The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 15. Collingsworth County Pioneer's Park

Travel Date:  September 10, 2018

Twenty-six minutes after not noticing Twitty, Texas, we arrived at Collingsworth County Pioneer's Park, not that it was a planned destination.  We were just hungry, and it provided picnic tables.  I was, however, anxiously looking for the forks of the Red River, as I knew from experience that many of the great picnic areas of Texas sit on the edge of the great rivers.  This one sits on the Salt Fork of the Red River, and it is indeed a great place to stop.

Marci prepares lunch at Collingsworth County Pioneer's Park, U.S. 83
between Shamrock and Wellington, Texas

I love Texas picnic grounds and rest areas.  The state has reasonably realized the road is the lens through which Texas is most likely viewed.  Wilds are few and far between.  Cities, though large, are spread many miles apart.  Land is mostly privately owned.  What connects it all is the road.  In Texas, the road is king.  You can't know Texas without putting miles on the road, and a lot of miles there are indeed.  According to Sue Owen of Politifact, summarizing a report by the Texas State Legislative Budget Board, "Texas had about 80,000 miles of highway in 2012, specifically 28,441 miles of U.S. and state highways, 3,231 miles of interstate, 7,031 miles of frontage road, 40,939 miles of farm-to-market roads and ranch-to-market roads, and 331 miles of park roads (Owen)".

Note, how few miles are park roads.  Public land is a rare commodity in Texas.  Only 1.8% of Texas is public land administered by the federal government.  Compare that with Utah, in which 64.9% of the land is public owned and administered by the federal government, or Nevada, where a whopping 84.9% of the land mass is federally controlled (Carol Hardy Vincent).  Folks in Utah like to complain a lot about the National Forest Service and BLM.  The ironic thing is that they spend every summer weekend camping, hiking, fishing and off-roading in areas that would not be accessible to the public if privately owned.  If they lived in Texas for a while and traveled miles to small, over-crowded public campgrounds, islands of wilds strictly controlled with off-roading forbidden, they'd come back to Utah more appreciative of what they have.

What Utah and Nevada have--mile after mile open, wild public spaces--Texas doesn't have.  However, to its credit, Texas has found a way to still provide the outdoors to its citizens despite the fact that most of the state is privately owned.  It's not the same, but the state and county governments do remarkably well with what they have.  Collingsworth County Pioneer's Park is a perfect example of that.

We pulled in next to a large covered picnic table.  We unloaded the cooler and food boxes from the trunk, and then I ran across the street to the restroom while Marci made lunch.  On the way back, I noticed it was warm, slightly humid, and wonderful.  Cicadas sang in the trees, and it was the temperature at which shade is preferable but sunlight is not unbearable.  You can move freely from one to the other, and neither is bad.

I wish I remembered exactly what we ate.  It's almost there, like when you have a familiar tune running around in your head, but you can't get the lyrics, or song title, to form at the moment.  I know we had sandwiches.  In my mind, they had crisp pickles and spicy brown mustard, and so they were probably made with cold-cuts of ham or turkey, but I can't be sure.  I know I had a Spicy V-8 to drink.  We probably had chips.  I know it was wonderful, because it is still almost there, a song on the tip of my tongue, and yet it's now been six months since we had that wonderful meal by the side of the highway in the great state of Texas.

For the record, I already used "great" four times in this post and "wonderful" three times. I normally avoid redundancy in word choice.  But "wonderful" and "great" is how I felt.  Besides, when talking about Texas, it is quite normal to overdue things.  There are as many miles of verbal "yahoos" and "yeehaws" in and about that state as there are miles of asphalt.  Ask a Texan about bluebonnets or the Hill Country and he will go on like he just returned from summer in the Alps or visited the Netherlands when the tulips are in bloom.   Seeing an armadillo to a Texan is like witnessing a snow leopard in the Himalayas.  This is even true even if the Texan flattens an armadillo out in his driveway each morning and has to stop and toss it in the garbage can before heading to work.  Texas is simply amazingly wonderful to Texans.  I must still have some Texan in me.  I certainly did that day.  I stopped at a roadside park and felt like I'd just been to Yellowstone.

References

Carol Hardy Vincent, Laura A. Hanson, Carla N. Argueta. Federal Land Ownership: Overview and Data. Congress Report. United States Congress. Washington D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2017. PDF. 7 February 2019. <https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42346.pdf>.

Owen, Sue. Texas’ change in highway miles not No. 1 when adjusted for state size, population. 28 January 2014. 7 February 2019. <https://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2014/jan/28/rick-perry/texas-change-highway-miles-not-no-1-adjusted-size/>.