"My Favorite Road Trip"

NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

1 MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE ROAD TRIP is on U.S. 90 from San Antonio to Big Bend. We find that July is the best time to go. We usually leave late in the afternoon so we arrive in Del Rio around dusk. We have a wonderful Mexican meal, then spend the next day driving to Big Bend, getting there in time to set up our tent at the campsite before dark. The campsite is usually empty—if anyone is there, it is groups of Germans and Canadians, because most Texans think that it’s way too hot in Big Bend at that time of the year, but the nights are quite cool. Usually you need a jean jacket to stay warm. Along the way, we always stop at Haby’s Alsatian Bakery, in Castroville, for cheese pockets. We sometimes stop in Langtry to check out the ruins. And we like to stop in Marathon to have a late-afternoon lunch. It is just the most phenomenal road trip in the world.

Poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s latest book, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, was published in April by HarperCollins. She lives in San Antonio.

HENRY CISNEROS

2 ABOUT ONE AND A HALF YEARS AGO, I decided to move back to San Antonio from Los Angeles. I did the drive by myself, since my son, John Paul, was already back in school in San Antonio. I stopped the first night in Las Cruces, New Mexico, about forty miles from the border, so I would cross back into Texas first thing in the morning, all fresh. I got up early the next day and stopped at the border, where there is a big concrete marker, and I got out and said a little prayer, thanking the Lord for letting us come back to Texas. Not five minutes later, I got pulled over on Interstate 10. The officer was intent on not cutting me any slack, so I got my ticket and drove on. I stopped in Junction for a midday hamburger. I talked to the proprietor about A&M legends and Bear Bryant and when they used to practice in Junction. Then I drove into San Antonio during a thunderstorm. It was a full day and a rite of passage from one life to the next. Really, a proper welcome back to Texas.

Henry Cisneros is the CEO of San Antonio-based American CityVista, which builds low- to middle-income housing in major metropolitan areas. He was the mayor of San Antonio from 1981 to 1989 and the U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 1993 to 1997.

ELIZABETH CROOK

3 THE HAMSTER, FOR SOME NOW UNKNOWABLE reason, was named Boombernickles. There was also a French poodle named Charles de Gaulle and an earsplitting canary called Bird. The rest of us included my mother and my aunt in the front seat and four children squeezed into the back of the station wagon. We had been living for two years in Washington, D.C., and were going home to Texas. I was eight years old. I remember a fight in the back over a can of shoestring potatoes and a general riot that broke out when my aunt Eileen emptied a baby potty out of the front window without closing the window behind her. I remember my mother stopping the car by the side of the road—long before “journaling” was therapy—to write peacefully in her diary until we finally settled down and there was no noise but the screech of the hamster’s wheel. I possess the powerful homing instincts of a runty pig and recall the feeling that came over me when the landscape began to grow familiar and the flatlands gave way to a few hills. It was close to reverence. Evening was spreading over the ground. I remember riding in silence. We were not on foreign soil anymore. We were in Texas. We were home.

Elizabeth Crook is the author of The Raven’s Bride and Promised Lands. She lives in Austin.

By Henry Cisneros, Elizabeth Crook, and Naomi Shihab Nye. First appeared in Texas Monthly, May 2002. Used by permission of Henry Cisneros, Elizabeth Crook, and Naomi Shihab Nye.