The Texas-Shaped World

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/insider/the-texas-shaped-world.html

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Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights from The New York Times. In this postcard, our Houston bureau chief considers “the singular, curiously drawn image that somehow encapsulates, with a few right angles and big bends, a state of 27 million people.”

HOUSTON – I was on a highway headed to West Texas the other day. A grocery-store chain’s eighteen-wheeler sped by and I studied the side of the truck. It was plastered with a juicy close-up of a steak on a grill. The meat was shaped like the state of Texas.

I was still processing this information, dwelling on what it said about Texas’s love for Texas (and for trucks and steak), when I noticed something staring back at me on my windshield. The state-issued vehicle registration sticker on the windshield’s bottom corner had a mini-logo in the center: a Texas flag in the shape of Texas. Then I thought about the cashier at that hair salon in Houston: She had a tattoo of the shape of Texas on her hand, with a star marking East Texas, where she is from. And I thought about the Texas-shaped cheeseburgers at the late Arnold Burgers in Amarillo. And the map in that state report from 2013.

The obscure report, prepared by the Texas Department of Public Safety, notes on page 11 that Texas, spanning more than 260,000 square miles, is larger than France and twice the size of Germany. To illustrate this point, the agency used a graphic showing the outline of Texas on a map of Europe. San Antonio was in northern Italy, Amarillo was south of Amsterdam and Nacogdoches was somewhere outside Vienna. It was a simple mapping technique to show scale, but it seemed to me to tap into the secret, shameless fantasy of the state America loves to debate and berate: the Texas-shaped world.

Indeed, the shape of Texas shapes Texas.

I see it carved onto the sides of highway overpasses and on T-shirts and in magazine ads. You can eat waffles shaped like Texas at the Vickery Cafe in Fort Worth and the Texan Diner in Haslet, and you can dive into the Texas-shaped Texas Pool in Plano, as long as you wait 30 minutes after eating the waffles. It wasn’t the pictures of Texas-shaped guitars, tequila bottles, coffee mugs and carving boards that surprised me on the Pinterest account called Things Shaped Like Texas. It was the Texas-shaped sinks.

The shape of Texas is the Rorschach test deep in the heart of the Texas psyche: the singular, curiously drawn image that somehow encapsulates, with a few right angles and big bends, a state of 27 million people.

“The shape’s not perfect,” says Bud Kennedy, a longtime columnist for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “It has jagged edges and sharp points and smooth lines. But it’s not some boring box shape. It’s a great brand, and not just on cattle. I went to Iowa four years ago for one of the presidential debates. There’s a lot of homespun sense of place in Iowa, but there was no place where people served me waffles the shape of Iowa.”

A few states identify with their shapes, but not many. When I lived in New York City, I never met anyone with a tattoo shaped like New York State and I never drove past a giant New York-shaped steak on the highway. Maybe Texas is so big that it needed one easy symbol, and a ‘T’ or a cowboy boot or a chicken-fried steak didn’t quite sum it up. Maybe its obsession with its shape is one of many age-old ways that Texas likes to separate itself from the rest of the states. No other state in the continental United States operates its own power grid, is creating its own state-run gold depository and no longer honors last-meal requests by condemned inmates. It’s hard to squeeze any of that onto a T-shirt or tattoo.

The business of constructing all this Texas-shaped stuff is serious business. In downtown Houston, a swarm of people have been designing, building and tinkering with the Texas-shaped lazy river at the Marriott Marquis Houston, which opens in November. The 140,000-gallon river forms the outline of a rooftop terrace shaped like Texas. The terrace and river cost roughly $10 million to build.

Waffles are far cheaper than pools — a Texas-cut waffle at the Vickery Cafe is $5.69.

I asked Curtis James, the owner of the Vickery and the co-owner of the Texan Diner, what happens if a patron orders, say, a nonstate-shaped regular old circular or square Belgian waffle. “It’s always Texas-shaped,” he replied.

Mr. James, a native Texan, said the idea to serve Texas-shaped waffles came from “my waffle guy,” his contact at a waffle mix and waffle iron distributor. “The guy offered a Texas-shaped waffle iron.”

The distributor that supplies Mr. James with his Texas-shaped irons and helps give the people of Fort Worth a Texas-shaped breakfast is Carbon’s Golden Malted. It is headquartered in Indiana.