Houston skyline Amid the city’s ribbons of freeway and corporate spires, says the author, the sky offers "a huge, open relief."

Erin Trieb/ Getty Images

Southern Comfort

Celebrated poet Mark Doty succumbs to Houston's humid charms

  • By Mark Doty
  • Smithsonian magazine, October 2008

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    Mark Doty

    Southern Comfort

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    The city's a world capital of erasure. I'll often go away for a few days and return to find a familiar building gone. In fact, it's so common to drive down some street and find the built landscape changed that one loses the very habit of familiarity. I find it almost impossible, in a way that's not true of any place else I've lived, to remember what's gone. What stood on that corner last year? What was here before they built those new condos with the coffee/wine/tapas bar on the first floor? The past starts to seem irretrievable. There's a neighborhood near downtown called Freedmen's Town, for instance, that gained its name from a 19th-century community of former slaves. The streets were lined with small, orderly houses of the kind called "shotgun," one room opening into the next, so that if the front door were open you could see—or fire a shotgun—all the way out the back. These repositories of history are almost entirely gone now. In a flash, after decades in which the exurbs seemed to be most peoples' goal, it became fashionable to live downtown. So the old neighborhood disappears, to be replaced by something more anonymous, and while I tend to think the destruction of the past is regrettable, I admit I've had my preconceptions brought up short.

    A friend asked a black student if he'd visited the city's historical African-American enclaves, and the student said, "Why would we want to see that?" That's a characteristically Houstonian attitude: What's so hot about yesterday? Let's go forward, let's see who we can be now. A historical preservation organization has been raising concerns that a handsome Art Deco theater in the city's River Oaks neighborhood will be torn down to build a high-rise. But I've come to understand the principle at work, if not its application: Houston is about the new, about transformation and ambition, the making and remaking of the self and the environment. Of course we make mistakes, but in ten years they're gone, and there's space for the next set of possibilities.

    Whatever they are—our hopes, successes and mistakes—they're put in perspective by what Shakespeare called "this brave o'erhanging firmament." When the clouds conjoin and a storm pushes up from the Gulf, look out. I've seen a tornadic tropic fury pour in, tingeing the day an evil green, and the whole city suddenly resembles some underwater kingdom. Wiser drivers pull over and wait for the storm to pass. The foolhardy plunge forward, plowing through channels of rainwater filling the intersections. Sometimes whole school buses float away. Everyone hopes for reprieve. Which won't be long in coming, so that we can forget about the sky and return to the theater of our aspirations, the daily traffic, this new city's strange promises and invitations.

    Mark Doty's most recent books include Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems and his memoir Dog Years. In November 2008, Doty received the National Book Award for poetry for Fire to Fire.

    It doesn't take long in Houston to realize that the beauty of the place is in the sky. The swamplands and fields that became the fourth-largest city in the country are almost entirely flat, and the availability of cheap land and an exuberant appetite for sprawl have kept most of the town low-slung and horizontal. So the sky seems vast, and from any parking lot you can watch big white towers of cloud sail up from the Gulf of Mexico 50 miles to the south as if they were navigating the ship channel beneath them. The expanse of sky is so wide, there's often more than one thing going on. Rain may darken the western rim while a fierce sun illuminates cloud towers in the center and a brilliant blue fills the east. How can you forecast the weather when it's doing three things at once?

    I've only just started describing the place, and already I've had to employ a whole vocabulary of scale: largest, vast, big, wide. Indeed the sky's a huge, open relief from all the busyness below, but that cluttered landscape is itself immense. Houston's a universe of visual detail. Drive down the freeway (this is a city built on the premise of the personal vehicle, a private sphere to propel you through public spaces) and you become a reader of the telegraphic messages the city pulses out all day, all night: Bail Bonds, Paternity Tests, Taqueria, Weight Loss, Wireless, Margaritas, No Credit? Bad Credit?, God's Got a Plan for You, Gentlemen's Club, Nails, BBQ, Christian Singles. The city's welter of signs is a crazy patchwork of human desires given material form.

