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"Like most passionate nations, Texas has its own private history based on, but not limited by, facts." -John Steinbeck
"Remember the Alamo" was a battle cry in the 1800s to spur U.S. troops in the Spanish War. Now it is a battle cry encouraging tourists to come visit the Alamo's hometown: San Antonio.
San Antonio lined its trickle of river with concrete paths, transforming it into the Riverwalk, where bars and specialty shops beckon. The buildings and grounds of the 1968 Hemisfair (World's Fair) were cobbled into a museum campus. Quaint old adobes were preserved in the part of town where Santa Anna quartered his troops before storming the Alamo and were now home to boutique shops. A downtown plaza housed what the city hailed as "the largest Mexican market outside of Mexico." The city built a large football stadium that hosts only one game a year: the Alamo Bowl.
But perhaps most savvy of all was that San Antonio preserved the nearby missions, including the Alamo. 
San Antonio takes its name from the Alamo's official name, Mission San Antonio de Valero. The 1718 founders were from a town in Mexico whose patron saint was Saint Anthony of Padua, and alamo was Spanish for cottonwood tree--many of which surrounded the Alamo.
In December, 1835, Ben Milam led Texan and Tejano volunteers against Mexican troops in the Battle of Bexar, which was what San Antonio was then called. In late February, they were surprised by the arrival of General Lopez de Santa Anna, self-declared dictator and "the Napoleon of Mexico." On March 6, 1836, he attacked the Alamo and killed its 189 Texas "patriots" (only eight were native-born Texans).1 They had held out for 13 days, partly because crossing the cold desert had Santayana's troops bedraggled by the time they arrived.
Legend holds that Col. Travis drew a line on the ground and asked any man willing to stay and fight to step over--all except one did. That one lived. The facts surrounding the siege continue to be debated. But people "worldwide" (the handout insists) continue to remember the Alamo as a heroic struggle against overwhelming odds. It opened as a museum in 1968, and more than three million people visit annually. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT) preserve it with no funding from the government.
The Alamo was now just a series of low stone walls held together by adobe. Davie Crockett's rifle, powder, and balls are on display, as was a Bowie knife, named for Sam Bowie who died here [pronounced "Booey" by the locals]. A sign on the Alamo walls read, "Only the sturdiest of pioneers came as far as San Antonio, isolated by at least three weeks travel from either Mexico City or New Orleans." GTT was often seen painted on the front doors of houses in the South. It meant "gone to Texas." One Texas pioneer called the state "a heaven for men and dogs, but a hell for women and oxen."
1One underlying cause of the battle was that the Americans wanted to keep their slaves, which they couldn't do if ruled by Mexico, where slavery was illegal. Ironically, one of the few survivors of the battle was a slave.
[The Alamo]
Technically, the Alamo was still a church. A sign ordered, "Quiet, gentlemen remove hats." As I read that, a security guard, a stocky woman with a broken foot, drawled, "Let me know if you have any questions."
She had big blue eyes and a slightly graying ponytail pulled tight on the side of her tan leathery face that bore no make-up. Her Alamo-themed jewelry included a multicolored pastel Alamo brooch, a lapel pin with "Alamo" spelled in rhinestones, and hoop earrings in the middle of which hung metal cutouts in the shape of Texas. On her white shirt hung a nametag that read "Paula."
"When Texas was their own country, er, republic," she began explaining to me, Mexico offered you to buy land real cheap, and these people were having problems in their countries. A lot of people were running away from debt. So they just skipped out from their creditors and came here because they couldn't come get them. [laughter] We had a lot of Irish that came during the revolution. There was nine of them that died here in this battle. They didn't know Texas was in a revolution. But they found out. [laughter] You know, the Irish, they want to fight anyway. A lot of them got over here, though, and they couldn't make it because the Indians marauded so badly. It wasn't until Texas became a state that people really started coming to live here in Texas. Then the United States Army could actually come here. And they started setting up forts and fighting to get those Indians out of Texas.
"There's so much history about these guys. One boy that died here in this battle was born in the Alamo. Look at the names. The real Texans were Mexican. They were born and raised right here on the missions. The rest of the people had come over here, and then they called themselves Texans. A lot of people, they come here, and the only thing they've ever seen is John Wayne's movie. And that's with Mexicans outside the walls, only white people in here. Texas actually is a large conglomeration of a lot of different cultures, kind of like the way the East is. But this revolution really kind of cemented them together under one cause, and it kind of just carried on over into statehood. That's where Texas pride comes from.
