Scale, Geography, and the Five Texases

People who have never been to Texas tend to think of it as one thing. People who have driven across it know better. There are at least five distinct Texases, and they share a state government more than they share a landscape or a climate or a way of life.

The Piney Woods of East Texas belong to the humid South. The trees are longleaf pine and loblolly, the air in summer is thick and still, and the culture carries the weight of the Deep South all the way to the Louisiana border. Drive three hours west from the Louisiana line and the trees thin out and the blackland prairie opens up, dark clay soil so fertile it produced cotton fortunes and now produces soybeans and grain sorghum.

This is the old plantation belt, and the cities of the I-Thirty-Five corridor grew out of it. Keep driving west and the country rises. The Hill Country of central Texas is limestone country, cedar and live oak, spring-fed rivers that run clear and cold even in summer.

The Edwards Plateau lifts the elevation gradually until you hit the Caprock Escarpment, the geological cliff that separates the Rolling Plains from the Llano Estacado, the high flat tableland of the Panhandle. Up on the Llano, the sky is enormous. In winter the wind comes from the north without anything to stop it.

Far to the west is a Texas that most Texans have never visited: the Trans-Pecos, the basin and range country beyond the Pecos River, where the Chihuahuan Desert meets the Davis Mountains and the Guadalupe Mountains and the canyon country of Big Bend. It receives less than twelve inches of rain per year in many places. It lies roughly five hundred miles from Dallas.

All of this is one state. The only thing stranger than the scale of Texas is that it works.