Everything Is Bigger in Texas

Everything is bigger in Texas, right? I made the big move to Texas a few months ago. I haven’t really seen any cowboys or much cowboy hat and cowboy boot wearing people. Granted, Houston is a big urban metropolis but I thought I would see some stereotypical Texans. Maybe once I venture out to cowboy country, once I figure out where that is.

I thought I would experience a bigger culture shock than I actually have. I spent time living in South Dakota, North Dakota, Minnesota, Oregon, and even a brief stint in Wyoming. When I moved to Oregon from Minnesota many years ago it was a big culture shock. The Willamette Valley in Oregon was very different than rural Minnesota.

The biggest shock in moving to Oregon all those years ago was that it was not like in the movies or television shows. Oregon is the West Coast, right? But it was not like how the West Coast was portrayed on the screen at all. In many ways it felt like I had stepped back in time instead of journeying to the epicenter of modern life.  Oregon is an interesting mix of people wanting to hold onto the past and people determined to grab their share of the climb to upward mobility.

I had never seen transients before. Or panhandlers. There’s a lot of that in the Willamette Valley. People actually lived in cardboard boxes along the river. Oh, we had stories back home of hobos following the railroad lines in Minnesota, but not actual transients. The cold weather eliminates the ability for people to camp outside because they’re homeless.

Transients, panhandlers, and a lot of crime. The day I arrived in Oregon the front page of the newspaper had a frontline story about the second murder in a series of suspected cult slayings. I almost turned around and went back home. You become immune after a while, unfortunately. There are murders there almost daily whereas in the area I grew up there was a murder only every few years. Times are changing though. There’s a few murders every year now.

So I worried about the culture shock in moving from Minnesota to Texas but so far it’s felt fine. Maybe it’s the world we live in now or maybe Texas is more similar to Minnesota than Minnesota was to Oregon. Or maybe I’ve traveled and lived in enough areas that the world has gotten smaller for me. When deciding to move here the choice was based on family. I guess when you’re with family that’s the most important thing and what matters in the end.