I took my 7-year-old son on a fishing expedition along the Texas coast with the help of an experienced guide on New Year’s Day 2024. We had lived in the state for a couple of years, in landlocked College Station, and I didn’t want him to forget what life was like on the rural coast of North Carolina, where my family comes from. We were told Matagorda Bay offered prime saltwater fishing opportunities. That was an understatement.

Our captain, Charlie Paradoski, steered his bay boat into the Intracoastal Waterway and under the Matagorda Bridge. When he realized we were comfortable on the boat, he sped up gradually to around 45 mph. The temperature was in the 50s as we flew down the waterway, fog hanging here and there. After about 2 miles, we never saw another boat. We cruised several more miles into West Matagorda Bay. Charlie said were about 10 miles from the harbor. He slowed down and pulled the boat to a floating stop.

Over the next hour, we reeled in one black or red drum after another. Charlie adjusted our location by maybe 200 yards several times. Wherever we casted, there were fish. We reached our legal limit within 15 minutes. The rest we released. I was astonished. After a life of living in coastal Carolina, I had never caught fish this rapidly. Since that day, my son has said, “It was the best day of my life.” One of mine, too.

My heartstrings were drawn to the Texas coast long before we moved to the state in 2021 after my wife got a faculty job at Texas A&M. I grew up in a town of around 9,500 people on a large river of brackish water that fed into a sound. The Outer Banks separated this water from the ocean. My childhood home was directly across a fence from a historical Black beach on the Pamlico River. People from miles away gained access to the water from this beach. I went to sleep on countless nights listening to a DJ spinning tunes by Earth Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Curtis Mayfield, and Donna Summer, among so many others.

We were still searching online for a house in College Station when our realtor told us about Matagorda. It was her family’s favorite spot on the coast. They liked it because it was isolated and remote, with basically no tourism except people there to fish or watch birds. This sounded good to me. I was something of a birder and my son surpassed me during the pandemic by studying bird guides with his grandmother via FaceTime. Matagorda County maintains, annually, the highest variety of bird species of any county in the United States. I had to see this place, for it seemed to touch many geographic buttons from earlier in my life.

Before we moved, I was looking forward to exploring this massive new state. I began looking at maps of Texas. I had visited the big cities, spending the most time in Austin, but nowhere else. I knew nothing about College Station outside of Aggie sports. Little did I know the town sits in a geographical sweet spot in Texas. If you connect the dots of Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston, the lines form a triangle, with College Station inside, 95 miles north of Houston—one of the largest cities in the country.

I found a topographical map showing the rivers coming out of the mountains and flowing downhill toward the coast. The whole state tilts down toward Houston and the Gulf of Mexico. Amarillo and El Paso are both nearly 4,000 feet above sea level. Austin’s elevation is 600 feet, DFW 500 feet, and College Station less than 300. Houston’s elevation is 50 feet. Incredibly, Galveston is only 7 feet above sea level.

I felt like I had made a discovery. College Station has a singular vantage point for exploring Texas, with Houston as the anchor. It’s places like these, on the edges and in between the cities, that I have learned to appreciate the most.

I was already living in Texas in my head before we moved here. I had landed a dream job ghostwriting the memoir of the legendary singer, songwriter, and bandleader Lucinda Williams. She is often thought of as an Austin musician, and that’s certainly not wrong; she was inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame in 2021. But her roots are deeper, buried in Houston, Galveston, Beaumont, and nearby places in southern Louisiana like Lake Charles and Lafayette. The interconnectivity between these locations is strong. When Williams lived in Houston, she played Anderson Fair in the Montrose area and Old Quarter in Galveston, while befriending other Texas musicians including Townes Van Zandt and Blaze Foley.

I learned that Houston is where Williams met a pivotal, lifelong friend, Hobart Taylor, whose family-owned farmland in the area turned out to have oil underneath it. His family became wealthy, and in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Taylor attended Brown University in Rhode Island, where he developed a fondness for American folk music. He moved back to Houston and hung around places like Anderson Fair. He met Williams and later became a critical benefactor to her life and work, fronting her money to make a demo record in New York City and helping her obtain a place to live in Los Angeles. Taylor now resides in San Francisco and the two friends stay in touch.

I spent more than 100 hours interviewing Williams at her home in Nashville from 2019 to 2021. I also had access to recordings of more than 100 hours of interviews her husband has conducted with her. Almost everything in my life and career came together during the project, listening to her talk and crafting the results into text, also digging into her personal scrapbooks and archives, and her music, which I had been listening to since 1992. We published Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You in 2023.

