How Texas Dances, Oh How She Moves
Words and maps to explain the many different types of Texas land
Preconceptions, Misconceptions, and Stereotypes
Parched sand, saguaros, table-top mesas. A lone cowboy on a horse. He ambles through a sepia landscape. A tumbleweed crosses his path. This, folks, is the cartoon Texas. I recall from my high school days a German exchange student who admitted to expecting just this version of Texas. He was surprised at how different it was when he stepped foot on The Dirt for the first time. He also mentioned how he expected to see horses hitched to posts at the entrance to the school as though it were an old saloon. Flapping doors. Spurs a-jinglin’-janglin’. Heavy footsteps on sawdust-covered floors. He worried because he could not ride a horse.
There is a movie (series of shorts actually) on Netflix by the Wachowski Brothers1 called the Ballad of Buster Scruggs. I thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommend the show. But the opening scenes of the first short are exactly the landscape caricature of Texas described above. And this a contemporary movie. No wonder the German exchange student was surprised when he finally laid eyes on Texas. No wonder anyone who relies on the Old Western version of Texas is surprised when they see her for the very first time.
No, dear reader, Texas is not monochromatic shades of brown. Texas is not a treeless expanse of thirsty desert (although we do have our fair share of desert too). How could it be so? Texas is so incredibly huge. She spans over 700 miles in width. She is about 800 miles tall (north to south). Texas land is as diverse as the United States itself. With its 700-mile girth, Texas occupies about 25% of the midsection of the continental United States (approximately 2,800 miles east to west). Texas is 268,596 square miles divided into 254 counties. That is 171,901,440 acres! Folks, can you fathom that? Can you truly conceive of the magnitude of the Lone Star State? I submit that unless and until you have driven across it2 , you cannot grasp the enormity that is Texas.
So what is a humble Realtor and word peddler, a mere speck amongst this vast expanse, supposed to do? Educate them, says the voice from the aether, educate them. So here it is, folks, my attempt to explain my beautiful Texas; how she moves north to south, east to west. How she dances and whirls like the dark-eyed Feleena3 across the prairies, the live oak mottes, the tall pines forests, the hill country, the bayous and swamps, the salt marshes. And, of course, the deserts too. There are plenty of deserts.
Dear reader, to do all of that we will need maps. Lots and lots of maps. But first, a little about the dirt of Texas…
The Dirt.
One of my all-time favorite descriptions of the Hill Country of Texas, how that country and its history, geography, geology, flora, and fauna all conspired to affect not only an entire group of people but a future President of the United States, is a section from Robert Caro’s story of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s early life: The Path to Power4. An excerpt from the book5:
THE HILL COUNTRY was a trap—a trap baited with grass…
To these men the grass was proof that their dreams would come true. In country where grass grew like that, cotton would surely grow tall, and cattle fat—and men rich. In country where grass grew like that, they thought, anything would grow. How could they know about the grass?
Even with the aid of fire, the grass had grown slowly—agonizingly slowly. Some years most of it died, some years all…
…It had grown so slowly because the soil beneath it was so thin. The Hill Country was limestone country, and while the mineral richness of limestone makes the soil produced by its crumbling very fertile, the hardness of limestone makes it produce that soil slowly. There was only a narrow, thin, layer of soil atop the Hill Country limestone, a layer as fragile as it was fertile, vulnerable to wind and rain—and especially vulnerable because it lay not on level ground but on hillsides…
Dear reader, to truly understand Texas (or any land for that matter) one must understand The Dirt on and over which you stand. Sand, loam, clay, silt, sandy-loam, clay-loam, and on and on. Unless you are a farmer, naturalist, or soil enthusiast then these words probably don’t mean much to you. Nor do the words acidic or alkaline or calcareous or limestone. But they define so much of what occurs around us. From the plants and animals to the very water in the ground or flowing through the streams, The Dirt is ubiquitous and everywhere. The Wise Landowner will study it and understand it. The Wise Landownder will know the soil6 as he knows him- or herself.
The following graphic comes from the online Texas Almanac (this is a link) which has an excellent primer on Texas landscapes and soils. I recommend it to any and all land buyer clients; especially those coming from out of state or those moving from one region of Texas to another.
Rain. Oh, sweet rain.
Second only to understanding dirt (and it is a very, very close second) is understanding how water first rains onto and then flows across Texas through its streams, rivers, and (almost all manmade) lakes7 to end finally in the Gulf of Mexico. To grasp all of this there are two maps. The first is an annual rainfall map.
