A Visit to Hyborian Texas

The "Second Amendment Cowboy" in Amarillo.

Crossing into Texas feels like you've entered a different realm, irrespective of the introduction of "Don't mess with Texas" signs.

I woke up at five in the morning because I had a long drive ahead of me. The arid front range of Colorado gave way to the smooth, volcanic hills of New Mexico as I descended out of Raton Pass. There, in mid-June, was not a tree to be seen, but there are gentle slopes up isolated mountains covered in surprisingly green grass. I was listening to the second John Carter novel, The Gods of Mars, as I reached Texline, Texas.

Texline is aptly named, nestled just inside the Texas side of the north-south border of New Mexico and the panhandle. As soon as you pass it, the landscape changes. The empty plains are taken over by farmed fields and pasture and silos you can see through haze. From my Coloradan perspective, the elevation is pretty low, but you find yourself on long, high stretches of road which allow you to see for dozens of miles in every direction.

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Even though I grew up in La Junta, CO, a southeastern Colorado town that's only about two hours from Texas, the Lone Star State has always felt like it was its own world away.

The Cadillac Ranch.

I started this blog almost exactly a year ago, and somewhere along the way, I decided that I wanted to make the trip down to Cross Plains, Texas for the annual Howard Days. It's a long drive- about 11 and a half hours from Denver, and with stopping for gas and such, it's more like 13 hours. But I've so wanted to see where the boss man lived and worked, so it would be worth it.

A few months prior to Howard Days, Howard historian Jeff Shanks offered me the opportunity to speak at the Glenn Lord Symposium, one of the sessions at the festival, and my brain just about exploded. That sounded like just about the coolest thing I could conceive of, but there was a problem. One of my cousins was getting married the exact same weekend as Howard Days. I hemmed and hawed for a while, but I came to the conclusion that if I skipped the wedding for the festival, my family would probably hate me forever. So I went to the wedding instead (it was lovely).

Since I was on summer break from the school where I teach, I figured I might make the trip down to Texas anyway. I do this thing sometimes when I can swing it: go on Google Maps and search "comic shops" in a city I haven't been to, and start seeing what the options are. Dallas-Fort Worth, the biggest metro area near to Cross Plains (I mean, it's still like two and a half hours away, but the state is fucking gigantic, so in Texas terms it's practically in the same zip code) has dozens. I would not make another person suffer through me just bouncing around in comic shops and bookstores, so I set off to crate dig for comics, Conan goodies, and visit some historic sites, alone.

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The Texas Theater, where Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested.

A few hours after I passed through Texline, I entered Amarillo, which feels like an island in the middle of a corn-field-and-dirt sea. Charley Crockett's version of "Amarillo By Morning" played softly on my car speakers as I rolled into the west side of town and stopped at the Cadillac Ranch. I visited the first comic shop of the trip, Whataburger was had, and it was disappointing. Put the gun down, Texans. 

The landscape changes in that part of Texas very gradually. Your altitude is descending the entire time, so it gets more verdant and fecund by inches. It becomes clear how lonely Texas is while you're making this drive. It's not only because I was doing it solo, but because each town I passed was no more than a few thousand people with one little main street, maybe a coffee shop, and a few church steeples recessed from the interstate. It was about the time I was due north of Cross Plains when an accident on the highway ahead of me left shards of glass on the road, putting a puncture in my tire. I scrambled to find a mechanic just about the point when I realized this was too long of a drive for one person to do. A single tire shop was still open in town that was able to fix me up, and I was on my way.

By the time I pulled into Dallas, I had been on the road for about 15 hours. I had finished The Gods of Mars and got a good ways into Conan the Unconquered because it was the only Conan audiobook I could find on YouTube I hadn't read before. It was still hot as hell, and way stickier than I'm used to. There were also far more donut shops than I've see anywhere else. I guess that's just a Texas thing.

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I was kind of rooting for the Royals. They won.

For the next two days, I went to 26 different comic shops and used book stores: all the shops in Fort Worth one day, all the shops in Dallas the next. I went to the Sixth Floor Museum to see where JFK was (probably) shot from, an event I teach about every year. I relished the air conditioning at a Texas Rangers game. The whole time I was there, I tried to think like Two-Gun Bob and take in his environment. Was this a place he was trying to escape from? He did, after all, in his "love for all that was lost and strange and faraway," create fantastic worlds that don't look much like Texas at all. "I became a writer in spite of my environments," he said. That sounds like a vote of no confidence for the Lone Star State.