"San Antonio," she pontificated, "is actually a multicultural city. Some areas, they do stay to themselves. But there are multicultural offerings, the arts, and theaters, and all the things like that. And then there's our big fiesta. What that is, is a celebration of freedom. We start it on April 21st when Santayana was defeated. One day we celebrate the way the German culture would celebrate freedom. The next another culture. The big finale is everybody just celebrates it their way.
"Yeah," she shook her head, "that Institute of Texas Cultures. [I] Go over there, and I'm there all day. [laughter] It's like, 'Wow, I didn't know that.' You think, 'Oh, it's just all these people from the United States.' It's not just Anglo people, and that's one reason I fell in love with San Antonio. And that's what I like about my job here, too. I meet people from all over the world, different states. I get to know their history of their state, their history of their country and stuff. And so to me this is like a smorgasbord of information for me. You know, I feel like I travel everyday. [laughter] I tease everybody all the time: 'Yeah, we built the Alamo in the right location, right near the mall and the Riverwalk.'
"We have people," she despaired, "who don't realize. They'll try and take a piece of the bar, or they'll just want to write their name on it, and that is a felony. We just had to arrest a young man. He's 20 years old. And he was actually going to college to become a minister. And he just walked up and started working a piece and jerked that piece of wall out. And he was arrested and prosecuted. Like our Rangers told him, too, 'You're becoming a minister. And what is one of the Commandments? "Thou shall not steal."' 
We are very serious about preserving this site. Anybody comes in here and they make fun or laugh or think it's just nothing but a joke, I ask them if they could, please, leave. I can't make them leave, but I can ask them. I just go up to them and say 'Apparently, you don't understand what's happened where you're standing. A little over a hundred men died right where your feet are,' and it humbles them. It will straighten them out.
"It's been hit hard since September 11th. Real hard. I'm lucky that here none of us are going to be laid off. We still have enough people that have gotten over the fear of coming to a monument that's so well-known that they are coming back now. We're not going to let them terrorists ruin our lives. They want you fearing. The day of the attack, we did not close. We were like, 'No.' The whole city closed down. We were the only thing that was open. We just go, 'No, we will not bow to terrorists.' We're going to show them no matter what you do, we're going to win and be open. And people were very surprised that we were open. Some started to take a little wrong attitude about us. But then they realized this is what we need to do. Like I always tell everybody, 'I cross that line everyday.' [laughter] Everyday when I come to work, I walk across that line and I says, 'I will defend the Alamo to the death.' And that's the way most of us do feel that work here. It does that to you. It really does."
[Espuma]
"[Texas is the] place where there are the most cows and the least milk and the most rivers and the least water in them, and where you can look the farthest and see the least." - H.L. Mencken
(Philip Sheridan put it more bluntly: "If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell.")
On the way back into town from the missions, I stopped at Espuma Coffee and Tea Emporium in a converted old house with wood siding painted pastel orange, where I interviewed two Hispanic ladies working the counter. The short, stocky, older one was stuffed into a gray long-john T-shirt and had a round face with big dark eyes. The younger one bore a tan-and-teal sweater that complemented her dark brown skin.
The older one stared blankly at my question, "I have no clue who Hopper is."
"I'm sure you do," the younger one countered. "Nighthawks," she pointed out, "is his famous one of the café at night."
"Oh," the older one glissandoed. "That's one I know. Yeah, that's it; that's San Antonio," she sighed. "It's like that within your own family here. I speak for myself. I live on the street, and literally my brother lives one house over on the other side. I wouldn't know. I never see him.
"I grew up in that neighborhood. I know my neighbor. But we don't mix. We don't socialize." [Her coworker nodded.] "We know who each of us are. 'Oh yeah, I know them.' But if someone asked me, 'What do they do?' I don't know. You know everybody, but you isolate yourself from them.
"Personally, I venture out on my own. So I came this far, to this neighborhood where I work. And I will continue to venture out. [but] As far as the average person here, they're very close-minded. I tell people where I work, and they've never been there."
