A friend of mine, Ted Campbell, a Beaumont boy, asked me what was distinctive about Southeast Texas. This is some of how I responded:
Houston claims to represent SE Texas, but as anyone from the Golden Triangle knows, it just ain't so. The ethos of Southeast Texas truly is much more likely to be found within the confluence of the Trinity, Neches, and Sabine rivers that wind and twist through its very soul.
At first I wanted to say that what is distinctive is its geography. But that is not accurate. Even though a geologist could map out the convergence of the piney woods with the coastal plain, what is distinctive is much deeper than what can be seen or touched or heard.
I think that at root and core, what is distinctive is an intangible nexus of the raw bounty this land had to offer in making a fortune—or at least a way of life—from fishing in the waters of the bay or gulf, to the timbers of its mighty forests, to the fertile land yielding a rich bounty of rice, or the drilling for black gold and its many spin-off industries. Long before derivatives were some arcane financial component to a corporate back page, it was alive and well in Southeast Texas with its magnetic siren call beckoning to those looking for a higher wage, a better standard of living, than could be found from its contiguous geographic cousins. It was a call that few could resist.
The promised yield was nearly mesmerizing. The opportunity for a better life was appealing. The conjoining of the rich and poor, the black and white, the educated and the uncultivated, provided a rich brew that bequeathed to the residents of Southeast Texas, a malt in which friendships could be forged, in which ideas could be distilled, and in which memories could be sifted endlessly—whether through the turbulence of parsing junior high alliances or the sophisticated pastiche of people bent on improving not just their economic lot, but the very heart of their social fabric as well.
The environment, the context that engenders southeast Texas is unique to itself, and yet like so many other areas, is a rich loam from which could be fashioned and formed lives that made a difference—contemporaneously, as well as historically.