    I've been coming to Houston for a decade now, teaching one semester each year in one of the country's best creative writing programs. I used to joke with my friends in the Northeast that every fall I descend into Texas like Persephone, only to return, come spring, into the light. But after a few years, my feelings about the place shifted. I can tell you everything that's wrong with it: no zoning, bad air quality, impossible climate. Tiny, malicious mosquitoes so tough and persistent you get bitten on Christmas Day. Poor drainage, so that the ubiquitous storms create floods of biblical proportion. It's harder to name just what it is about the place that's gotten under my skin, holds my attention here, makes me want to come back.

    In spite of its international petroleum-based economy, its layered ribbons of freeways and corporate spires, Houston still feels Southern. Imagine a hybrid of New Orleans and Los Angeles, with a dash of Mexico City thrown in. True, it doesn't have the regional feel it once did, but you can still find it in my neighborhood, Montrose, an arts/alternative/liberal district near the center of town. Here the city's splendid tradition of patronage is on its best display, so the great old live oaks thrust their bowing branches out beside the Cy Twombly Gallery and the Rothko Chapel. The limbs dip perilously toward the ground, and the roots heave the sidewalks beneath them into little concrete alps, but since nobody walks anywhere it doesn't make much difference. In summer the trees resound with cicadas, like electronic versions of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir chorusing an insanely repetitive song. Gangs of bronzy black birds—boat-tailed grackles—prefer smaller trees in busier areas; they like grocery store parking lots and the drive-through lanes at the Taco Cabana, and they shriek and holler long into the night, as if in avian parallel to the traffic below. They're the loudest part of a plethora of urban wildlife: opossums, raccoons, the occasional snake slithering across the road, a sadly large population of stray dogs. Coyotes roam the cemetery north of Buffalo Bayou, where Howard Hughes is buried. All over town, tiny green lizards hold their heads up with notable alertness. My friend Mark's iguana, a giant version of those local denizens, escaped into a wisteria arbor and remained there for months before finally consenting to be lifted down.

    Southern culture still lingers. There is, for instance, conversation with strangers. In my other life, in New York City, I'll walk into a deli and the guy behind the counter will shout, NEXT, and I shout back, COFFEE WITH MILK NO SUGAR. This brusque exchange is not rude, though visitors sometimes think otherwise; it is designed to make life easy for a large number of people, part of the unwritten civil contract that makes an enormous city work. If the server or I behaved this way in Houston, we would be seen as rude or crazy or both. Our exchange would more likely go something like this:

    — How are you today?
    — I'm doing well, thank you, and I sure am glad it's not as warm as it was.
    — Oh, me too, I was just melting in that. Now what can I get for you?

    I understand that this is simply social convention, so maybe I shouldn't find it so touching, but I do. When I first arrived, I went to a Whole Foods store in my new neighborhood to order some dinner from the deli there, and after I'd asked for some grilled chicken breasts the server said, "Would you like some green beans with that?" in a warm East Texas inflection, and I found myself tearing up then and there, almost unable to say yes. Hers was a version of the voice of my grandmother, who was from Tennessee and spent her life pleasing people with food. Would you like some green beans with that? meant I love you with all my heart, and what can I do to make you happy?

    This particularly Southern social fabric, with its suggestion of a slower pace of life, no hurry in all the world, is eroding. That's not entirely a bad thing; in comes new energy, more urbane possibilities, new futures. Since Houston is about transformation, it seems by nature to be a city without much allegiance to history. If there were a motto on the town flag, I think it might read NO NOSTALGIA.