"You mean," the younger one asked me, "like everybody in their own space? Like they might sit right next to each other but be separate? I don't think I've ever thought about it like that. I think of it as people are close-minded. Like, 'me me me.' Their lives are not changing. I find it not challenging for a big town. Usually," she added, "when you do meet someone who has been somewhere, like different cities or states or countries, they're not from here." ["They're not originally from here," the older one echoed.] "My parents are very different [than me]. They're not that familiar with Texas. They don't even know what we have here. I really do like the downtown area, but I think it's for tourists. That's not for the locals.1
"You can get ethnic food here now," she brightened. "We're not picky, but people here won't try it. We don't even have a place that shows independent films. And even then, it's like two or three films. Because people don't want to have to think here. They want to pick one and just go. They stick to what's known."
The older one agreed, "Right, exactly, with everything, culture, everything. They don't cross that line."
1"San Antonio is for tourists" is the tourism board's motto.
At a used bookstore, I interviewed the woman behind the counter. She was heavy-set, with long dark hair flowing from her spherical head. She had on a red flannel shirt over a multicolored tie-dyed T-shirt on which rested a dog tag collar with no dog tag on it.
"Well, being born and raised in San Antonio, I can tell you: we may be number eight or nine on the population list, but everybody knows each other." She nodded a lot and raised her eyebrows to reinforce her comments. "Instead of six degrees, here it's like three degrees of separation. My mom's from here, and if I'm talking about someone, it'll be, 'Oh is that so-and-so's daughter?' It's like that. If I'm in a hurry, sometimes it's a hassle because everybody knows everyone; I know I'm going to run into two or three people [I know]. You can't just blow them off because they know people you know. You have to go, 'hey, how's your mom?'
"Culturally, it's not as diverse in some places. This town is All-American. People cut the lawns and yell at the neighbors. I fear that it will eventually become more isolated. People are moving farther out (especially people that are not from here). It's becoming car culture. And people I've met who are from there, I tell them to meet me somewhere, and they say, 'Oh, we don't go downtown.' And I'm like, 'Oh, my! Why not?!' It's kind of odd. I don't go out where they are. Because I don't recognize a thing. They're all strip malls. They all look the same. I get lost."
Local Hopper wanna-bes might have a studio at the Blue Star Arts Complex, a pair of narrow warehouses carved up and adapted into artists' spaces, separated by a narrow tract of crumbling, weed-poked asphalt. I found a gallery owner named Joan, sixtyish, with moussed gray hair, green eyes, a big Irish nose, and bright red lipstick. She broke off her conversation with an associate and set aside an oversized pot of large red flowers on a big square glass coffee table so that we could see each other as we sat in chrome tube and leather Marcel Breuer chairs. 
"I think," Joan cooed, "isolation has more to do with who you know. Thinking about my neighbors: he's a retired doctor from Mexico. She's from New York. They stay in their home all the time. You never see them. My other neighbor says maybe she's buried in the back yard. But that's the way their life is. It's extremely isolated. But that's their choice.
"The other thing is that we have a high population of Mexican-Americans. And they certainly are not isolated people. They embrace. They are very family-oriented and party-oriented. I always say about San Antonio, 'we don't need an excuse to have a party.' We have a fiesta all the time. And that has a lot to do with the city having so much Mexican culture."
To my question referencing Nighthawks, her associate Rick jumped in, "Oh yes, where you're looking through a glass window, right?" Rick was a wiry bundle of energy with thick hairy forearms. He was draped in a gray sweater and gray wool socks with brown loafers. Avid green eyes peered out from his constantly-moving head. "Are we as isolated as that, in character? You could maybe say that. But there's a small group of people in this city that aren't isolated. People have a tendency to call San Antonio a large small town. There are people that are very worldly, that have traveled and are very well educated. But it's a minority."
"I was in Dallas," Rick continued. "Living in Dallas and seeing all the culture that is offered to the citizens, and then coming home to San Antonio, it's kind of a shock. I think this city protects itself from what's going on in other cities, which could be viewed as isolating itself. In Dallas, you're always meeting new and interesting people. Here you can, but it's not as easy. The way I describe San Antonio is it's always slow to react to anything, any trend. I think a lot of people [here] are military and that's conservative." 
"Hm," Joan frowned. "That's interesting. I've never connected it to retired military. I always connected it to a cow town. Not a cow town but ranching. It's just a different way of life. You have a lot of people with ranches. And oil. And you have hidden little treasures, and they really don't know what they've got. They don't even know what they're worth here in this city."