Most of my work involves music. I spent 20 years, most of my adult life, researching a midcentury, underground New York City jazz loft in Manhattan’s wholesale flower district in which hundreds of jazz musicians passed through in the 1950s and ’60s. I’ve been called a cultural historian, and I suppose that’s true. The novelist Allan Gurganus called me a “story finder,” which he distinguished from a storyteller. Both of those terms indicate a certain kind of excavation into places and the memories, thoughts, and feelings of people. I’m seduced by not knowing what there is to find in my research, not going after targets. I’m not looking to prove anything

When Williams lived in Houston in the early ’70s, she made a trip to Navasota to visit the legendary blues musician Mance Lipscomb, who was born into sharecropping on a cotton farm near where the Brazos and Navasota rivers meet. He stayed there his entire life. Williams and a friend picked Lipscomb up at the bus station downtown, and they went to a barbecue joint that Lipscomb picked out. Williams told me:

“We sat down and Mance ordered a huge plate of barbecue chicken with sides and several pieces of white bread. He was specific about the bread. He wanted plain white bread, like Wonder bread. He’s eating this greasy barbecue chicken and soaking up the juices with the Wonder bread and loving every minute of it. Mance was nearly 80 at this time and skinny as a rail.”

One day in December I drove down to Navasota and turned onto Piedmont Road to look for the location of Lipscomb’s house. It was no longer there, just a vacant lot. I drove toward downtown and found the statue of him that’s now there, then a short drive away I found his grave. Outside of town is the flat farmland, Allen Farm, where the rivers merge. Lipscomb called this place “my precinct” deep into his life, after he’d become well known on the national folk music circuit and memorialized in a short documentary by the renowned filmmaker Les Blank.

Good barbecue restaurants haven’t changed much over the decades, neither here nor in North Carolina, where “barbecue” is not brisket but pulled pork with vinegar-pepper sauce (no tomato!). Whether in Navasota or College Station, they’re gathering spots with a sense of place, where all walks of life can share the pleasure of simple ingredients.

I immediately felt at home in and around Matagorda. The town has a year-round population of less than 500 people, but it felt bustling at the center in the morning because Matagorda Harbor draws boating people from a wide radius. Houston is about 100 miles away to the northeast. It’s not the closest coastal access to Houston but it’s the closest place to feel like you are in the middle of nowhere.

There is a general store in the center of Matagorda, Stanley’s, that has gas, ice, fishing gear and bait, food staples, and a little grill serving sausage-and-egg sandwiches in the morning and barbecue, fish sandwiches, and cheeseburgers later. The nearest grocery store and pharmacy is H-E-B, 22 miles away in Bay City, due north on State Highway 60. In between Matagorda and Bay City there is a large wind farm, with massive turbines looming over the terrain like something from outer space. The land is tabletop flat, providing a feeling of landscape that is in my blood from the coastal plains of North Carolina.

The morning of the day before the fishing trip with my son, I drove from our rental house on the Colorado River, near where it dumps into the Gulf, to Matagorda Harbor. I counted 67 boat trailers in the parking lot of the marina and boat ramps, and several more trucks and trailers were lined up to put boats into the water. Serious fishing folks. I ventured inside the marina dock store and saw old salt couples and individuals wearing weathered fishing gear, people experienced on the water in winter, people familiar with each other who knew what they were doing. Even though I had extensive experience on the North Carolina coast, this was foreign territory. Bodies of saltwater are all different. Local knowledge can only be acquired through firsthand experience. Back at our rental house, I told my wife, “This level of fishing might be well above my league.” I am glad I had asked the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department for a suggestion on a professional guide.

My son and I met captain Charlie at 8 a.m. at the harbor docks. His bay boat was already in the water, and he was sitting in it, tied up to a short pier, ready for us. While we waited for the fog to lift, my son and I walked around the parking lot and counted 55 trailers emptied of their boats already. A dozen more were lined up waiting for open ramps.

Back at Charlie’s boat, I asked him about himself. He was a Vietnam veteran who returned from the war and worked for more than 30 years at Sears in Houston before retiring in the early ’00s. Now his permanent residence was Sugar Land, about 80 miles from Matagorda. Weather permitting, he fished here every day, year-round, as long as there were customers lined up. Most of them came from Greater Houston. His reputation was so strong, he received a new boat from a local boat dealer every two years, his previous one commanding prime prices in the market as “captain Charlie’s last boat.” Perfectly tended with up-to-date equipment. Better than new.

Charlie was ready to leave so we pushed off. We waved to my wife as she got into her car to return to the rental house.

When I was a kid growing up in coastal North Carolina, Houston was something I associated with industrial energy, technology, and space themes. The Astros, the Astrodome, the Rockets, the Oilers with the oil rigs on their helmets, NASA … it was all something foreign to me. But as I’ve learned visiting Houston over the past couple of years, the city fits squarely in the American South, like a cross between New Orleans and Atlanta. The gorgeous and haunting live oaks, with long, lazy limbs that sometimes droop down and rest on the ground are straight out of The Big Easy or Savannah.

