China Grove

It's Saturday night and we're going to eat out while we still can, before the lockdown resumes, as it surely will.

'Let's go to China Grove,' I suggest.

We discovered the place just last week on the way to Victoria. We saw much Trump campaign material that day, big signs and flags secured to the gates of ranches as we headed for the coast. Keep America Great, they proposed. It was depressing, but seems significant that Trump's support is at its most visible way beyond the city limits, and that it's nearly always ranches - people with money rather than the trailer parks, contrary to some of the mythology.

China Grove has a few trailer parks, probably more than average, and has the reputation of being the place where all the crackers live. This makes it sort of exotic from where we're sat, so that's where we're going, knowing full well that we'll almost certainly end up listening to stadium country as we eat our barbecue. Without wishing to seem too anthropological, we just want to see what the place has to offer. Bess finds a list of the top ten places to eat in China Grove on her smartphone and we hit the road. Top of the list is something called the Den, with second, third, and fourth places all occupied by different outlets of Dee Willie's BBQ Smokehouse. The rest are mostly Mexican diners.

We follow directions for the Den, and end up exploring more of China Grove than we expected. We go through a neighbourhood which is clearly better off than where we live, so that's interesting, and the map is once again proven to be distinct from the territory. We drive on and realise that we're leaving China Grove. The Den is in fact in La Vernia, some seventeen miles east of China Grove. This seems to represent a derailment of our expedition, but never mind. It makes us feel a bit sorry for China Grove given that the best place to eat in China Grove isn't actually in China Grove.

La Vernia is outside the city. It's of a decent size but is spread out, as towns in Texas tend to be. It looks clean and modern and well maintained for the most part. The cremains of Bess's father were interred at a church here for reasons no-one quite remembers in the absence of any particularly obvious familial association with the town. As we approach, her phone goes - a text message from the city warning us to stay in our homes so as to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It feels a bit apocalyptic, but we're already here so we may as well eat.

We were doing so well. We had chalked up about sixty total deaths among the two million inhabitants of Bexar county, with fewer and fewer new cases coming in each day. Mayor Nirenberg was on top of it, but found himself overruled by Greg Abbott, the state governor, who seemed particularly bothered that anyone might have to pay a fine for exercising their freedom to not wear a mask, and seemed sympathetic to those who claimed that the way forward would be to pack as many of us into the churches as possible so as to deliver a prayer for the end of the pandemic of such force that God would have no choice but to do the right thing. So this seems to be why the numbers are back in upwards freefall and we're once again in the shit. The masks have been demonstrably shown to slow the spread, but no-one is wearing them if they don't have to. No-one has been wearing a face mask on the Tobin Trail or in McAllister park because that's exercise, and walking a chihuahua at two miles per hour apparently counts as exercise.

Arseholes are quite naturally blaming the Black Lives Matter march attended by a fraction of the city's population, and every single one of them masked, because it's always the fault of those who have the most to lose. That's how it works, I guess.

We approach the Den and I can already hear the country music. Trucks are lined up outside and the place looks like a gymnasium. Bears abound in La Vernia, and I presume some local sports team will be known as the La Vernia Bears or similar, hence the Den. I assume bears have dens. It seems like a quiet town. I find it impossible to imagine what it must be like to grow up here. I have no frame of reference.

Masks, on the other hand, don't abound in La Vernia, at least not here, even if the Den is otherwise observing all of the other social distancing procedures. We find a table in what really, really looks like a gymnasium and order iced tea and beer from a waitress with false eyelashes like a couple of spiders. Five or six flatscreen televisions are mounted high up on the walls around the room, three of them tuned to Fox News, currently in the middle of an opinion piece which actually seems to be criticising Trump.

'Maybe the tables are turning,' I say to my wife.

We order food and are given an electronic buzzer which will go off when its ready, letting us know we can go to collect it from the serving hatch.

A man named Bubba now appears on Fox News, a NASCAR driver. NASCAR is some sort of motor racing event associated with economically impoverished white people. Bubba seems to be mixed race and the news item concerns what seemed to be a hangman's noose left in his dressing room. We're trying to work out if it was racially motivated, just a joke, or merely a bit of rope coincidentally resembling a noose which happened to be there and we're all way too sensitive these days. The feature which follows is some woman explaining what great jobs our cops do, so I guess the tables, if they have turned at all, haven't actually turned that much.

The buzzer goes off. I collect our food, and it is genuinely excellent, way above what we had begun to anticipate. It has been worth the expedition. The coronavirus has returned worse than before, and the Texas sky is presently full of Saharan dust, but we're glad we got out, just for this one evening.