Rick barreled on, "We have a lot of blue-collar business. So there are a lot of neighborhoods within this otherwise tourist city. And the industry here isn't like what you see in other large cities. Southwest Bell moved their headquarters here, and moved a lot of people in from Kansas City or wherever. And those people are moving back because the city doesn't have enough to offer them. One guy that moved here from L.A. I knew personally, and he said, 'Where is the stuff I was enjoying in a bigger city?'"
Paul at Blue Star's San Angel Folk Art wore black plastic glass frames and had tan skin and short hair. He modeled a blue shirt. "My family moved here 13 years ago from Mexico." He spoke fluent English with no accent. "This store is devoted to Mexican folk art and to those people and arts that are indigenous to the area. It is not devoted to those who just want to get a little more color in their lives. I have been in the collector's circle. I was dealing with art collectors, and, for some, it becomes a life and not just a hobby. They all are trying to scam each other. They want to put their name in front of a painting's name."
"San Antonio is important because it is a border land. We're over fifty percent Latino now. If you're getting at San Antonio, you have to look at that."
San Antonio's downtown municipal market had been transformed into El Mercado, which hailed itself as "the largest Mexican market outside Mexico." Paula had told me, "I remember being a little girl when I came here to Texas, and I loved going down to the market, because you could buy all kinds of items that were from Mexico. It's like you're stepping back in time into you're in another country. Green pastel arches on the Mercado's adobe siding led to a curved Spanish tile roof. Young boys snapped firecrackers on the pavement. A 12-year-old girl in tennis shoes Irish step danced to the South American Andean (NOT Mexican) music that played out back on speakers and from live musicians. Tattered flags atop the building looked like the flag must have looked after being shelled, shot, and wind-whipped in the Alamo.
At a store called Angelita, I spoke with the large woman behind the counter while she tidied in bright pink lipstick and black eye shadow, draped in a light gray smock above which hung a silver choker. "No," she answered my question. "I grew up here, and we knew everybody on the block and everybody on the next block. Some of the old [she pronounced it "ode"] neighborhoods you wish were more isolated. My parents live in their same neighborhood, but they no longer go out after dark, and they have to lock their doors. The gangs are really bad in San Antonio. Every citizen should have a gun, and those gangs ought to get the death penalty." With that, I strolled back out past the angel dolls and books on positive thinking.
Noted Texas historian and journalist Frank Tolbert once wrote, "Every Texan has two homes: his own and San Antonio."
By the Mercado, I jumped on one of the Texas Trolleys that whisks tourists around in wooden seats with brass poles modeled on San Francisco's cable cars. Underneath I-10 at Commerce Street, I watched a scene play out that my trolley driver explained. A guy came up in a red SUV and was mobbed by Mexicans who soon walked away from his car. The driver explained that the man was giving them a chance to work, but it was at too low a price. San Antonio was one of the first and main stopping points for Mexicans coming over the border on their way north my driver explained, and I asked, "To Dallas?" He looked at me like I was crazy, "No, to Chicago." The trolley driver sermonized, "people ought to be ashamed of themselves for paying so low. You get a bunch of people trying to take advantage of them," he harrumphed. A Mexican on the trolley chipped in, "I was paid five bucks an hour and worked for four days straight."
The trolley looped around back downtown to all the sights. San Antonio has always been a crossroads and a meeting place (as the missions attest), and now is the eighth-largest city in the United States, hosting seven million tourists each year. The annual Mud Festival was going on, when a mud king and queen are elected to coincide with the city's annual lowering of the river for repairs and maintenance. Hoses were replenishing the meager river during my visit. Ironically, the San Antonio area was originally called Yana Guana, which means clear waters or cooling waters. Texas was named for the local Tahaas Indians, whose name means "friend."
Sea World of Texas seemed out of place in this landlocked town, though the Cowboy museum could justify using the name. It, like the nearby Dinosaur World, exhibited beings that were extinct. Brackenridge Park, a sort of mascot of this town, was a large expanse of open land and woods. It was virtually deserted when I visited on a weekday, but locals assured me that it was filled up on weekends and in nice weather. It was home to a 
golf course, zoo, and Japanese Tea Garden (whose sign read 
"entrance to Chinese Tea Garden").
Downtown had plenty of Hopperesque sights. 
The Kress store had tall, thin windows and five terra cotta art deco capitals projecting from the roof line that held red letters spelling out K-r-e-s-s. Nearby was Hermann Son's Bowling Lanes, housed in a former church.
