Dallas / Fort Worth and Me

If you’re into buckin’ broncos, ripsnortin’ bull rides, and some darn good horsemanship, then the Mesquite Championship Rodeo is a great place to visit if you ever find yourself in the Metroplex during the spring and summer months (April through September). Even if you’re not into all that, the MCR will give you get a real eye-opener about what rodeo’s really like, right down to the smell of the sawdust and the snorting of the bulls. The MCR, which bills itself as “north Texas’ premier western family attraction,” is located just 15 miles east of Dallas, not surprisingly in the town of Mesquite, on the west side of Interstate Highway 30. It’s fairly easy to get to, and hard to miss if you’re keeping your eyes open.

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And we’re back, with another exciting episode of — Ride that Train!

When last we met our dauntless hero, he was stuck at Union Station in downtown Dallas, complaining about the employees and waiting for the Trinity Railway Express. Now it’s almost an hour later, and he’s had to wait soda-less in a boring transit center for almost an hour. Fortunately it’s somewhat cool inside, which makes up for the lack of visual stimulation. It’s rather more exciting outside, especially if you like pigeons, but our hero has never much been into squab — and besides, it’s so hot that it’s almost as if Ming the Merciless has ignited another sun in the sky.

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A few weeks ago, I took a nice train trip to Fort Worth with my family. It’s wasn’t one of those purposeful jaunts; it was for entertainment, mostly, but there was a bit of education thrown in there too. Despite the fact that I’ve lived in Dallas for 14 years and DART has been available for most of that time, I’m a Texas boy through and through, and I prefer to gallivant about the D/FW Metroplex in my car. This being the case, I’m not as familiar with the system as I might be. I’ve taken the DART train Red Line from one end to the other (Plano to Westmoreland Road deep in Dallas), but I’d never been on the Blue Line from Garland, and I’d never taken the Trinity Railway Express to Fort Worth.

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The D/FW area, despite its relatively brief cultural history, has some truly interesting architecture to behold. I’m not talking about glass-and-steel monstrosities, though you can find those a-plenty; I mean those things that were built for the ages, the structures that come to mind when anyone thinks of the Metroplex. These are buildings that, if they haven’t already survived decades (or more) of our tear-down-and-rebuild culture, doubtless will, as they’re so striking to look at.

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The city of Dallas is well known for a lot of things, but one of the saddest is how incompetent its police force was back in November 1963. First, they let the President of the United States get assassinated right in front of their noses; then they let the assassin get away and murder a police officer before he was caught; and then, when they did catch the assassin, they let him be executed by a disgruntled restaurant owner while he was in their custody. The Secret Service didn’t have a lot to be proud about back then, either. It really is enough to make you wonder about a conspiracy, but I’m of the opinion that one should never underestimate the power of stupidity. It’s easier to explain the assassination of John F. Kennedy as a result of simple bureaucratic ineptitude.

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December’s one of my favorite months, and not just because of Christmas. In fact, I can take or leave that overly-commercialized celebration of consumerism, thank you, along with all those other winter solstice events that society’s forced down our throats. (And don’t even get me started about Valentine’s Day.)  No, the reason I enjoy December is because it’s cold! I don’t care for the ache in my bad leg*, but the chill on my skin brings me surcease. As I like to say, when you’re cold, you can always pile on more layers; when you’re hot, you can only take so many off before you get in trouble with the law. I know some people really like warm weather, but I sweat when it gets above 70. Why yes, I am big-boned. Why do you ask?

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As you may have guessed, my subtitle for this mini-treatise regarding D/FW’s November weather is, yes, a specimen of that species of literary legerdemain known as the double entendre. In my previous missives, you may have noticed that I’ll occasionally drop in a clever reference to a celebrity who comes from the Metroplex; we’re a hotbed of pop culture, dontcha know. In this case, the “Ice Ice Baby” reference is relevant not merely because November is when we get enough blessed cold for water to occasionally return to its solid state, but also because one Robbie Van Winkle once resided here. He was raised on the mean streets of Carrollton, right between the D and the F in D/FW. It’s where he gained the street cred* that earned him the nickname “Vanilla Ice.”

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In most of the country, October and November are the months when people talk about “Indian summer” — by which I suppose they mean warm, summery days in the fall. I’ve never experienced that, because I live in D/FW. We don’t have Indian summer; we just have plain old summer. It takes the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex a while to catch up with the idea of fall. Although the autumnal equinox occurs somewhere around September 21, that doesn’t mean that our fall actually starts that day. Oh my, no. We’re lucky if it gets in gear before mid-October. Meanwhile, we enjoy the tail end of the summer heat, and try to cram all the activities we can into those days that are actually bearable.

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Ah, September — or should I call you May revisited? September’s just as mild, though it’s kind of like May in reverse: we get the lingering echoes of summer rather than the foreshadowing. This is about the time D/FW starts to recover from the heinous heat and drought of the annual August onslaught. The recovery is gradual, but it’s notable, and not so precipitous that we can’t still enjoy the great outdoors. In fact, it’s easier to abandon the AC and go outside than in has been in months. Of course it’s still summer – that season lasts until mid-October here, no matter what the calendar says — but September summer is much easier to handle than July and August summer.

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