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

Park Mall earlier in the week and had overheard a young guy in a white hat talking to two girls who were working at the Athlete’s Foot. “Midland has a lot, a lot, of money,” the young guy was saying as the girls nodded enthusiastically. “There are more Mercedeses here than anywhere in the country. In other places, when kids get cars it’s something like, you know, a Toyota.”
    “There are all these rich kids here,” Barbara said. “They’re doing coke, drinking, partying. They’re totally into football and cheerleading and into trashing cars—just trashing them, for no reason. Everything here is about being trendy. There’s even a trendy church, Kelview Heights Baptist Church, which is trendy because the pastor is on TV.” Barbara said that her mother was a housecleaner. For a while, she had worked at a private club in the Clay-Desta Center, and she told Barbara that many of the younger rich men who were members behaved in a disgusting way. I was lucky to have met Barbara at all, because it turned out that she was planning to move to Austin in a couple of days, and she thought she would be a lot happier there. “It’d be great to live in Midland if you were rich,” she said.
    After a few minutes, Barbara and I were joined by Midge Erskine, one of the few environmental activists in town. Midge is an elegant, silver-haired woman who grew up in the East but came to Midland thirty years ago with her husband, a geologist. In the late seventies, she became unpopular with local oil companies when she protested their practices of dumping contaminated water and keeping their oil tanks uncovered—both of which killed thousands of birds and other wildlife. Recently, Midge began videotaping city council meetings and set up a website, Truthmidlandtx.com, raising questions about local power. In general, the café seemed to be the place where people’s dark suspicions about their hometown surfaced: Why was the Midland Airpark, which has no control tower, still operating? Who was so eager to come in and out of Midland sight unseen? Were police reporting the real crime statistics? How did So-and-so get his money, make his deals, and avoid getting busted? But if the Ground Floor is the meeting place for Midland’s local hippies, poets, folksingers, and Democrats, there may not be enough of them to keep it afloat; these days, the establishment is barely breaking even. Nute blames the city, for having scared away teenagers, and the economy, for having failed to bring a spark back to the city’s downtown. To keep the café going, he was forced to liquidate his investments, and now he has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
     
     
     
    I WENT TO MIDLAND expecting to find an ordinary small city, but nothing about it was ordinary: not its weather or its topography or its history or its economy. People in Midland take in huge amounts of money, they lose huge amounts of money—then they move on to the next day. It’s a manic-depressive city, spending lavishly and then suffering desperately. One afternoon, I was out with Richard Witte, looking at the fanciest neighborhoods in town. “Here’s a fella who lost millions,” he said, passing one sprawling Italianate ranch. “And see that house over there?” He pointed to a white-brick confection with skylights and Palladian windows. “They lost all their money, had to sell every single piece of furniture, the TV, everything. You drive past these houses and you see a big, expensive home, but you don’t know how the people might be living inside.”
    There’s a saying in Midland that whenever you strike oil you go out and get a boat, a plane, and a mistress, and when you lose your money you get rid of them one by one, starting with the mistress. No one mentioned anything to me about mistresses, but several people I met in Midland had been forced to sell their boats and planes. No one seemed ashamed about having lost money: It was like catching a cold—common and