Ben Milam, who had rallied volunteers to the Alamo had a statue in Milam Square by the Milam Building, a Hopperesque art deco office building. 
The first floor was home to the Milam Diner and advertised, "home cooking, chicken fried steak, chalupas, beef tips with rice." There were no windows, just a shotgun-narrow room with red Naugahyde booths and swivel stools.
There were also many theaters downtown: the 
Aztec, 
the San Pedro, 
the Alameda, the McAllister Fine Arts Center, and the Spanish-style 
Texas Theater, which was now swallowed up by the SBC Building, built around it. The opulent Majestic Theater [locals pronounced it, "thee-YAY-ter"] had pillars sporting Sullivanesque or Egyptian patterns. Next door stood the Cowboy Cleaners, whose logo was "because that's what daddy named it."
The H.E.B. Grocery Company, a Texas institution, bought the old arsenal in San Antonio and made it their corporate headquarters. The name was meant as a tactful stand-in for founder H. Earl Butt. 
Nevertheless, locals often tell you they got their food "from the Butt."
Interesting that Texas institution H.E.B. chose an arsenal as their headquarters. Another Texas institution, Luby's diner chain, which started in San Antonio, was infamous for being the site of the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. In 1991, a man backed his pickup into the Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, and fatally shot 23 people before killing himself.
One main tourist route is the Riverwalk, which trails the brackish green water of the San Antonio River. Calling it the Riverwalk is misleading if you're used to a river going all one direction. This river forms a horseshoe through downtown. Restaurants have placed tiny metal tables on terraces where you can sit and eat beneath tavern balconies and lush vegetation overhang.
Along the Riverwalk, I interviewed one of the Centro San Antonio helpers. He was in their standard uniform: 
a denim vest and straw hat with a green ribbon on it that read "Centro San Antonio." He was African American with heavy jowls. [As I was writing this chapter, San Antonio took over the title as the U.S. city with the highest rate of obesity.] The corners of his dark brown eyes were heavily veined. He seemed affable, a good fit for the job. Unlike most interviews for this book, which I had to initiate, he approached me. "How are you doing, sir?"
"I'm fine," I rejoindered. "Since you're here to help, can I interview you for a book I am writing?"
To my question whether he thought people in San Antonio were isolated, he answered in a rich deep tone. "No, not since I started this job. Because they're promoting tourism. And now it's easy for people to see the world. People come down to see the Alamo and walk along the Riverwalk."
"We've lived here about a total of eight-and-a-half years. Longer than other places. We moved a lot. My wife's 20 years Air Force. So we've been to California, Florida, Great Britain. Everywhere people are so nice. Before, we lived in Great Britain. It was like five Air Force bases in a small country. But they're very Americanized. They had Pizza Hut, KFC, McDonald's, Burger King's.
"But she wanted to retire here, so we came back here. A lot of people move here. It's like the military. You get all different cultures. This job has made me branch out. Even though we've been here so long, we've been on the military base. You don't really have a reason to come downtown. Everything you want you have right there. I have to learn all the names of streets, emergency procedures, what they're doing downtown. I had no clue it was like this.
"You get some people that look at you like, 'we're not used to this.' Because, first, they think we're looking for a handout. I have to tell them these are free. 'They're free? Okay, we'll take one.' Yeah, we get these official badges. When they see that, I'm safe then. They walk up and say 'Do you work for the city?'"
Though it attracts fewer tourists and is not on the trolley line, one attraction in San Antonio is the Marion Koogler McNay Museum of Art. Here hangs Hopper's Corn Hill. In 1620, pilgrims ransacked the Native Americans' stash of corn for enough to plant their crop the next season. The place where they did that became known as Corn Hill and was near Hopper's summer studio on Cape Cod. Corn Hill was painted in 1930 at the beginning of the Depression. Perhaps Hopper was noting that Americans were again (like the pilgrims) forced to steal to eat. Or maybe he turned to easily accessible landscapes because there was no money to go to the theaters or travel.
In the painting, several houses atop the hill are broadsided in salmony sunshine. Two small edifices off to the right mirror the hilltop houses in looking like the kind a kindergartner draws: just a box with a peaked roof. These structures are surrounded almost entirely by rounded and undulating forms in the dunes and foliage. Jo called the painting "Bare spot all sandy, palish sky with 1 long thick cloud. Foreground pale green tall grass salt meadow." Corn Hill originally went to the Hoppers' friend Bee Blanchard, and they visited to find that it had been replaced by a painting of Bee's favorite horse, "Sir Archie."
