Meet Alice

And Kingsville, and Harlingen and McAllen

The only billboards you see leaving Pleasanton are for personal injury attorneys. Been in an accident? You have your pick. In fact, after several hours of driving through south Texas toward the Rio Grande valley, small towns separated by vast quiet it’s easy to imagine that this is on purpose. Get into an accident halfway between Kingsville and Harlingen? Just look up and dial. A tow truck and the promise of a big law settlement await.

But the highways aren’t cluttered with the usual roadside debris some of us are used to, and the landscape is optimistically wide, horizon covering, windmills as far as the eye can see. Refineries dot the ride. A derrick here and a thing spouting a flame there. Oil stuff. Texas.

I am an expert on Texas downtowns of course, having been here three or four times in the state. Like downtowns everywhere where development in the 60’s and on have turned backs on them, most have hit some kind of bottom, some to stay and some to bounce back anew, to varying degrees of success.

First stop. Hour and a half ride from Pleasanton.

Ah, Alice. Alice of Lyndon Johnson’s blessed memory. I quote from John Warner:

“In the 1948 United States Senate election in Texas, an incident (Box 13) involving Johnson’s bid took place in Alice, where 202 ballots were cast in alphabetical order and all just at the close of polling in favor of Johnson, a statewide election he won by 87 votes.”

No one at the coffee shop we visited mentioned this. Probably a sore subject. The shop has been opened for 3 months. So far so good. It does have that trying things out feel. Tables hug the sides of a large space that may have housed a clothing store in the 40’s I’m guessing. You can get an egg sandwich but not just simple eggs. You can get pancakes, which seems like a draw to me, but just to 11AM and then it’s lunch. The only other customer is a woman who brings a wrapped gift and sits near the window. A younger couple join and you can see that this can become a gathering place that towns need. She kept looking out the broad window until they walk in and in that big empty space it felt occupied with just the three of them.

There are several shops along the two block downtown devoted to Quinceanera, colorful dresses in the windows. A barber, a couple of those storefronts where you’re not sure quite what they do, and a hollowed out theater, the fresh dirt slopping away from the street where the screen would have been. A new beginning maybe.

Second stop. Hour ride.

Kingsville. The million acre, sorry, MILLION ACRE, bigger than Rhode Island King Ranch needed a town. This one is of the doing just fine thank you very much variety. It’s the kind of downtown I could learn to like pretty quickly. You don’t have to fight for a parking space. It’s several good sized blocks long with a combination of actual shops one might need with a smattering of those that appeal to tourists or those shopping late on Christmas Eve.

And a book store! Started just before the pandemic. The Novel Blend, it had a good year two years ago, but not because the housebound nested and read. He expected an uptick, he sells used books and records, put everything on line, but it didn’t happen. Tuesday’s are good for some reason, but then there’ll be a Tuesday where he makes $5. Saturday’s bring the tours of the King Ranch and that helps.

I asked if he opened a bookstore because he saw a need or had a hunch. He and his wife love bookstores. Owl Project Dave and I visited a bookstore in Indiana last year. Dave knows what makes a successful bookstore. The owners of that one were super enthusiastic. I asked Dave when we left if he thought it would succeed. He thought not, that they “hugged their books”, that it was a passion and not a business. Loving books is a passion. A bookstore is a business.

My hunch is this one might work. I don’t think it’s much overhead, I’m guessing the used book business is a different model than one that sells new books, and this seems a retirement passion, after years in the Coast Guard. When he moved here, ten years ago because his new wife had her family and grandchildren here he said he knew no one except them and the Walmart greeter.

But the bookstore opened up the town to him, his customers are his friends, if not always his most lucrative customers. Everyone wants him to succeed. Many wish him well without buying anything. The pandemic upended things. His regular customers before things shut down haven’t come back. His regular customers now are post pandemic, he’s had to rebuild his base.

In talking about moving here from northeast New Mexico he mentions the border.

We’re headed to Harlingen next as it happens, toward the border. But we don’t know anything about border concerns and how far they reach geographically.

