The realization crept up on me slowly, sometime after I had noticed that the chain restaurant had a new menu (these are the sorts of things you notice when you find yourself in small towns frequently). It was the one restaurant in town that seemed to be doing a booming business that also didn’t feature a drive through window. I blame my slow reaction on the half a bottle of wine that Natalie and I had consumed prior to setting out for dinner.

There’s not a lot to do on the road when you’re trapped at another outlet of a major chain motel that looks like all the other outlets of the same chain you’ve ever stayed in. Apart from the unusually high number of American flags floating around the property (the byproduct, as we would later discover, of a nearby Haliburton plant) it was fairly average – a cookie cutter branch of a cookie cutter chain.

We had rolled into town after four hours and ten minutes (the last ten minutes thanks to my perennially confused GPS, which didn’t have the new bypass in its map inventory and thus spent a good chunk of the last few minutes of the trip convinced we were in a corn field) on the road from Austin. It was actually a rather pretty drive – the foliage gives way to evergreens the further north and east you go, and there are hills and vales and the occasional ranch style residence of the sort that makes you stop and think, “Hmm. If that were a bed and breakfast, I’d totally spend the weekend there.”

It was starting to rain (again), and we got out of the car to the strains of deafening thrash metal music emanating from the swimming pool area overlooked by every room in the place. Short investigation of the “What the hell … ?” kind revealed that the thrash metal music was coming from a portable CD player belonging to the migrant workers who were in the pool drinking beer in the rain.

There was a sign on the front door of the motel advising those who enter the lobby that they need to wipe their boots before they come in. Usually in Texas, the signs say something like, “Carrying a concealed firearm on these premises is prohibited” (according to state law, it’s legal unless otherwise noted). Natalie and I both put two and two together and guessed that the sign is directed at the migrant workers staying at the hotel, and both of us found it odd that it was only written in English. Most public notices in our part of the state are bilingual.

The chippy young woman behind the front desk put down her copy of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons and stopped popping her gum long enough to check us in and give us directions to our rooms. She pointed to the vast sitting room in the lobby area and mentioned that breakfast would be served from 6:30 to 9:30, causing me to glance in the direction of the widescreen television that was broadcasting Fox News. Fair and balanced news for the masses.

Naturally, and only because I had to pee very badly, my key didn’t work and I had to trudge back to the desk where I tried not to notice that the maintenance supervisor — who appeared to be at least 10 years older than the young woman behind the desk — was flirting with her.

An hour and half a bottle of wine later, Natalie and I took our seats in a cookie-cutter booth at the chain restaurant, where I noticed that the part of the menu that used to be dedicated to appetizers now proudly displays full page ads for various premium margaritas. Our waiter stopped by and said … something. I pride myself on my ability to speak numerous languages, and it always gives me pause when I have problems understanding someone who is speaking what is supposed to be my own native tongue. Maybe it was the fact that it was loud in the restaurant and I have problems hearing clearly when there’s a lot of ambient noise. Maybe it was his thick East Texas twang. Maybe it was his thick East Texas twang being distorted through his missing front tooth.

At some point, I became aware that whatever it was that he said required a response, so I took a wild guess and said, “Great! How are you?” He smiled even broader, which, with the missing front tooth, made him look about twelve years old. He said something else, in which I caught the work “drink,” and Natalie and I responded in unison: “Water.” He smiled and left the table, and Natalie and I both looked at each other, each of us uncomfortably aware that we were sharing the same politically incorrect thought and feeling our share of white-middle-class-academic-politically-correct guilt over it.

That was about the point when I made the realization. I glanced around the restaurant one last time for confirmation, and then I muttered to Natalie, “Everyone in here is white.”
“I know,” she said. “I didn’t want to say anything.”
“I mean, really, really white.”
“I’m with you.”
“Even the busboys.”
“Yup,” she said, looking at her menu.
“We saw lots of people on the way up here who weren’t white,” I said.
“I know.”
I looked at the menu for a moment. “It creeps me out.”
“Me too.”

The waiter came back with glasses of water with lemon and took our order. For the next hour we sat, talking about the recent workshop, our plans for the next day’s presentations, and every so often taking stock of who was new in the restaurant and whether any of them represented minority groups. By the time we left, there was a table of migrant workers from Mexico (the hats and belt buckles were the clear giveaway: classic norteño wear) and an African-American couple in the bar who didn’t seem to be terribly uncomfortable being there.

Whenever we wind ourselves in a new place for work, both of us invariably wind up spending part of the night before trying to gauge the character of the town and, more to the point, what the next day’s session is going to be like. It’s just something we do – political correctness aside, it’s a survival habit. We try to make educated guesses: is there a large Latino population? A nearby military base? Did any notable historical events happen there? Anything that we can identify that we can work into the presentation the next day gives us a leg up — it helps us bridge those gaps and make some of the concepts we’re trying to get across more familiar. Where we fall apart is when we find ourselves in towns that appear to be homogeneous – when there’s no diversity in the local population, it gets harder to make those connections.

The session the next day went perfectly well. No one had ever heard of us, but by the last session at the conference, every seat was filled, a dramatic change from the seven brave souls who wandered in for the first. It was a depressingly homogeneous crowd (something I would not have said there, lest anyone overhear my usage of the word ‘homo.’) — nearly everyone was white (there were a couple of orange people of indeterminate ethnicity), and had I stood in the auditorium and yelled “coach,” nearly every man there would have turned around (this is the standard social studies teacher joke). But they were good sessions, some great questions, and Natalie and I both remarked as we set out for home (GPS both confused and fuming at me for not going the way it wanted me to go) that we’d come back if asked. We’d stay at the same hotel, and we’d even eat at the same chain restaurant.

And we’re definitely bringing a bottle of wine.

Tags: Fox News, Natalie, texas, Travel, work