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http://www.omniture.com --> Sections Home Page Local News AP News Blogs Archives Business Classifieds Event Calendar Forums Life Opinion Obituaries Multimedia Photo Gallery Readers Photo Gallery Sports Tempo Weather Road Cams Special Coverage 2006 Britt Festivals --> Shop Our Valley AutoFinder HomeFinder JobFinder Search Our Valley Special Sections Distinctly Northwest Readers' Choice Homelife Magazine Joy Magazine Oregon Golf Info Oregon Wine Info Other Publications Local Links Ashland News eSouthernOregon Newspapers In Education Personals Moving Here Movie Listings TV Listings Volunteer Customer Service Advertise With Us Media Kit Place Classified Ad Contact Us FAQ's Home Delivery Site Map --> Email Story to a Friend November 5, 2006 Stuck inside of Dallas with the Medford blues again Between the Lines By BILL VARBLE One of the main jobs of a vacation is to make you glad you live where you live. This re-dawns on me as my wife and I spend a week in the Dallas-Ft. Worth megalopolis in Texas visiting my daughter and her husband. Once upon a time Texas was cattle and big hair and chicken-fried steaks. It's a vestige of that that's evoked in Sasha Baron Cohen's new movie "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan." Fuggettaboutit. You could live here and not get stuck in that Dallas. Now it's freeways and subdivisions and Italian restaurants and sushi bars (chains) radiating out on the plains from the urban centers with all their high-rise construction and mega-churches and strip clubs. Advertisement Amon Carter, who owned most of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, once said he wouldn't go to Dallas without a sack lunch. Big D felt the same about Cow Town. But whatever the cultural divide was, it's being homogenized in the 'burbs by the seemingly invincible force of endless sprawl. The land is flat, and there's a lot of room to sprawl. You can buy a three-bedroom house for less than a vacant lot in Medford (if you could find a lot in Medford). Yet huge, faux ante-bellum mansions are thrown up on lots so small you figure the buyers are hoping their neighbors don't snore. The most modest new subdivision home is brick and probably has pillars and a vault and a fireplace. Yet even the grandest have these ramshackle wooden fences. If you get far enough out of town, say, 30 or 40 miles, there's a sense of what the land once looked like, although sprawl is encroaching here, too. It is grassy and surprisingly green, Eugene or Ireland green this early autumn after some rain, a savanna of red oaks and live oaks. Grapevine, where my daughter lives, is a farm town morphed into a bedroom theme town, an Old Town Americana boutique of collectibles and espresso and micro-brews. There's no use being in the megalopolis and not doing city things. We take in a nice production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" at Dallas Theater Center's Kalita Humphries Theatre, a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed glory without a right angle. It uses Williams' 1974 script that famously un-Bowdlerized the '55 Broadway version in which language, sex and humor had been turned to mush. Brick missed. One never sees the right Brick. The next day we execute an easy mid-morning freeway transit — our luck is good — to the new Van Gogh exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art. The secret of museuming is to not try to see everything. We zero in on the Van Goghs. "Sheaves of Wheat" grabs me and sucks me into that sun-blasted field with eight palpable, hallucinatory, dancing sheaves, all that yellow and lavender pigment jabbed onto the canvas in violent strokes. Van Gogh went to Auvers-sur-Oise in May of 1890 to be treated by a homeopath. Say what you will about his advancing breakdown, at least it wasn't artist's block! From the time he got a shipment of canvases from his brother in June, he turned out thirteen large canvases of double-square format before his death just weeks later, obsessing over wheat ("Wheat Field under Cloudy Sky," "Crows over the Wheat Field" "Sheaves of Wheat," etc.), which in his fevered brain must have been a metaphor for — what? — some kind of cycle thing. When you go from the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, the world's fourth largest, to little, grandiloquently named Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport, you ain't in Texas anymore, Billy Bob. And although Texas is a state I dearly love, you know that's a good thing. You know in your bones when you look down from the plane and see this scepter'd little isle of green majesty in a sprawling world, this fortress built by nature for herself, this precious refuge set in a green valley, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this valley (with apologies to Wm. Shakespeare). Yessir. You just hope the sprawl monster doesn't engulf it. Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail [email protected] . Would you like to respond to this story? If so Click Here to visit our forums. Advertisement Copyright © 1997-2007 Mail Tribune, Inc. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms & Conditions | Website Feedback online casinos news Home Security Systems Online Casino Reviews Trunks, Footlocker Fundraisers UK Homeowner Loans Casinos Canada Cord Blood Banking Discount Hotel Reservations Texas Electric Choice Compare Electric rates in Texas Windermere Van Vleet Men's Clothing Debt Help New Hampshire Primary