It also was not on display in the McNay when I visited, but they allowed me to see it in a gallery that was closed for installation. I could stand back and see it from about 25 feet away. At that distance, the perspective and lighting come together to feel natural, especially the sky. Here's a man who understands clouds. And, like with cloud-watching, people seem to see whatever they want in Hopper's paintings.
The woman assigned to show me the painting and files, Heather, was short with short hair parted on the side. Atop her elfin nose, her glasses frames were speckled dark blue and brown, and the sides had jagged edges like flames coming out of her brown eyes. Black pants and a white shirt divided her into equal halves. Like many I met, she had come home. "I had been at a gallery in New York. I came back to San Antonio because I'm from here. I never thought I would return, but I did." Heather's sick son convalesced on a makeshift bed in the next room. While I was pursuing a personal dream to learn about the American people, they were taking care of the business of living.
"If I owned a painting like that [Corn Hill]," she fawned, "I'd probably never want to sell it. It is a very popular piece. When we don't have it up, people always ask. The hills of Cape Cod don't like anything like the landscape around here. So it must touch something that people can identify with. I don't know whether it's a sort of sense of isolation. I don't think that our painting has quite the sense of loneliness as other Hopper paintings, like 
Western Motel. You don't know what she's doing in that motel, but you know it's not happy. I don't know if this fits in with your thesis, but we get so many requests from Germans for this. I don't know if it fits in with that 
German angst or what."
Next Heather regaled me with stories of the Hopper buyers: Sylvan Lang and his wife Mary. "They were really passionate about what they did. The Langs had a Calder mobile. 
They wrote to Calder to try to find out what date it was made. He sent back a little scrawled note that said, 'Yes, I made it, but I don't know when.' That Calder mobile, they had it actually out on their pool. At a party one time someone was showing it to people and dropped it in the pool. The director of the McNay was there and took off his shoes and jumped into the pool and saved the Calder. That kind of passion is what inspired Sylvan to donate his collection to the museum."
As we parted ways, Heather suggested I check out another collection that was a museum highlight: the Tobin Theater collection.1 Donated by Robert L.B. Tobin ("Fritzy"), it is one of the most comprehensive collections in America related to theater history and design. "I often wonder," Heather mused, "people who are in love with theater, if it isn't a way for them to perform. He [Fritzy Tobin] did perform maybe three or four times. But he was a backstage person. I kind of wonder if it wasn't masking a desire to be an actor."
I wondered the same thing about Hopper. Maybe art is a kind of private performance for those too introverted to actually go in front of audiences.
1Heather had related the life of museum founder Mary McNay, which was worthy of a stage play, replete with failed artistic ambitions, forced marriages, and weepy train station goodbyes to a GI husband who went off and got killed in war.
When I think of Dallas, I think of oil. When I think of oil, I think of gas--Hopper's painting Gas, which contains an image of a sign for Mobil Gas, whose headquarters are in Dallas. For years Mobil's building was the tallest in Dallas. In fact, it was the tallest building south of Washington, D.C., and the huge Pegasus statue on its roof presided over downtown Dallas and the entire American South like the one presiding over Hopper's painting.
The building had since been transformed into a hotel and surpassed in height by many more modern skyscrapers, but the city had adopted the Pegasus as its symbol. Pegasus medallions topped the lamp posts downtown streets, and the public sculpture theme in this town was corner statues of variations on Pegasus. The one in front of the preserved cabin of area pioneer John Neely Bryan had on a tie and reading glasses. In front a building at Bryan and Harwood was a version of the statue 
Pegasus and Man by Carl Milles, a copy of which I had seen in the courtyard of the Des Moines Art Center. At the corner of Main and Akard was the Pegasus Credit Union.
Also, when I think of Dallas, I think of 
November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed here. The sixth floor from which the fatal shot was fired (depending on who you believe) was now a museum devoted to JFK and that fateful day. I got spooked thinking that I was about to walk the same steps that someone (allegedly) took that day. The exhibit did a great job of clarifying what was known about that day and the people tied to it--and what remained unknown about it. An exhibit of important moments of loss in the U.S. already had already added the Attack on America September 11, 2001, though my visit was only three months after that.