Driving from College Station to Houston, a landscape of the West gives way to a landscape of the South. In only 95 miles, the climate changes from dry to wet. Live oaks need humidity and torrents of water, and they have it in Houston. You can feel the gentle descent toward the water.

I’ve been driving down to Houston at least once a month for personal and professional reasons. There is a deep and thoughtful arts community there. I met Sarah Rothenberg, who is a world-class pianist and the artistic director of the innovative music-presenting organization DACAMERA. I’m writing a story about her for a New York magazine. The group’s offices are down the street from the Menil Collection, which is my favorite small museum in the country. DACAMERA and The Menil maintain a unique partnership linking music and art with their collaborative programming. DACAMERA’s Hamburg Steinway piano is kept in the basement of The Menil’s modern building, available for Rothenberg to use for practice and brought up into the galleries for intimate performances by many artists including her. Everything The Menil does is carefully crafted and elegantly presented, from its gallery devoted to the work of the legendary abstract artist Cy Twombly to the member mailings. And admission to The Menil and the nearby Rothko Chapel, devoted to the painter Mark Rothko, are free. Rothenberg told me recently, “The Menil and Rothko are reasons by themselves to live in this area.”

As much as I feel comfortable in rural areas and on the outskirts, I need the vital mixed cultures of cities to thrive. I lived most of my life in North Carolina but also felt at home in New York City since my parents first took me there when I was 14. In my adult life, I have often said New York is my second home, having made some 300 trips there for work over a couple of decades. One foot in and one foot out of both places. Similarly, though I live in College Station, Houston is becoming my second home in Texas.

This spring I’ll research and write about Rothenberg’s collaboration with the globally celebrated composer Tyshawn Sorey, who is based in Philadelphia. The pair worked together in 2022 when DACAMERA and the Rothko Chapel commissioned Sorey’s piece Monochoromatic Light (After Life) for an ensemble, on which Rothenberg played piano. Sorey first conceived of a solo piano piece for Rothenberg while the ensemble was performing for the first time at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. Rothenberg will play the solo piece twice at The Menil in March, along with performances in Los Angeles, Washington, and New York. To hear music of this caliber inside The Menil is a gift to the public.

There is a massive live oak tree outside the Cy Twombly Gallery at The Menil. One of the limbs almost reaches the ground about 30 feet from the tree’s trunk. Another limb almost touches the main door of the gallery. Every time I walk through that door, I stop and gaze at that tree and think about its proximity to the gallery, which Twombly helped design before he died. Much of his artwork is in homage to ancient images, writings, and thoughts.

This past December, I met a photographer from Austin at The Menil and we went downtown for dinner. It was early evening, and I walked across a bridge over the Buffalo Bayou. I didn’t know there was a bayou in downtown Houston. I looked over the rail at the moving water, probably 50 feet below the bridge, and saw an egret standing on the bank looking for fish. Birds are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs, and the egret certainly looked prehistoric here amid the freeways and skyscrapers. The water of this bayou is a result of the tilt from the mountains of northwest Texas to here. I tilt in this direction, too.

My son and I still had time on our half-day excursion, so captain Charlie took it easy on the way back to the harbor. I said to Charlie, “The harbor was full of empty trailers, and there was a long line of more trailers waiting for the ramp. But we didn’t see any boats after the first couple of miles, and we were catching one fish after another. Why weren’t there more boats around us?” Charlie responded, “Well, I don’t know how to say this except to be blunt. They are scared to get this far away from the harbor, and they don’t know where the fish are. It’s as simple as that, but the fog doesn’t help either. Most people flash a bigger fishing game than they actually can do.”

Charlie told me two-thirds of his customers are repeats. Some families go back three generations of fishing with him. Sometimes the latter generations have moved away, but they come back to Houston to visit and find their way to Matagorda for a few days. Charlie cleaned our drum for us, and we packed the fillets in ice. I asked him if he ever saw alligators. “Oh, yeah, in the summer they are all over,” he replied. “They are hibernating now.”

Back at our house in College Station, we made fish stew using a classic recipe from my home waters in North Carolina. Rockfish, or striped bass, was the staple there, but drum was another firm fish, a good substitute. We layered chopped potatoes, onions, celery, pieces of fried bacon and semi-dry sausage, parsley, spices, and fish in the pot. We dropped in a can of diced tomatoes, a few tablespoons of Worcestershire, and three bay leaves on top. Then we filled the pot with water and fish broth to the brim. We didn’t stir it; we just let it sit on a light simmer for a couple of hours. I might rename this version Matagorda Stew.