Merle Haggard once said it best in the song Big City (Turn Me Loose): “I’m tired of this dirty old city.Entirely too much work and never enough play.”
That was surely the case when I moved from the Windy City of Chicago with a population of nearly 2.7 million people to Port Lavaca, Texas, a small and quiet coastal community in Calhoun County with a population just over twelve thousand. I moved here to try and kick start a freelance writing career I had been thinking about since 2006 and fell into the migrating droves of people that have yet again moved south and west to change their fortunes, like they did in days that are long gone in the past.
I was greeted by a location that is ideal for a change of pace for a person tired of seeing cracked sidewalks and grumpy people, but also a city that offers a steep learning curve for a person born and raised near concrete towers rather then open lands and a lake rather then the overwhelming expanse of the bay and the Gulf.
The journey from Illinois to Texas made me appreciate the beauty and wonder of being in wide open spaces that, although are not quite shunned by people who live in urban areas, they are probably as forgotten as the simple enjoyment of being able to trust your children in the front yard alone or being able to reconnect with Mother Nature just outside your front door.
As we moved further south, I watched the game being played out on the highways as the ratio of cars to trucks started to rapidly slide into a war of numbers, the compact car of the city or the functional truck of the country; and the war was rapidly shifting in the truck’s favor. Besides being in an array of shapes and colors and designs, the trucks were also marked by the accessories that showed their owners personalities, from the rims to the hunting lights and gun racks down to the logo laden mud flaps that advertised beer, brand names and even a sexy girl or two.
I was also rewarded with the sun’s warmth, something that had left Chicago’s skies sometime before the start of October and had completely disappeared by the time Trick or Treating had begun on Halloween. There was quite a sense of comfort knowing that instead of being in the middle of a blizzard this winter, like I was last February, I might actually be enjoying sitting by the water next to the pier while my former city brethren shivered in the cold and scraped ice off their car windshields.
A sense of history also engulfs this area that is harder to come by in a city with an abundance of museums, but not enough standing monuments to the past. Museums can be stuffy academic places, that, try as they may, can never give you a sense of exactly what the past might have felt like.
It is one thing to view history behind a glass case or in the pages of a book, but quite another to be surrounded by it as you walk down the street and run your hands along a structure that may have once been touched in the nineteenth century by someone long gone, but not any less important when all the ships come in.
Fashion is another thing that can shift when you travel over a long enough distance and this was the case for me as I saw a change from over-expensive clothing designed to flash a brand at you to envy rather then being worn for purposeful use to more comfortable items that seemed to be not only more relaxed but more practical as well. Camouflage, John Deere and Carhart were in while Gucci, Nike and Reebok were most definitely out, and good riddance. The new fashion was based more around wearing what worked for working than what worked to show off your peacock feathers to the rest of the flock.
Another interesting aspect were the local, independently owned shops, both along the main streets and the side roads, where layaway is not something that went out with the Ronald Reagan’s administration and most stores sold a little bit of everything to accommodate their clientele. It was something that was reserved for movies and television shows for a city boy and it was a welcome change to the corporate mentality that has taken over most of the country.
Being able to slightly haggle over the price of a prized violin was a joy to attempt, although I did not ‘engage’ too much as I am not used to such transactions where the price is possibly negotiable.
Which was not to say that anyone was ever less then polite and friendly. Actually it was quite the opposite as everyone seemed to greet you not only as a potential customer but also as a person as well.
I guess what another classic country song stated ended up being true. When it is all said and done, you can love a town that has personality and a unique sense of self, but you “just can’t say I love you to a street of city lights”.
Freelance writer Thomas Spychalski has been writing for a variety of websites and web zines since 2006, as well as co-editing and writing much of the content for the up and coming UK cult media site Cult Britannia. He also provides a weekly NBA basketball column for the site ShattertheBackboard.com. and was a contributing writer to the book Ultimate Regeneration, which is being sold both on Lulu and Amazon.
He can be reached at thomasspychalski@hotmail.com .
