On Texas

by MOLLY WHITEHOUSE

April 2009

This March I found myself in Texas. Big whoop, lots of peo­ple live in Texas. As every­one was sure to remind me, there are ranches in Texas big­ger than my home state of Rhode Island. Yet given the “everything’s big­ger in Texas” aver­age girth I saw, I’m not sure that more land means room for more peo­ple. A few south­ern beau­ties were so big I thought they might try to secede them­selves. But I digress. I wasn’t sure how I was going to fair in this dip spit­ting man’s world. I’m more pro-choice than pro-meth and knew the acronym LGBT long before the NRA was any­thing rec­og­niz­able. Oh well, what’s the worst that could hap­pen? I get shot for tres­pass­ing by a whiskey-logged farmer? At least it would be an enter­tain­ing obit­u­ary. So off I went into the wild red yonder.

As we drove to the ranch we passed a nearby store’s sign that read only “LIQUOR GUNS.” I liked this place already. Imme­di­ately upon arrival the shirts came off and the guns came out– lit­er­ally. This wasn’t a Gold’s Gym gun show. With more mali­cious inten­tions than Mad­off in a syn­a­gogue (too soon?) our blood-thirsty-for-Bambi eyes scanned the hills, hop­ing that some unlucky ani­mal might ven­ture into our rifle’s sights. Hav­ing had no luck with our geno­ci­dal rac­coon hunt that morn­ing, we instead set our sights on the can-laden fridge. Break­fast hadn’t been served yet, but hey, we thought, it’s noon some­where, right? The thing I love about Texas is that peo­ple who would be shipped off to all kinds of coun­selors in other parts of the coun­try (i.e. me) aren’t much dif­fer­ent from all the other cra­zies. I was a fugi­tive on the run from the AA team lurk­ing back north. Per­haps it was this dis­crep­ancy, or the bot­tles of dip spit lit­tered around, or maybe it was just that I had a shirt on, but I sud­denly real­ized that I was out­num­bered: seven South­ern, Repub­li­can boys and… me, hap­pily none of the above.

The smack­ing sound of Rowan* pack­ing a dip shook me from my, ahem, daze.

“Well don’t hit it so hard, it’s not your wife!” Dwayne* called out.

The only girl, I admit­tedly laughed the hard­est at this wit­ti­cism. Clad in a Dixie bikini, drink­ing before noon, get­ting called a gringo on a reg­u­lar basis by four half-Mexican boys, and fir­ing back with plenty of slurs of my own, I wasn’t sure that I was in a posi­tion to be call­ing Dwayne’s com­ment offen­sive. I sup­pose it begs the ques­tion of what should you do. I’m a shoddy fem­i­nist. Gen­er­ally speak­ing I’m a paci­fist too though, and my con­tri­bu­tion to “world peace” and “one love” this sum­mer will be… dove hunt­ing. Let’s see how many birds of peace I can rain down with a shotgun.

* Names have been changed to pre­serve character’s respectabil­ity. My dig­nity, on the other hand, is scarce as a hen’s teeth.

Molly White­house is a sopho­more in Yale College.