See the changes from right to left. From far southeast to far west there is a difference of 40 inches per year! That is over one million gallons of water per acre of land. Drive east to west over a few dozen miles and you will come across an entirely different ecosystem due to rainfall alone. A person considering land simultaneously in the Dallas Prairies and the Edwards Plateau is considering land in two completely different ecologies of Texas. They do not look the same. They do not feel the same. They do not plant the same. And these pieces of Texas, though they be related by name, do not move the same.
The next map comes from the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD). I find the TPWD website to be a wealth of knowledge and information about all things related to the Texas outdoors. Moving again from east to west one might begin to see a theme: there is a great deal of water in the east. It gets less and less as you move west.
Ecoregions
To bring The Dirt and the water together, to understand the diversity of Texas, one should come to know the ecoregions of Texas. And that is the subject of the next map. But first a note: these ecoregions are not set in stone. They are not official (to my knowledge) nor are they canon nor dogma. An internet search for the phrase ‘ecoregions of Texas’ will yield dozens of maps and each drawn a bit differently. But I like this version the best. And it is from TPWD which lends credibility. And so it is the one that I share.
Notice the names of the regions: plains, deserts, timbers, plateaus, marshes. Notice the variety. Notice how they sweep and glide across the straight lines of the counties. Look at how they bend and stretch. Behold the colorful dress of Texas as she whirls. This is how Texas dances, this is how she moves.
Bringing it all together.
On paper and in practice, we humans divide and subdivide and then sub-sub divide the world into smaller and smaller sections. This is because the world is too big for us to manage as is, and so we must impose upon it those imaginary lines of order that we call states and counties and cities. I am not different. Texas is too big, too much for my little brain to chew all at once. To discuss her, I must divide her into bite-sized pieces that are understandable to both my clients and me as we converse over the phone or via text or email. Fortunately, the folks over at LandWatch.com have already done the hard work of dividing.
This is the last map. This is the map to which, if you are a client of mine and looking over a broad range of Texas, I will refer. It blends geography, ecology, and political boundaries to make a manageable reference. I give you the 29 real estate regions of Texas.
More maps and resources:
NRCS Web Soil Survey: an absolute wealth of soil information. You can zoom down to the acre of a property and the NRCS will tell you what kind of soils it has, how well it will grow crops or grass, moisture retention, production abilities, and much, much more. It all makes my little, nerd heart go pitter-patter.
Texas Water Development Board: If it has to do with water and the state of Texas then this is your resource. Drought maps, rain maps, just all kinds of maps and data. Again: heart goes pitter-patter.
Drought.gov: The misery site. Drought sucks but is a part of life. This is a good resource for information.
Climate.gov ENSO Page: The El Niño-Southern Oscillation is the most fashionable weather pattern out there. That little thing also dictates climate and weather over the continental United States. Fun fact: as of this writing there is a 70% chance of a rare ‘triple dip’ La Niña winter weather pattern, aka ‘hat-trick, aka 3 times in a row. This means more dry and warmer-than-average weather conditions in Central Texas. How did I know this? Because I subscribe to the ENSO blog.
The Matrix, No County for Old Men
And I have many so many times. The miles slip by hour upon hour, minute by minute, second by everlasting second. The visual drone of the highway mashes my brain like so many potatoes. And yet, when asked by a sleepy voice, the answer remains: we are still in Texas, honey, still in Texas…
A reference to the song El Paso as performed by Marty Robbins. One of my fav’s.
I cannot say enough good things about Robert Caro’s entire bibliography on LBJ. Each book is a masterpiece. They are detailed, thoughtful, well-researched and expansive. If you are a Huge Nerd like me and absolutely love history and Texas History then you absolutely must read these books. I have read no book on a single individual that goes so far in describing so well an era and all of the personalities that made it. Caro writes a biography focused on LBJ but the reader gets mini-biographies of all the important people around him as well (e.g. Sam Rayburn, Coke Stephenson). Of all of the hundreds of pages by Caro, my favorite sections are the description of the Texas Hill Country in book one and the mini-biography of Coke Stephenson (one of my heroes) in the second book. I actually listened to all of these books on long drives and while working at the ranch.
For an epic adventure, play the first part of this book as you begin the drive west on Highway 290 from Austin and headed toward Fredericksburg for a wine-tasting.
There is a big difference between ‘dirt’ and ‘soil’. I know this and have preached it many times. And were I the one reading this article it would bug me to no end to see them used interchangeably. Therefore, for those that it may annoy, I humbly beg you for poetic license.