Wide open clutter

The flight didn’t begin on an auspicious note.  I had a window seat, and as the plane taxied left onto the runway, I could see a FedEx plane a few miles out on final approach, making a lazy turn to line up with our runway.  Our runway.  The one we were on, and were about to use for takeoff.  The pilot fired up our engines just a little and scooted back off the runway to the left, making a quick semi-circle, and a few seconds later the giant DC-9 dropped onto the runway with screeching tires.  I could only see its reflection in the mirrored windows of San Antonio’s A terminal.  The DC-9 is one of my favorite planes; it’s got the tail tri-jet configuration that never competed effectively with what Boeing and Airbus came out with and eventually led to Lockheed’s exit from commercial aviation.  But while it was a thrill to see it land so close, I was wondering who the knucklehead was who let us get onto the runway while it was about to land.

A minute passed, enough time for the jet wash to subside, and we made the same left turn back onto the runway.  I checked the skies; nothing within range.  We took off.

As we lifted up into the dirty sky, hitting the smog barrier a few thousand feet up on the way to Houston, I looked out at the landscape of south Texas and the cityscape of San Antonio.  It’s not really a cityscape in the way anyone who appreciates such things would describe it.  Yes, there’s a smallish downtown cluster of tall buildings, none of them memorable or particularly good looking, but there are isolated office and apartment towers randomly thrown about, especially when viewing them from a plane sweeping first to the northwest, then banking off east.  It looks like someone just tossed darts at a giant board – the highways creating three concentric circles, with the dartboard segments marked by other highways and six- or eight-lane city avenues and freight train tracks out to the outer edges.  The office towers are clustered around the middle, sure, just like in a good dart game, but where the loop roads meet the spokes, aiming shots to score a much-coveted 51 or, sometimes, a miss, and a tower sprouts in the middle of the 2 slot, near or next to nothing.

The scale of the city is at a kind of cosmic dartboard level, actually.  It’s definitely not at a human level, even a human driving a Ford F350 with jacked up high clearance wheels so that you can drive through the flash floods that have happened with weekly frequency since I got here a month ago.  The houses are on enormous lots, the apartment buildings are surrounded by enormous parking lots, everything else separated by half-heartedly landscaped scrub and that wide-bladed tropical grass that is so unpleasant to walk on or sit upon.  The highways are fast because they are scaled well beyond the current required traffic’s capacity.  I walked across the city – from my temporary apartment north of downtown through a few neighborhoods and into south San Antonio, what someone called “disenfranchised Mexican San Antonio,” and eventually to a movie theater that was showing the Met Opera’s simulcast performance of Verdi’s Aïda – and at one point crossed a multi-level highway with adjacent connector-distributor lanes which, all told, represented 20 lanes of traffic.  San Antonio has 1.5 million people, with another million or so in suburbs and surrounding unincorporated areas.  It has without a doubt over 100 miles of such roads – I drive 10 miles of them, varying between 16 and at one point 24 lanes of two-way traffic, just on my way to the office – while Toronto, with four times the population in the GTA, has maybe 20 miles on the 401 of equivalent capacity.

Last weekend confirmed a growing sense of dread I’d been experiencing.  Most of my time in the city thus far had been confined to specific grids of time.  Driving to and from work, which itself is in a building larger than any I’ve ever seen in terms of how it covered the earth, although it has only five or six occupied floors (and another four floors of parking beneath every inch of it), occupies about forty minutes total a day; occasionally I’ll stop by the grocery store or the filling station.  I spend eight to nine hours a day at work, mostly in a cubicle but I try to walk to meetings at other people’s desks and sometimes they are a half mile or more walking distance away, so that gives me a little adventure to break things up.  I get home and will either listen to post-season baseball on the radio or read or watch the Spanish-language mystery-thriller station which shows 1970s cop dramas with Spanish voiceovers, which for some reason I can’t get enough of, while eating my sad cuisine and drinking gin.  Two nights a week I’ll venture out and walk to a local restaurant or bar instead of staying in – more on that presently.  Then eight hours of sleep, sometimes more, sometimes less, shower, shave, and get back in the car for the morning commute.

