Literary allusions are my Achilles' heel, so I may be on shaky analogical ground if I start making comparisons in the story of a far-flung pork rind company location man pretending to be scouting out luxury home sites while he's actually seeking hog farmland. Maybe there's something here about not making a silk purse from a sow's ear. Because of course, a rose is a rose as a hog is a hog, or to lapse more appropriately into the expressed bureaucratese, a pork unit is a port unit. And furthermore, a rose or a hog or a pork unit by any other name would smell as sweet.
Better to stick with cautionary country songs and bumper sticker caveats. For the hapless offender in question in Annie Proulx's novel That Old Ace in the Hole surely violates some Lone Star bylaw when he actually messes with Texas. The best-selling author of The Shipping News and the novella Brokeback Mountain eventually, if unsteadily and every-which- waywardly, reins in her main character with, in true Proulx fashion, the help of dozens of Texas-style rodeo-clownish denizens, assorted and sundry eccentrics, second bananas, wacky neighbors and gruff but lovable codgers with such Proulxian bizarro-world names as Rope Butt, Freda Beautyrooms, Jim Bob Bill Skirt and Francis Scott Keister bearing down on him like a posse of all of my exes who still live in Texas.
Such Ox-Bow incidentals are to be expected in this "back porch country" of the Texas and Oklahoma panhandle region, now mostly hardscrabble and pocked with more characterless "prefab ranchburgers" than in its renowned oil-rich or cattle country days, a place where apocalyptic thunder, dust storms, tornadoes and grass fires builds quick-draw character, "counterpoint humor" and an underlying sense of unease.
It's an apprehension extended to outsiders and big-city ways, including the consideration of what AARP hath wrought: " `Trouble with these retirement people comin in,' " explains one sagebrush sage, " `is that they all want to change things to how it was where they come from. They want the National Public Radio. They want organic grocery stores. They want the Houston Chronicle delivered to their doorstep. They want likker stores. They want restaurants.' She gave the last word a tone that equated it with leper colonies."
The same way that the troubling mention of an incoming pork rind company might be spat out. That's Pork with a capital P and that rhymes with T and that stands for Tool of an industrial hog farming company that confines suffering animals, poisons the water supply and fouls the air, while any hopes that the local economy will be helped are shattered as the few minimum-wage jobs are overshadowed by the automated, computer-controlled operations, and as the company purchases bulk supplies in the world market rather than buying locally.
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