Texas – they say, or was it in a song? – is full of wide open spaces. “The Wide Open Spaces of Texas” must have been a lesser-known Western swing hit. Or not. The [Dixie] Chicks did one called “Wide Open Spaces,” which is clearly about coming of age and leaving home, and vaguely the West, but not as specific as Texas.
You don’t have to drive very far from urban and suburban Texas to find the spaces. Head south on US 281, which can be picked up in the urban-suburban conglomeration that is the northern half of Bexar County. The further south you go on that road, which becomes I-37, the more sparse the population and buildings become. Soon you pass into Atascosa County.
The increasingly arid land flattens out and the brush is pretty thick, browns and yellows and grays, maybe a less wild version of the thorny Nueces Strip further south. Or something like the Hill Country, but no hills, and few well-to-do city dwellers or retirees taking up residence there. Many of the Atascosa County residents are of the bovine sort, though I didn’t see that many cattle from the road, as one does sometimes. But they’re out there, the 2022 Census of Agriculture tells me: more than 65,000 head in the county that year, which sounds like a lot, but this is Texas. Plenty of counties have that many and many more.
A scattering of crops is also raised in the county, but for real economic action there’s the service industry, like in most places, and some oil. A scattering of pumpjacks is visible from the highway. That’s Atascosa County, a scattering of this and that. But with a family connection: my mother spent part of her formative years in Jourdanton, the county seat, and periodically even as late as the 1990s (I think), she would visit old friends there. I went with her sometimes in the ’70s.
From San Antonio, I-37 continues southeast through Atascosa, Live Oak and Jim Wells counties, to Nueces County, whose seat is Corpus. A few towns tick by, but not many: Campbellton, Whitsett, Swinney Switch (a fun name), Mathis, with slightly larger burgs just beyond the immediate highway: Three Rivers, George West, Sandia.
Choke Canyon State Park is some miles to the west of the road, and its reservoir is not visible, except in signage. But looking at an online review, it’s clear that while the territory may be arid, not too much to support all kinds of fauna.
“Stayed 2 days in a cabin,” houstonphotojourney says [all sic]. “Saw tons of javelinas and their babies, white tailed deer, gorgeous green jays were all over the park, wild turkeys, vermillion flycatchers, orange crowned warblers, ladder backed woodpeckers, downy woodpeckers, crested caracara, a wilson’s snipe, common ground doves, golden fronted woodpeckers, western meadowlarks, american coots, long billed thrashers, killdeer, verdin, had regular evening bunny visitors.”
We found some wide open spaces at a cemetery in Corpus Christi last week – at least in an urban context. Or barely urban, since the neighborhood around the cemeteries features a scattering of houses (that word again), a lot of vacant lots, darkened landscape and a large part of the city’s petrochemical industry in the near distance, toward Nueces Bay.
A graveyard that humanity is forgetting. Guess that is the fate of the majority of all graveyards so far. A scattering of stones are upright and legible, despite that.
Most are not.
Entire family plots are now anonymous, at least to casual visitors like my brothers and I.
There isn’t any signage to identify the cemetery that I could see. It was just some city blocks, if you can call them that, cobbled together as a burial ground, but it’s been a long time since any of the graves were new.
I knew from reading that a place called Bayview Cemetery was the historic cemetery to visit in Corpus. Early settlers are there, along with participants of the war with Mexico, marked by a fair number of standing stones, at least to judge by the photos. The kind of place at which the local historical society conducts periodic tours.
The cemetery we’d gone to was called Bayview on the electronic map. Turns out the historic one is called Old Bayview on the same map, but simply Baywiew in some of the other materials on line. Anyway, to get to the historic Bayview from the less picturesque Bayview, we had to deal with this knot of highways a bit to the east. If you’re going to be a big city in Texas, or at least aspire to be one, you need flyover expressways, and lots of ’em.
We didn’t make it. Instead of going to the cemetery, I managed to get in the lane to crosses the Harbor Bridge to North Beach, where we planned to eat anyway. Later, as we started on the way home, visiting the historic cemetery was again flummoxed by a wrong lane in the tangled overpasses. In cases like that, I take it as a sign, or at least a suggestion, to visit that place some other time.
At one point, I did stop across the street to check Google Maps and we were treated to a view of Corpus Christi Electric Co.
If that doesn’t say built during 1960s, I don’t know what does. And so it was: 1965. Originally the Lew Williams Chevrolet Dealership, designed by Donnelly and Spear, with Wallace R. Wilkerson as structural engineer – something worth noting for a structure like this.
“Prominently sited at the intersection of two main thoroughfares, the circular former auto showroom links a set of eight hyperbolic paraboloids that dynamically thrust upward at each of their pointed ends,” says the Society of Architectural Historians. “At the time, the showroom’s 185-foot clear interior span was considered as the largest to be erected in concrete in the United States.”