Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | Texas Monthly

Into the woods: when I took my son to Cleveland, in East Texas, to show him the touchstones of my childhood, I discovered that the hometown I knew no longer exists--except in my memory.

Article Excerpt
"What's this?" said my fifteen-year-old son, Tyler, as he pointed to a crawdad squirming on the edge of Double Lake, one of my favorite childhood haunts near my hometown of Cleveland, in East Texas. "It's gross." [paragraph] My grandfather Dock Jarboe had once brought me to this very spot in the Big Thicket. Surrounded by the great stands of pine trees and hardwoods, he had entertained me with stories about how old-timers had hunted in this forest for bears, panthers, and wolves. Now here was my only male child standing on the edge of the lake on a July afternoon, unable to identify a simple crawdad. [paragraph] Tyler planted his size 12 Nikes in the boggy soil--first the left shoe, then the right. His feet made a sucking sound on the wet earth. "Hear that, Morn?" he said. "The land sounds like it's farting." [paragraph] We walked on without speaking, watching fishermen east their lines into the lake and listening to the absurd sound of Tyler's nervous march. Then he asked if he could borrow my cell phone. I explained that he would get no reception here. The woods are too dense. [paragraph] "That's okay. I just want to take a picture," he said as he aimed my cell phone's camera toward the spot where he'd seen the crawdad. "I just want to try and get a shot of this attack fish." He not only got the shot but also entered it ms the new wallpaper on my cell phone. Thus my two worlds--the old, rural Texas of my childhood and the new, urban Texas of my present--collided in a single image.

Tyler and I had gone back to Cleveland so that I could show...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!