25 Random Things About Houston

A columnist for Houston Chronicle wrote this. I totally agree with #8, #24 & #25. I moved here in 1992 and was only going to stay 2 years. Oops!

1. Houston, as a city, often feels random — which is to say undefined, unpredictable, hard to grasp.

2. Clear Lake is neither clear nor a lake.

3. It is possible to drive north on the South Freeway, and south on the West Loop.

4. Mount Houston? Oh, please. We are flat, flat, flat.

5. Mountains or oceans or big, rushing rivers give other cities shape. But we are left to sprawl.

6. Try to picture a map of Houston. Don’t worry. Nobody else can, either. The city proper — all 600 square miles of it — is a wiggly, hole-ridden splatter, like syrup spilled on the kitchen floor.

7. The best that most of us can do is to picture the freeways — the U.S. 59/I-45/I-10 triangle, the 610 Loop, the Beltway. If anything defines us, it’s those freeways. Most cities are destinations. We’re a journey.

8. Nobody, it’s said, dreams of moving to Houston to retire. We’re a city where people come to work.

9. More than 90 languages are spoken in the metropolitan area.

10. The freeways define not just our physical world but our psychological one, too. We are constantly on the move, more interested in speed than reflection. At our best, we’re a fast-moving, git-’r-done city. At our worst, we move fast, but without much idea where we’re going. The future is whatever is up the road.

11. Houston, moving fast, rarely looks in its rearview mirror. The past is an inconvenience.

12. The Astrodome — once hailed as the Eighth Wonder of the World and recently voted Houston’s most iconic building — now stands empty and is considered endangered.

13. One inconvenient fact: We were never really a cattle town. That hasn’t stopped us from making our annual rodeo one of the biggest on the planet.

14. The oil industry means that we’re a city full of geologists. Which is funny, really: all those geologists convened in a city notably low on rocks. We have no boulders, no quarries. When you dig in our clay, you don’t hit bedrock. The ground under our feet is shifty stuff.

15. Our signature drug is codeine cough syrup, the rappers’ “drank” that fuels the slowed-down H-Town sound. It seems like self-medication: a calming agent for a city prone to moving fast.

16. Drivers here often wave you into a merging lane in front of them. When shop clerks urge you to have a good day, they seem to mean it. We may be rushing into the future, but we will go there politely.

17. Sam Houston, hero of the Texas Revolution and the first president of the Republic of Texas, was as rowdy and hard to grasp as the city that bears his name. He lived for a while among the Cherokees, who called him “Big Drunk.” A slaveholder, he opposed the expansion of slavery. While Texas’ senator in Washington, he was known for chasing women.

18. Larry McMurtry, the novelist who’s made maybe the best attempt at grasping this city, considered moist, oozy Houston an essentially feminine place, and his best Houston character — Aurora from Terms of Endearment — seemed to embody the city itself. He once said he liked her because she was “wildly selfish, wildly irresponsible; crazy, demanding, kinky, arrogant and yet an extremely endearing and lovable woman.” Maybe Houston has grown up since 1975, when he published that book. Maybe not.

19. Our port, and the refineries that go with it, are tucked away east of downtown, part of the city where many residents never go. It is our industrial id.

20. Most American gardening books don’t work here in subtropical Zone 9. Cold-hardiness, so fetishized in other places, matters less than heat tolerance. It’s easier to grow lemons here than apples.

21. In school, though, our kindergartners learn a seasonal model that would make sense in Maine: winter brings snow, autumn involves colored leaves, and summer is a wonderful time to play outdoors. Observant children soon recognize that the world is askew, that Houston stubbornly refuses to conform to the Way the World Is Supposed to Be.

22. But sometimes, just to confound you, Houston behaves the way it’s supposed to. Pears once grew in Pearland, and buffalo once roamed Buffalo Bayou.

23. Even the Heights sort of deserves its name: It towers inches over the rest of Houston.

24. Newcomers often don’t intend to stay in Houston. But the place sneaks up on them. After a few years, its randomness begins to make sense. And it’s other places that seem off-kilter.

25. “Houston gets in your blood,” my friend Ann once explained. She paused, then finished: “Like malaria.”

lisa.gray@chron.com