Someone once said that if he owned Hell and Texas he’d live in Hell and rent out Texas. I figure he must have visited Texas in the summertime. I remember visiting a ranch just outside of Fort Worth one April a few years ago and thinking the weather was pretty nice…especially compared to the tail end of winter we were still dealing with in Northern NY. But then the owner noted the number of consecutive days the previous summer that the temperature topped 100 F…and it was a whole lot of them.
I was in Texas again this week, speaking at the Mid-South Ruminant Nutrition Conference in Arlington, just a few miles north of Dallas-Fort Worth. Dallas and Fort Worth are “sister cities” joined by a common airport, but that’s one of the few things they have in common. Dallas considers itself pretty much an Eastern city, quite cosmopolitan, while Fort Worth is still in many ways a Cow Town, complete with the touristy Fort Worth stockyards just outside of town. You see a lot more cowboy hats and boots in Fort Worth than you do in Dallas. The weather was pretty decent when I was there this time, though the wind was blowing so hard the day I arrived that there were whitecaps on the swimming pool at the Hilton. And of course central Texas is suffering from yet another big drought, or maybe a continuation of the old one Texas does nothing in a small way: Either there’s a severe drought, or a rainstorm that’s a real frog-strangler.