When I do go out at night, I walk.  What struck me at first was how the sidewalks are random.  I live just over a mile from the center of downtown, but most blocks do not have sidewalks which stretch the entire length of the block – even as you get closer to downtown.  Rather, each property has either laid down sidewalk, or it hasn’t.  The sidewalk pavings don’t always match up, and shrubbery and random weeds often block even the paved bits entirely.  As such, you’re basically forced into the street – which streets are, fortunately, usually four or six lanes wide, even the quiet residential ones – enabling cars to be parked, and cars to pass by both ways, still leaving enough room for pedestrians to walk between the parked and driving cars and not feel too unsafe.  It’s not that you feel safe; after all, large one-ton or two-ton metal objects are passing by you about two to three feet away at high speed.  But there’s room, as long as Driver X is paying attention and isn’t drunk.

So I usually don’t venture far from the apartment.  I had chosen the apartment because it was three blocks from a very small cluster of three restaurants, two hair salons, and an interior decorator.  I haven’t needed to my hair done, and otherwise, all shopping requires a drive.  The restaurants are good, though.

In seventh grade, I did a science project which asked (a) could a normal everyday person construct a fission nuclear weapon, using only publically available information and only by obtaining materials without requiring any special clearance (answer: yes), and (b) based on, again, publically available information, what would the yield of said weapon be and what would its destructive radius be (answer: about 10-15 kilotons, with a destructive radius slightly smaller than Hiroshima).  Walking across San Antonio gave me an eerie reflection of that project, because the epicenter of a roughly 15 kiloton fission weapon would utterly destroy the center of San Antonio, but importantly, it would leave a concentric zone about a mile wide, starting about a mile distant from ground zero, where buildings would be approximately destroyed but not entirely destroyed, and where damage to people would come more from collapsing buildings than from the actual heat of the central fireball.  Sure enough, central San Antonio has a diameter of about a mile to a mile and a half, and the concentric ring around that – call it a mile wide – consists of an urban wasteland.  Multilane concrete highways with the dusty appearance of having dealt with too many flooding events intermix with parking lots, mid-century buildings surrounded by wire fencing and marked as being “possessed by order of the Sheriff,” fleabag hotels (never stay at a “Best Value Inn of America” if you can help it), gas stations with cracked windows, and those light industries that should be dead in a technology-driven era but somehow hang on because of incredibly cheap long-term rental rates – lithographers, plumbing and restaurant wholesale suppliers, paint supply companies and the offices of painting subcontractors.  And also the seedier gay bars, seeking custom from leather daddies and bikers, and 1960s era breakfast-specializing diners with fancy space-age designs, placed there when the lithographers and plumbing suppliers were richer, relatively speaking, and could afford tax-deductible business lunches of chicken-fried steak with sweet tea and peach pie for dessert.

I thought of the concentric circles I had drawn over the motorist club maps of Portland, Maine, and Manhattan, and drew them in my mind over the map of San Antonio, and there was a perfect fit – just where the total devastation ended was where the urban core, such as it was, ended too.  And the next ring out looked like what I’d expect San Antonio to look like if you had detonated your crude but functional gun-design U₂₃₅ Little Man weapon roughly close to the Alamo, waited 48 hours for the primary fallout and fast-decay isotopes to wear thin, and went out to see what was happening.

It was humid but not too hot, except when the sun came out from behind the low humid clouds and hit you full force and then the perspiration would come in waves until I found an east-facing building to hide against, and then the air temperature felt comfortable until the building ended and the sun reappeared.  I walked seven miles south, then two miles east, then another mile south until I got to the theater.  Except in the touristy core of downtown, where name-brand bars and hotel lobbies and the Riverwalk of engineered pleasantry combined to attract tourists waiting for a Saturday afternoon flight home or arrived early for the Sunday evening convention kick-off, I saw exactly four other walking people, and three people on bikes.  Two of the bikers were either homeless or barely-homed people who were collecting recyclables for cash.  The other biker seemed lost.  I’m sure he thought the same of me.