The signs say "Drive friendly: the Texas way," but Texas is not what I would call friendly. That's not meant to be a dig, it's just not an easy place. Its heat is unforgiving, and as I drove, I was glad to not be doing the trip in August. When Texas isn't baking in the heat, it's washing out in floods.

Its people are isolated. There are huge cities in Texas, but you can drive for a dozen hours in one direction and not leave the state.

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And in general, I'd say its people have a fierce independence that can be seen in its sloganeering and our image of it in the popular consciousness. I am, actually, not inclined to mess with Texas. The last time I was here, I was playing with my band on tour in Austin, and three guys tried to rob our van as we left the venue. After managing to get away, we went to an all-night Walmart to buy a machete to protect ourselves, figuring that since we weren't about to shoot someone to save a guitar, we could maybe at least put a scare into someone. I'll never forget that as my first real Texas experience.

I don't think I'll ever be able to truly dig under Robert E. Howard's skin, but it's clear that he was shaped by the state of Texas. A seriously nerdy young man, a total mama's boy, eventually hardened into working out so that he could go rough-and-tumble boxing, or at least claim to. I feel like most of us who are into sword-and-sorcery feel some kind of kinship with Howard even if we don't realize it. As a five-foot-five doughy comic book nerd who turned to punk music in his teens in part because it felt stronger, I don't not get aspects of the guy.

I found some cool stuff as I swam through the Texas heat with Bob: the Official Handbook of the Conan Marvel Universe, Conan the Adventurer #1 and #10, some paperbacks of Howard's horror fiction. Why don't we have Half Price Books everywhere in this country? I'd blaze from my car into each comic shop and feel a blast of cold air as I opened the front door. Even the comic shops were uniquely Texan- lots of shops whose bread and butter is cling-wrapped full runs sold for a few hundred dollars. One shop owner apologized to me about the humidity because the AC had gone out the day before, as his new comic book shelf shriveled and wilted before me.

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More Fun Comics in Denton- the last shop I hit on my way out of DFW.

One of my nights there, I found a micro brewery and sat on the patio drinking a beer. I actually brought my Dark Horse Savage Sword of Conan Vol. 2 for this purpose: I wanted to re-read Savage Sword #16 - 19's "People of the Black Circle" adaption while sitting in the heat. Trying to actually enjoy the heat and knowing I would miss it dearly when I was scraping snow off my car at six in the morning a few months from now, I went to the Hyborian Age analogue for India. It's a very different kind of place than the patio of a Dallas brewery, but it funnily enough didn't feel jarringly different.

​We're all born in a strange land. And Texas is a strange land. It's belonged to six different nations. It's extremely diverse in people and environment. Every road and plaza is named for a famous person or president who was born or killed here. I tried to picture Howard, hammering away on his typewriter late into the night with the windows open for airflow as I tried to ignore beads of sweat on me while reading the comic.

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The Texas School Book Depository. Now the Sixth Floor Museum.

Are we reading Howard to escape our own problems, or just to spend some time with someone else's problems for a little while? I'm not sure Howard was simply trying to escape where he was at; everything I've read about the man supports the conclusion that he wrote because he had to write and read because he loved to read (well, and to make a few bucks). If Howard had been trying to escape anything, I don't think he would have been so adamantly Texan. "I'll make the pulps," he said, "and I'll make them from here in Texas. I'm going to prove that a man doesn't have to live in New York to tell his stories."

According to Howard himself, "Man is greatly molded by his surroundings." To visit Texas is to get a sense for Bob Howard. The place is hot-blooded and full of contradictions, and it's quite the experience. Howard may have become a writer in spite of his environments, but he became the writer he was because of those same surroundings.

It was tempting to visit Cross Plains while I was so close, but I decided that nothing will keep me from going to Howard Days next year. I kind of want it to be its own experience, so I'm saving it for June 2026. I hope to see you there!

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The Robert E. Howard quotes and most of the biographical bits in the above piece come from Willard Oliver's excellent Robert E. Howard: The Life and Times of a Texas Author. If you're even sort of interested in Howard, it's worth the buy. Thanks for reading a little travelogue that I'd had rolling around in my head for a few months! Next summer, I may just have to buy another disposable camera and take it with me to Cross Plains.