Fort Worth

Texas. In july. It’s perishingly hot here; the only mitigation is that indoors, the air conditioning is not equally punishingly cold. It’s comfortable. This may be a rural Texas or specifically Fort Worth thing, because I have found that super air conditioning even in Dallas.

I’m in Fort Worth because Mythcon next weekend is in Oklahoma and I took a nonstop flight to DFW. On previous trips here I went to Dallas, so this time I am trying Fort Worth. Dallas thinks of itself as a sophisticated Eastern city, but Fort Worth is the Gateway to the West. It has a Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, which I visited despite knowing nothing of any cowgirls except Annie Oakley. I might learn something, and I did. Turns out there were a lot of ranch-bred women skilled at riding and roping in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, though there’s not much in the displays about any of them. And these skills are still to be found among ranch women today.

Fort Worth also has a Stockyards district. It’s a small area bursting with a riot of local color, rather like Beale Street in Memphis. And in among the Western wear shops and the Western furniture shops and the saloons are some steakhouses. I couldn’t go to the Stockyards without having a steak, right? {And if ir wouldn’t appeal to you, you wouldn’t be much attracted to the Stockyards anyway,) Ah, it was a good steak, richly flavored without seasoning, crusty and textured and marbled and juicy just as I like them. One down