The sidewalks appeared and disappeared and reappeared again.  The buildings – outside of Ground Zero and the immediate blast destruction zone – were rarely more than one story high.  The ground was flat, so flat that you started to notice the very slight undulations to it, started to notice where the high ground during flash floods would be, started to look down side streets and see the accumulation of sand and debris from the prior week’s flash floods in street gully bottoms and in yards of the poorer and more flimsy looking houses.  I kept walking; I crossed a three-line railroad crossing, on foot, while a tinted-out 1991 Lexus with chrome super rims caught air on the lip of the crossing going in my direction.  There were dozens of small, burnt-out huts selling tamales, at least a half-dozen laundromats, each house in an identical kind of flat-roofed, burgundy-painted stucco building.  There was a microbrewery next to the railroad tracks next to a tire repair shop.  The trees looked tired and looked like no one loved them, like they were wondering what to do next and crying because of it.  And when you hit a vista – the railroad tracks, a power line corridor, a street closed for construction – you could look down the vista and just see the highways in the distance, two-level, cars whooshing by, terminating the view with their artificial lines.

The vistas gave you sight lines for something else, too.  Outside of the scattered dartboard office towers, the only other monuments on the horizon were fast food and gas station signs.  At major intersections, there would be a handful or maybe a dozen of them – giant McDonald’s arches, or Shell signs, or HEB grocery signs (that’s the local chain) on 150-foot steel poles, high enough and large enough that drivers could see them from at least two miles away because given the speeds most highways move at and the number of lanes you’d have to cross from the outer passing lane to the exit, you need to plan two miles ahead to get off the highway if you’re suddenly inspired to eat at McDonald’s or shop at HEB or realize you need gas and cigarettes at the next Shell station.  I’m not joking about that; in other places – Boston, say, or even the greater Seattle area – you can see a sign a half mile in advance of an exit and have more than enough time to realize you forgot you needed something, have the sign-inspired inspiration that it’s available at the next exit, and still then initiate a move to the right-hand land (UK readers remember we drive on the right here) across at most three or four lanes and still safely get into the exit lane without difficulty.  That’s not the case in Texas.  Signs need to be visible a solid two miles away to indicate to drivers with enough advance notice that they should start planning an exit.  Now.

I walked for about three hours.  I got a couple tacos, which let me store up some napkins to wipe the sun-sweat from me and keep my eyeglasses dry.  The tacos were delicious, in fact possibly the best carne asada tacos I’d ever had.  The local soda was intolerably sugary.  I threw it out and stuck to water.  I got blisters on the soles of my feet, walking way too far on a far too humid day after doing most of my walking in the mile-long air-conditioned office building for the past few weeks.  I made it to the cinema, had a cigarette, and went inside to watch the opera.

I was one of four people in a theater built for two hundred.  I’m not in the right place.

After the opera was over – and it was lovely, although Aïda is sort of the Dallas of operas, so over-the-top blingy that you kept waiting for Ramedes to spin around and realize he was in a shower having a daydream – I got on a bus, my feet too sore to deal with the return walk, and went back towards my neighborhood.  I met someone for a drink, someone who I had met at a random gathering earlier in the week.  He was great, but he also encouraged me to get out of San Antonio.  He was looking to get out too – one of the places he was thinking about was Seattle, oddly enough.

One of my cherished moments with the ex-girlfriend was the time she asked me what I’d miss most about England, when I’d inevitably leave.  I said it was the urban planning.  She didn’t so much laugh as she snorted with disdain.  She didn’t have perspective back then, and I’m curious as to whether she’s gotten any since.  In any event, she’s never been to Texas.

I can now say I’ve lived in Texas.  And I miss England exponentially more so after the last month.  I miss greenbelts, and urban transit planning, and downgraded motorways, and investment in high-speed rail.  I miss deep green instead of brightened khaki; I miss dull drizzle instead of torrential downpours off the Gulf of Mexico.  I miss walking cities, and streets with not enough capacity for cars but sidewalks with all the space you need to walk – without disruption, without breaks, without desiccated shrubs blocking you every hundred feet.

What do I miss most of England?  The urban planning.  I hate it when I get it right.