H. Palmer Hall: Why I live in the San Antonio Suburbs

Why I live in the San Antonio Suburbs: A PoMo Exaltation

Sameness, stultifying, dreary similarity, each box similar in some way to the boxes on the same street, my street, the place I live in the middle of an urban noghtmare of a triangle formed by the intersections of West Avenue, Lockhill-Selma and Blanco. That's the impression you might get if you simply read the "Culturas" section of the San Antonio Express-News on Sundays. The signs that grow on the lawns call for the election of conservative Republicans, with our house and only a few others supporting Al Gore and Joe Liebermann and those other members of the legion of the caring doomed in the last election.

Pete Seeger sang about us, "Little boxes on the the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky, little boxes, little boxes, little boxes all the same. And the people in the boxes they all went to the University..." and so on. A brilliant song. Richard Louv wrote about us in America II, an excellent book of essays about movement out of the cities into the suburbs and into rural areas, turning those areas into our own commuter communities while searching for "elbow room."

The San Antonio Express-News's urban landscape critic, Mike Greenberg, refers to us as dwellers in Loopland, a quasi-mystical cityscape located within a few miles of the Interstate Loop that encircles the places where "real" city dwellers live. In our dreary sameness, we are probably the true PoMovers, migrating fairly frequently, always farther out from the city where grass fights hard to survive the builders' trucks and the rocky terrain of the far north side of San Antonio. If we have lawns, it is because the builders of the boxes are required by VA to put in a minimum coverage of at least 12 inches of dirt and we scurry to cover the bare dirt with turf, normally with Saint Augustine grass that drains the Edwards Aquifer as we water it twice a week until it is strong and healthy.

My own neighborhood is a close-in suburb, urban itself now as the city's actual center of population is only a few blocks from my house near a "world-class" shopping mall with Sak's and Foley's and Macey's and Dillard's, miles of shopping that includes specialty stores like Sharper Image and Banana Republic and Victoria's Secret and Laura Ashley and so many others.

There is no lack of junk food places, every variety known to humankind is within a mile of my house, within jogging distance. We do jog, we denizens of Loopland, and play tennis and volleyball and belong to neighborhood clubs with swimming pools or we own our own pools and can see them glowing blue as we fly in over the city to the International Airport that the suburbs have now surrounded. We anticipate a new airport someday, shared perhaps with Austin, and much more inconvenient, though it will move the noise out into rural areas.

Those of us who live here do what we can to differentiate ourselves one from the other. On my own one-third of an acre, I have dug a small pond and stocked it with koi and planted water lilies and Louisiana Iris and other water plants, surrounded it with paving stones, have grown ivy up the walls of the blue-grey brick exterior, have recently replaced a chain link fence with a four-foot cedar fence. We have shocked only a very few of the neighbors by planting colorful flowers and crepe myrtles and other non-green shrubs in the front yard. Most of them seem to like it. And I have placed a statue of Pan in the back yard, squat and ugly, pot belly, playing his syrinx. It is nothing like the stone lions that guard a neighbor's front yard. I sometimes think he stole them from the New York Public Library.

I live here because I want to. I love my third of an acre, almost all of it in back of my house, with a wilderness area and Italian ivy on the ground and a black Labrador that can run free, cutting paths all along the fence and through the Mexican persimmon grove. I have, consciously, rejected the romanticism of the farm and ranch, but I have lived there and have realized how essentially boring it is to me. I have lived downtown in Manhattan and Houston and Washington, D.C., and have felt that that life was even more sterile than my current life. Life, for me, is not a cabaret, old chum, and I have better things to do than worry about the next drive-by or the folks who accost me in the streets for money. I do worry about those things, of course, and about the fact that many of them are also happening out here in the 'burbs, and I worry about Bosnia and Haiti and Somalia and Cuba and Northern Ireland and Palestine. Many of us in the suburbs do, many of us are even liberal Democrats. But I do not move to all of those places because of my worries.

It is the same with the urban jungle. I pay taxes, live inside the city limits, enjoy the nearness, the propinquity, of the city, go to concerts, the theater, use the public library, and retreat to my own plot of earth in Loopland, sit in the back yard and watch the squirrels and the koi in my pond. If it is growing dark, I am frequently awed by the sight of an owl who has nested in my little wilderness area as he soars down to catch a field mouse or some other small animal.

The suburbs? I love them. That's where I live. My own ticky-tacky little box has been transformed since I moved here ten years ago from a smaller, cheaper little box located even farther outside the Loop. It is not the kind of suburb that has a large fence all around it and guards and gates. It is open. City busses run through it and passengers, not just cleaning ladies, get on and off the busses. People walk down the streets and say hello to each other, even stop and chat for a while. This is the place we found when we decided our old, even newer house, was too small for us with our son growing and it is the house where my son grew from six years old to eighteen before going off to college himself. I suspect he will want to live in a similar place when he has his own family. It is a place that we call home.

I wouldn't move out of this area unless I was forced to for economic reasons. I've turned down jobs in other cities, jobs that would have paid much more money, because we have sunk roots here, not the roots of generations, though my family has lived in Texas for six generations, but the kinds of roots that can survive in caliche and rock, that have to force themselves downwards to find water and sustenance.

It is cheap and easy to criticize suburbia, John Cheever's land and, to a lesser extent, John Updike's. Those of us who live here are mostly Anglo although that is happily and rapidly changing and, on my block, most are over sixty. That's not true for most of the suburban areas, only the older ones. My suburb inside the city limits of San Antonio was "developed" in the 1950s, not terribly old, but many of the people who live here bought their houses new and the neighborhood is established, changing slowly as they retire or die and younger people move in. As with all other people, we hurt when we are wounded, mentally or physically, we cry when our children feel pain, we celebrate when good things happen to us, we grow older and, if we are fortunate, wiser.

So, here's to Loopland! It's a large portion of the life blood of the city that it is a part of. In our city, the Looplanders do not strangle the larger city. Few of our suburbs are incorporated, unlike my wife's own past version of suburbia. She grew up in Webster Groves, part of the doughnut of communities that surrounds St. Louis and leeches the blood from it. In San Antonio, there are only a few such communities. Those of us who live in Loopland are, I suspect, the people who keep the city's cultural life viable by supporting that life through donations and taxes, by buying tickets to cultural events and sports events. Believe in us or not, we exist. And very few of us are plastic.