One thing I do not think of when I think of Dallas is lighthouses. However, that's what I was here to see. Edward Hopper's painting Lighthouse Hill in the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA). Lighthouse Hill shows a series of darkly shadowed hills topped by a pale yellow lighthouse set against a blue sky. One of the few well-known photographs of Hopper shows him painting this canvas. Jo wrote they "lived curiously for [the] sake of [this] canvas. Lighthouse Hill came out of housekeeping with water from village pump--& the toilet in a shed shared with lobster bait." More so in person than in reproduction, the painting gets across a sense of isolation. Partly it is the separation between the two buildings. Partly it's the anonymizing sunlight broadsiding the white façades.
The painting was so popular that immediately after the DAM purchased it, another admirer wrote to inquire about obtaining it. The DAM wrote back, "neither the owner or the museum would care to relinquish this particular painting." However, someone seemed to dislike it. Lighthouse Hill was one of three paintings scratched by a vandal in the museum. Luckily, the needed repairs were relatively minor. Hopper suffered at Dallas's hands an attack just as did John F. Kennedy.
In the gallery with me stood a freckle-faced teen with blue eyes and a cowlick in his hair, his slight frame draped by a lightweight jacket. He shrugged, "I don't come here often actually. I'm here because my uncle is having an opening in the next gallery."
"I'm really happy for my uncle," he stated. "I just don't like big functions like this. I'll wait a couple of days until it dies down, then let him know I liked it. It means a lot to my grandparents. My grandfather was curator. When I was younger, I would come here every now and then with him. That was usually after we would do our painting. He was an artist, too. My whole family is a little bit surrounded in art.
"My uncle's painting has a lot of symbolism in it, not all of which I understand. It shows my uncle as a child painting, when he was younger. Before my father was born. See that easel in the painting? 
I have a portrait of my grandfather painting my grandmother in a chair, and that's the easel that he used. And that easel he passed on, so that [easel] has symbolism. And then also…" He looked around and then continued sotto voce, "My grandfather's ashes are in the painting. Not a lot of people know about that. We didn't know what to do with them. When this came along, we said, 'that's perfect.'"
When I asked my question, he seemed confused. "Isolated from each other? In Dallas? I don't think they are. I know that some people want to be. But they just put their happy face on and kind of cover up."
His dad called out, and the teen yelled back as if worried he had done something wrong. I felt a little like that myself as his father arrived and glared at me. I apologized for detaining his son and slunk off.
After that group left, in walked a slight-boned man with a thin face and a gray mustache. A black leather jacket was slapped on his back, and he had a thick gray duckbill haircut. Behind him trailed a stocky Hispanic with a buzz cut who had on jeans and a gray zippered athletic suit with a pull rope through the neck.
The one with the duckbill murmured, "I teach art, so I do know about Hopper." He spoke in short phrases that gave the impression he was shy. "I work with airbrush. And work from photographs. Like photo-realism. Hopper's always someone who I've liked for that reason. He was heavily influenced by photographs. I think he was very much talking to everyday people. He was not talking to only artists. You don't have to be trained in art. It's not that I think bad about him or lesser of a painter than other trained artists. But this is a very clear statement to which everybody could relate."
When I asked about Hopper's isolation relating to Dallas, he shook his head, "Boy." After a pause, he pointed to his friend. "You're from Houston. Have you ever thought about it?"
"I don't think so," the other man stepped forward. "I think the Dallas community is a bit isolated. We're from a really small town a bit out of town, really rural. Where we're from, I wouldn't say that we were isolated. Though you see a lot of houses just out in the field. 
That painting's not un-Texas-like, minus the lighthouse." He in turn pointed back at the teacher. "He might have a different thought about Dallas."
"Yeah," The art teacher posited, "I think Dallas is isolated. There's not really any other places like Dallas. Dallas has a way of really balancing the opera and Red Rock Renaissance Festival real well. And I feel that makes them less isolated. I've seen more like that," he pointed to The Hutter Barn beside the Hopper, the Andrew Wyeth painting showing a lone barn below a moon at dusk.
His partner agreed, "There's a lot of places around this part of the country that build houses and there's no trees around. It makes me feel like it's more isolated because you've got just this single dwelling out in the middle of nowhere. And it's not very comfortable. There's nothing to block the wind."
