recreation; it had time constraints, as I was helping Madison move, and we also had only so much willpower to exist for long durations in the confines of the two front seats of her car, the rest of the car jammed to the ceiling with bins and bins and yet more bins! and various disassembled pieces of furniture.

So, we spent a night in El Paso and a night in Dallas, sprinting from one city to the next. In El Paso we achieved nothing more than sleep, but at least in Dallas we were able to experience takeout (a recently opened Wagamamas, the London-origin Asian food restaurant), a local café for breakfast, and the Katy Trail, a pedestrian and bicycle trail that follows the path of an old rail line. The Trail is surrounded on either side in downtown Dallas by a thick wall of trees, bamboo, and apartment buildings, with swaths of native plants maintained in between the pedestrian-only and the multi-use path. A colony of monk parakeets—a species native to South America—have also made some electrical towers beside the Trail their home. These naturalized parakeets of mysterious origin keep warm in the cold Dallas winters by utilizing the heat the towers generate. They are soft green and cream-colored, and very talkative.

For the majority of our drive through Texas, my mind was somewhat fuzzy with concern over the travel. I found it hard to focus on much else besides the next day’s drive, the logistics of finding food and keeping hydrated and safe in the 100+ degree heat. Because of our time limitations, we were also limited to highway travel. For me, this kind of travel is isolating and somewhat soulless, and the best parts are often finding a gas station or travel stop that actually has clean restrooms. There is also of course driving for hours while listening to a long playlist, or an audiobook, which improves things substantially—but still the sense of being in a liminal space persists, of being an exposed and vulnerable passerby subjected to the dips and rumbles of pavement, taking begrudging part in an exhaust-generating, climate changing machine. Everything turned out fine for us, of course. There were no dramatic mishaps. Travel simply unnerves me for its definitional instability; I am ultimately a person who is content spending my days stationed in one place, going places primarily in my mind. But I do admit I don’t dislike it enough not to undertake an adventure every now and again.

There are also the interactions with people, which for me ramp up significantly in quantity when I’m not living solely in the window seat of my house in front of my laptop. There are now faces and demeanors I have embedded in my mind via written description in my journal, of people who stood on immense round granite rocks in Joshua Tree National Park in California the same day we did, the Joshua trees like unfamiliar, shaggy-barked creatures holding pompoms and stretching out below us in every direction, as far as the eye could see, and people who served us in a hotel restaurant in Tucson, Arizona, and people I encountered at gas station check-out counters while buying coffee, who passed us on the Katy Trail, who helped us with our luggage at various hotels. I’ve metaphorically dipped these people in wax, in a respectful kind of way, because I know without writing about them I will invariably forget them and the infinitesimal change each one has made to the ways that I perceive the world, to the ways I think about the kinds of the people that inhabit it in different places. In general, even after doing extroverted things like teaching high school science, I suck at mundane conversations with people I encounter briefly. I never know how to approach such an interaction; my mind is always turned too inwards, maybe, to register half of what is being said to me in an exchange with a stranger, never mind comprehend any layers of second-meanings or implications or references. But I’m still interested in, and love, people. I enjoy being in places with other people, provided I am not being impelled to speak with them. It’s too incomprehensible for me to gauge who I should be to a stranger, what persona I will inevitably be needing to don to have a successful interaction, what ten thousand assumptions about each other have already unconsciously passed through the minds of both of us.

Although sometimes, I do this thing when I’m in public, something that may have embarrassed me to talk about when I was twenty-two and first developed the concept but that I now acknowledge for the perspective and joy it brings into my life: I pretend that I am royalty visiting Earth from another planet. Which maybe sounds conceited as hell. But it’s useful. If I can delude myself into imagining I am not from Earth, then it makes sense that I am eternally clumsy and clueless about etiquette and procedures no matter how seemingly simple. The royalty part just makes me feel more elegant and cool, so that I can confidently fuck things up without damaging my sense of self-worth.

Usually I’m just pretending like this when I’m dropping boxes of food on the floor at the self-checkout at the grocery, or trying to figure out how to work out the interaction between myself and the well-meaning bellhops who try to accost me as soon as I pull up to the front of a hotel, offering me luggage carts and their entire lives if only I would just ask. But it can be employed anywhere. For instance, you can imagine, as I set up a scene for you that is entirely romantic, this version of myself, Yale as some kind of clueless prince, meandering late at night around the gardens of a historic hotel in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains, which border Tucson to the north. A monsoon has just passed through, the ground is dark and damp. A light breeze blows but doesn’t reduce the lingering heat. I have a blue crop top on, and long white linen pants, and gold-rimmed sunglasses perched on my head. No one is around, save Madison.

The gardens are full of new sights. Full of ocotillo, which seems like a plant that should be waving at the bottom of a fish tank, so elongated and seaweed-like are its many-leaved stems—of jojoba, with its wavy, upturned pairs of little green-gray leaves—of foothill palo verde and it’s green, photosynthesizing bark—of cholla cacti and its innumerable desert relatives, sometimes with a cactus wren’s nest hooked into its spines—of saguaro on the surrounding hills, an endless forest of sturdy green towers.

There are no bats in the air, like the lesser long-nosed bats that emerged into the Joshua Tree sunset like chaotic freckles on the sky, but there is a desert tarantula, crossing in front of me unexpectedly and calmly. It’s almost as big as my foot, is so fuzzy and substantial in size it doesn’t even feel like it should be called a spider. I am delighted, find it beautiful. There are also red-spotted toads on the stairs near the pool, which sit placidly and politely even as their photos are taken.

The hotel, once a girls boarding school, does indeed feel like a campus, with half-outdoor corridors and courtyards to explore and get turned around in, wide open lobbies to sneak through and take decorative mirror selfies in.

To my current mind, it’s these recently formed memories that stand out the most from this trip. Thinking about the landscapes and habitats, human-built and natural, that we ran across in those places where we paused in our travel, as well as the people my life brushed lightly against in Joshua Tree and in Tucson, in Dallas and in Palm Springs.

It’s somewhat likely that I’ll find myself writing more about this trip in the near future, that this is the first installment in a series of bursts of musing about something which of course became more than the staring agog at cattle ranches and cowboys in Texas that I thought it would be. I don’t know that it will ever cease to astound me how many corners of the world can go on existing each day without my knowledge or attention, because when I finally experience a few more of them (even if only for a brief time), it seems like they assert themselves so vigorously and vibrantly on the planet that it seems impossible everyone isn’t aware of them all of the time. Some strange sense of relief comes over me when I visit a new place, like I have picked up a stone in a creek and catalogued what’s beneath it and there is no longer that slight tugging curiosity, or that concern that I’m missing something that might bring me new knowledge or help me solve the fantastically abstruse puzzle that is Earth.

So look forward to those, if they come, but for now I hope you’ve enjoyed this and perhaps learned the name of a plant or two—or a new way to imagine who you are when you’re out in the world surrounded by new places, new people, and new situations.