He talks about two encounters. One was shortly after he moved here and he went for a walk just out of town, to be soon met by a Sheriff Deputy explaining that people don’t walk around in the countryside. He likes to walk. He’s a citizen and a veteran. But people don’t walk around here. He also said he doesn’t like to go to Harlingen because of the secondary border check point between there and Kingsville, watched by “hundreds” of cameras and asked where he is going and where he has been.

I buy a book about the King Ranch and Peter buys a Rod Stewart album. We ask where to go for lunch. He God’s honest truth lights up and directs us to Harrel’s Pharmacy and Soda Fountain. Truly. Frozen in time including the prices, four bucks for chicken salad with 12 packs of Saltines. $1.25 for a basket of French Fries. They’re making creamy milk shakes while we sit at the counter. How can you not sit at the counter? I ask what she’s making. Vanilla. The guy next to me waiting for take out says he has never ordered one because it looks like a meal in itself.

She brings three milk shake shots for us. It’s pretty light but full of flavor.

And so, milk shaked we leave, driving south to the border. From Kingsville to Harlingen is an hour and a half drive through what I would describe as scrub pine but I’m sure its a less Cape Cod varietal. About half way palm trees show and the soil more brown. No “services” for 60 miles.

What you do see is the law enforcement presence. Right off and consistently through. It’s mostly concentrated on the north side of the highway, and we’re travelling south. But on our side several Sheriff cars have stopped a truck and more are responding. I pass, I think for the first time going the speed limit, a state trooper, who I’m guessing is driving south to set up to watch cars going north.

And then we see the secondary border check north, cars backed up a bit, cameras all over the place. I don’t want to leave the wrong impression. It was unusual to me but, but what? I’m not sure. It was unusual. It might not be the umptenth time I had seen it. But it was my first time seeing this. Given what we saw further south, and on the border, it didn’t escalate, in fact the opposite, and so, in context, gave me the impression that this highway corridor was particularly active.

Third stop. Hour and a half ride.

Harlingen. We stop for coffee. Though you could get a Dirty Grandma or a Lemon something. I opted for the Iced Mocha. I sat outside. The sun was hot. I wanted to get a haircut, which is an Owl Project ritual, but it was closed despite the stated hours. I bought a wood cutting board. It seemed time to press on to McAllen.

We could go straight through on Rte 2 or along the border. I punched in the border route to GPS but user error sent me to Rte 2. There is a lot of new development along the corridor. The usual commercial services, and a lot of industrial uses, warehouses, and transport concerns. It could be any prosperous burb. At the bookstore the owner told me that people used to move from the border up toward Kingsville but were now moving down.

It seemed so. We travel a bit and then redirect south through Weslaco to the border road.

Someone may need to tell Weslaco they are so close to the border, because it wasn’t evident to us. I don’t know what we were expecting. Helicopters. People running north while we traveled south. There was far less law enforcement presence than on the Kingsville Harlingen highway. If you didn’t know you were looking at the border, you wouldn’t know you’re looking at the border.

The road ends and you have to go left or right. Directly ahead is the wall, or sections of it, where the land is flat and you can build a wall we guess. It matches the pictures of “Trump’s Wall”, metal rods evenly spaced, hard to tell how high, but high, and beyond the river.

There is some law enforcement presence but nothing unusual to a casual observer. What is noticeable is all the new industrial construction; the same warehouses and technology and transportation companies we saw along Rte. 2, concerns who would want to be located on an international border.

It’s also more agricultural here; fruit trees and fields of something leafy. Palm tress. Housing developments, also new, large and grouped tightly like in a lot of places. The fences around these homes and developments don’t look meant to keep people out but to keep pets in.

McAllen is prosperous. It has a grand sign welcoming you into the city at the International Airport. Dinner at a steakhouse and a hotel next to the Convention Center. Walking back in the warm night we pass a holiday festival all lit up in its final days.

Tomorrow we explore. I’m thinking Hidalgo.