"I think," the art teacher pursed his lips, "of isolation a bit differently than physical. I guess I think of it as psychological. This [Lighthouse Hill] is physical, but it also could be psychological. The lighthouse keeper, he's separated from other people. And I think in the city, you have that choice. Sheer numbers. You can be surrounded by people. But you can be all alone. And that's your choice. And even though you can be alone, perhaps when you're walking downtown or going through a neighborhood, you have a friend you feel connected to who lives next door or miles away in another part of the town."
More people came in. Stephanie was short, with a Roman nose, dark skin, and short, thick hair. She wore a suede suit and a camel-hair coat. Her tall husband had big ear lobes that folded sharply outwards, sincere blue eyes, and brief hair flipped up in front, making him look like Fred Gwynn from The Munsters. He was in a tawny tweedish jacket and a bright multicolored tie on a white shirt, very business-like. Stephanie's dignified, gray-haired mother sported a tasteful gray sweater and held her brown coat folded over her forearms. Her thin father had on a blue button-down oxford shirt open at the collar draped in a dark blue blazer. They were joined by a woman who had cellophaned red hair, waxy skin, and a wide-eyed forcefulness that made her seem to be leaning into me.
When I mentioned that Hopper's paintings were associated with isolation, they all agreed with a chorus of "yeah," "absolutely," and "it's amazing." Then when I asked about Dallas's isolation, Stephanie didn't hesitate, "Yes, people are isolated here."
"I don't really think so," her husband dissented. "To me, Dallas doesn't have that cold, urban feel that pervades so many of those paintings. I'm from Minneapolis. My father moved here 30 years ago, and I moved in with him. It's very easy to move to Dallas and be connected to the rest of Dallas because there's so many people coming from somewhere else. Most of the people you'll meet are not native Dallasites. Dallas had such a boom in the '70s and '80s where companies were relocating here. I'm in banking. Dallas is a banking town," he noted drolly. "It has become so. There's a Federal Reserve here. Right across the street. It's a mint; they print there as well." [That's a use for etching that Hopper would have been humored to consider.] 
"There are enough people from out of town," he pontificated, "that it tends to be the kind of town where you introduce yourself. It's not really a typical southern town except in that respect: the warmth and outgoingness is definitely there. Texas isn't really the south; it's very much its own state. It was its own country at one point. It came into the fold just before the Confederacy. Then it joined the Confederacy because of proximity--as well as other issues. But it's really always been its own state. Texans will invariably tell you that Texas is the only state in the union that has the right to secede. It's not true, but they feel that just the same. They want to be able to do so."
"I work for a senior agency," Stephanie finally burst in, "and the older tend to be isolated, definitely. I don't see Dallas as special in that way. The elderly rely on public transportation, and Dallas is not a great town for that."
When I asked the cellophaned drama queen 
("DQ," I thought of her as), who was a native Dallasite, she yipped, "OK," pronouncing it "Kyay. You don't care that I don't know anything about Hopper? Do I think people in Dallas are isolated?" She paused. "Yes." She paused again. "Isolated from what? Jeez, you know, it's something I've never thought about. In a Hopper way? He's very Midwestern. So that kind of fits isolation there. A lighthouse is always terribly isolated."
"But," Stephanie's mom countered, "it doesn't speak to me because it doesn't look like anything that's a part of my life."
DQ clarified, "I was thinking of individuals. You can be in a big city with a lot going on around you (even though Dallas isn't New York) and feel very isolated. Big cities breed a lot of lonely people because you get lost."
"OK," Steph's mom nodded, "I would agree with that. I don't think Dallas is that way, but yeah. I would think that Hopper was going for that."
"But Dallas isolated that way?" DQ mused, "I think socially, no; politically, well..."
"It used to be," Stephanie's dad intoned. "I've lived here for 40 years. And I am a Texan. I don't think it is any more."
"I think it is," his wife jumped in. "Politically. Geographically. When I was a child, people didn't travel that much." She chuckled. "I was twenty-one before I left Texas. Texans like to set themselves apart from the rest of the country."
"There is that," Stephanie smirked.
"Yes," her dad agreed, "there's definitely that."
San Antonio takes its name from the Alamo's official name, Mission San Antonio de Valero. The 1718 founders were from a town in Mexico whose patron saint was Saint Anthony of Padua, and alamo was Spanish for cottonwood tree--many of which surrounded the Alamo.
