My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere Read Online Free PDF

Then, one afternoon, I drove out to the Racquet Club—which used to have George W. Bush as a member—to attend a party hosted by a local mortgage company. The clubhouse was cool and whitewashed, the lawns were silken and lush, and when the kids did cannon balls into the swimming pool, the water roared like applause. All the other guests at the party were in real estate, and they gathered in the shade of a live oak tree, snacking on hors d’oeuvres and chatting about the annual performance of Summer Mummers, the local vaudeville troupe, and the upcoming season of high school football, which is by far the biggest sport around.
    It is a pretty nice time to be a real estate broker in Midland. It is not as nice as it was in, say, 1980, when you could show people only two or three houses and know they would snap one up at any price. “This was not the real world back then,” Kay Sutton, who owns Century 21 in Midland, explained to me. “My daughter would shop and have lunch at the country club, and she didn’t know that there was any other way people lived.” Back then, so many new houses were going up that contractors were brought in from all over the country and had to camp out in RVs and tents.
    These days are middling; still, the agents were feeling easy and the mortgage company was flush enough to have ordered shrimp. “It’s the high price of oil,” Kay Sutton said. “It makes people optimistic.” When people are extremely optimistic, they want to live in a fancy development like Saddle Club North or Green Tree Country Club Estates, with maybe an attached three- or four-car garage and a view of the golf course. The best houses have swimming pools and lawns that are as soft as lamb’s wool—real luxury in a place where a gallon of drinking water can cost more than a gallon of gas. “Of course, everyone dreams of mature trees,” Kay Sutton said. “But it’s just a dream. You can’t have both a new house and mature trees.”
     
     
     
    RIGHT NEXT TO MY HOTEL was a café called the Ground Floor, the unofficial clubhouse of a different Midland. The Ground Floor was opened in 1996 by a real estate investor from Seattle named John Nute; he put in free Internet access, sponsored live music and poetry readings, and made the restrooms available to anyone who walked in the door. The Ground Floor is across the street from Centennial Plaza, one of those sterile brick-and-concrete urban parks, and once the café opened, the two places quickly filled with kids. “A lot of us misfits sort of found each other by hanging out at Centennial Plaza and the Ground Floor,” a seventeen-year-old named Barbara Lawhon explained to me one afternoon. “We’d sit around writing poetry and playing music. It was a really big deal.”
    By 1997, Nute says, Friday night crowds at Centennial Plaza had grown to two hundred teenagers. Some of them were skateboarders and in-line skaters, who began doing a move on the park benches called grinding, which tears the benches to shreds. By the next summer, a city ordinance forbidding skateboarding and in-line skating in Centennial Plaza was being strongly enforced, and Nute’s business dropped off by more than two-thirds.
    The year before the ordinance was enforced was one of the only times Barbara liked living in Midland. “Growing up here sort of sucked for me,” she explained. “We were basically poor. Midland is all about money. All the rich kids get into upper-level classes, even though they can’t spell. In the first day of honors English in eighth grade, our teacher made us stand up and say our names and why we wanted to be in an honors class, and then say what our parents did for a living. And your parents’ occupation is listed on the roster for band and for some of the other clubs, too. It’s gross.” In Midland, the nickname for spoiled preppies is “white hats,” because of the fashion for wearing white painter hats with college logos. I told her I’d gone to the Midland