    The city's a world capital of erasure. I'll often go away for a few days and return to find a familiar building gone. In fact, it's so common to drive down some street and find the built landscape changed that one loses the very habit of familiarity. I find it almost impossible, in a way that's not true of any place else I've lived, to remember what's gone. What stood on that corner last year? What was here before they built those new condos with the coffee/wine/tapas bar on the first floor? The past starts to seem irretrievable. There's a neighborhood near downtown called Freedmen's Town, for instance, that gained its name from a 19th-century community of former slaves. The streets were lined with small, orderly houses of the kind called "shotgun," one room opening into the next, so that if the front door were open you could see—or fire a shotgun—all the way out the back. These repositories of history are almost entirely gone now. In a flash, after decades in which the exurbs seemed to be most peoples' goal, it became fashionable to live downtown. So the old neighborhood disappears, to be replaced by something more anonymous, and while I tend to think the destruction of the past is regrettable, I admit I've had my preconceptions brought up short.

    A friend asked a black student if he'd visited the city's historical African-American enclaves, and the student said, "Why would we want to see that?" That's a characteristically Houstonian attitude: What's so hot about yesterday? Let's go forward, let's see who we can be now. A historical preservation organization has been raising concerns that a handsome Art Deco theater in the city's River Oaks neighborhood will be torn down to build a high-rise. But I've come to understand the principle at work, if not its application: Houston is about the new, about transformation and ambition, the making and remaking of the self and the environment. Of course we make mistakes, but in ten years they're gone, and there's space for the next set of possibilities.

    Whatever they are—our hopes, successes and mistakes—they're put in perspective by what Shakespeare called "this brave o'erhanging firmament." When the clouds conjoin and a storm pushes up from the Gulf, look out. I've seen a tornadic tropic fury pour in, tingeing the day an evil green, and the whole city suddenly resembles some underwater kingdom. Wiser drivers pull over and wait for the storm to pass. The foolhardy plunge forward, plowing through channels of rainwater filling the intersections. Sometimes whole school buses float away. Everyone hopes for reprieve. Which won't be long in coming, so that we can forget about the sky and return to the theater of our aspirations, the daily traffic, this new city's strange promises and invitations.

    Mark Doty's most recent books include Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems and his memoir Dog Years. In November 2008, Doty received the National Book Award for poetry for Fire to Fire.


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    Comments

    As a native Houstonian now serving in the United States military, and having traveled to a few far away places, I have come to know that there is no place like Houston. Mark, you definitly hit it on the head. There are so many things to dislike about the city and where it sits, menacingly on the Texas coast. The unpredictable weather, the traffic, and the mistakeably ever-changing scenary. Yet, there is that something that always draws you back. Be it a stronghold on old-world Southern charm with the freshness of change, or just the completely different atmosphere that it provides to all those who inhabit it. Houston is a one-of-a-kind. Thanks so much for making us proud to endure what Houston has to offer.

    Posted by Laurel on October 4,2008 | 01:53PM

    I first learned about the term "closet cities" when I moved to Houston. I lived in West University Place, smack in the middle of Houston. Where else in the U.S. could I live a suburban type setting with live oak trees surrounding me and still be symphyony ten minutes from the opera, symphony and major theater? Houston also can show the rest of the country what the year 2020 will be. Ethnic populations and racial group swork and interact there daily in a friendly manner that makes the city and large medical center work for everyone. I moved from Houston to Baltimore a year ago. Although I don't miss the bad air quality, I do miss much about a city that is friendly and has much to offer culturally

    Posted by Linda Z. Nieman on October 10,2008 | 08:41AM

    I heard about this article on The HAIF, and I have to say it is spot on. No article in years has so adequately captured the real flavor of Houston as this. Occasionally the New York Times comes close, but can't resist making childish East Coast elitist jabs. Congrats on an article well written. I hope it brings many people to the Bayou City.

    Posted by Mike on October 11,2008 | 02:04PM

    When I used to visit Houston for business - before succumbing to its charms and moving here - I noticed the sounds. I'd step out of my downtown office and hear the roar of birds in all the trees, so loud it could drown out conversation. We're in the time of year when the birds are especially active again, and last night as we sat on the patio of the Black Labrador in Montrose, eating and watching a group of children play with the giant chess pieces as the sky turned purple, I heard the birds and thought of those early visits.

    Posted by John on October 19,2008 | 05:14AM

    As a transplant living in Connecticut, I have tried without success for 22 years to explain to my New England friends and neighbors why I would in a heartbeat trade the radiant falls, proximity to NYC and Boston, and historical richness of the Northeast for the bugs, traffic and humidity of Houston. You just did it. And by the way, one year in Houston makes you practically a native!

    Posted by Loretta on October 28,2008 | 08:42AM

    I am originally from Mexico;when I moved to US; Houston was the place for me. I moved to Southern California for a couple of years, only to come back to Houston as soon as possible. It is the southern hospitality, and the "I'm at Home" feeling what keeps me here. I loved this article because it reminded me why I am still in Texas, ohter States may have many things of beauty, but is Houston's PEOPLE the main ingredient in this mixed race soup. Traffic is bad in all big cities, but comming from Mexico City; the Houston traffic is child's play. for a city that spreads out every way, it is very conforting to have world-class Simphony,and Opera Houses, Museum district, Zoo, and Medical Center all near my neiborhood. I find Houston to be my home for the past 22 years. In spite of my background, I am a Houstonian and proud of it!

    Posted by Hector on October 30,2008 | 05:35AM

    Houston is the IT city for me. I lived in Dallas for 10 years prior to coming to Houston and I never could find a soft spot in my heart for Dalls. I don't know if I felt the place was too sophisticated for me, but when I moved to Houston, I loved it immediately. The folks here are very friendly, helpful and I can see why; Houston is very intoxicating; while I know that the humidity is bad, hey, you are always driving, turn the A/C on, our buildings are all air conditioned, your home is too, why complain? Now that fall is here, we are all excited because we know that our winter is going to be very mild compared to many other cities, so think, October, November, December, January, February, March, April - all these great months with the best weather in sight. Think about coming here, we have the best of everything. I think Houston has the best restaurants and can even compete with New York and Los Angeles, we are very close to the beach, 45 minutes, close to the Mexican border, approximately 5 hours; if you are a gambler, drive a couple of hours to Louisiana, another couple of hours to the ancient and beautiful San Antonio "Remember the Alamo" and the plush and quaint Austin city, where the best BBQ is, (in my opinion, go to Salt Lick), I could go on and on........Homes are low priced, our economy is very strong and we just survived a major storm but we are still here and still thriving! We are SURVIVORS and we are good people. Why don't YOU ALL come and spend some time with us during the holidays? You are very welcome! Write me and I will recommend you the best restaurants in town!

    Posted by Ana Maria on November 4,2008 | 12:23PM

    This article is very good. I would like to defend the lack of zoning however. It would be very difficult to make zoning laws now since it would force many businesses to shut their doors. Besides, I like the convenience of being able to find anything I want in any part of the city. Just try to find a gas station when you need one in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex. If we had zoning, we wouldn't have the Beer Can House or the Orange Show or all the other great folk art in this city. It would become just another homogenous city. It certainly makes some neighborhoods interesting. There's a house in a very pricey and traditional neighborhood that cracks me up everytime I see it. The house is painted bright purple and gold, LSU colors I guess. The story goes that he was sued by the homeowners association for some reason and won his case in court. Because the court upheld his property rights and basically said he could build his house anyway he wanted, he decided to paint it purple and gold to get back at the neighbors. I'm not sure the story is true, but the house is definitely a sight to see.

    Posted by Cindy on November 25,2008 | 08:57AM

    Houston has its drawbacks and attractions. There are many new family's and couples that find the cheap housing and suburban lifestyle quite attractive. People in Houston are brought up to respect others and love for others what you love for yourself. This is very difficult to find in other large city's. However many view and enjoy the city through the glass of their vehicles. It can be argued that houston is just a string of Strip malls and paved roads. But for those that love it here; nothing is going to change their hearts.

    Posted by Mohammed A. on January 2,2009 | 06:57AM

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