It’s all momentum from here. I can hardly pick up my feet as we approach the intersection where Westheimer becomes Elgin. The former site of Whole Foods is our Mecca and our Hajj was coming to an end. Just 10 hours earlier, our driver Brandon shuttled myself and my cohorts Carter and Ben out past West Oaks Mall and to the Kroger parking lot or more accurately, HoneyKaz West African Restaurant. When I initially posted about doing the 18 mile stretch, the resounding questions friends and strangers posed to me was: WHY? If it wasn’t obvious, my initial curiosity to do this walk was sparked after reading John Lomax’s account of Westheimer in 2006. His tales of seedy sex shops and abundant liquor stores slowly fading into the upper class luxury of River Oaks called to me and I rushed to set a date with my friend Adrian Carter. Something I’ve noticed over years of making plans and schemes that die in the group chat is that when you set a date, even tentative, things tend to become real and move faster. So after a reschedule due to a conflict with the follow up visit for a clinical trial I had just completed, we chose Monday, December 9th and promptly forgot about it until the day before.
Shortly before we embarked, we made the addition of our friend and the Most Whimsical Guy I Know award winner, Ben White to our outfit. This made a healthy trio to keep up honest amongst adversity and ensured we didn’t bail if we got tired. As we began the journey, which features no sidewalk just a varying width of uneven grass, a vulture skipped ahead of us. Carter remarked that this could be seen as our White Rabbit to follow along our journey. The first mile or two prior was perhaps the second most challenging portion of our walk up until we hit the stretch of road in front of West Oaks Mall where we first encountered real sidewalks. The mall was the first major landmark we passed and represented a lot of what was to come on our walk. Without stepping inside you could tell this mall was dying. The main entrance was boarded up and from having gone to a similarly dead mall, I doubt you could go beyond the major department stores, in this case a Dillard’s. Still, a winter carnival was set up in the parking lot surrounded by a covered chain link fence. As far as I’m concerned, this might have been the most interesting thing we encountered on our walk. The only exception might be passing one of two Jollibees in the city. We didn’t get any spaghetti but I appreciated the novelty.
As we approached 610, Carter and I’s mobility was beginning to be a major issue. I don’t think there was a point we considered calling it quits but it was certainly becoming more difficult to ignore the pain creeping from our feet to our calves as we passed Hotel Derek. Ben, a known walker, was absolutely unphased throughout. Night was creeping up as we entered the loop and made our way through River Oaks. Perhaps only because the previous 16 miles had been nothing but gas stations, I finally felt a notable shift when we exited River Oaks and entered Montrose. I had written off Montrose as just the place teenagers who are trying on their city clothes at Pavement went (Honestly, that’s spot on still) but being greeted by a white trash meth head saying “Everybody wants to be gangster but nobody wants to catch a body…y’all got a cigarette?” made me question if I had a misplaced malaise about the area. Then we passed a bunch of yuppies walking into Agora and I knew I was beginning to hallucinate from exhaustion. We stopped into the Juiceland that our buddy Ed works at and got apple juices and yerba mates. Our stops were becoming more frequent but we all knew that with the end literally in sight, we needed to push forward to avoid our legs locking up. So we bid Ed a quick farewell and continued towards the finish line.
It’s all momentum from here. It seemed like all these landmarks were passing by at a snail’s pace. Avant Garden to Tiemo to Numbers. It took us what seemed like an hour to make it to our final destination, the former site of a Whole Foods where Westheimer became Elgin. It was a lackluster place to end our journey but we still shared celebratory daps before sitting down outside Kitty Bodega and waiting for Brandon to pick us up. “How was it?” he asked. I didn’t know how to answer, I honestly felt like we just completed an exercise. Ticking a box on a list of “Must Do Things For The Underemployed In Houston” list. I had to come up with something quick that didn’t include The Friends We Made Along The Way.
Derek: Brandon, I learned that a person can live their whole life in a city and not know a single thing about it. So at the end of the day, this was an exercise in slowing down and taking in a part of the city we weren’t so familiar with.
Brandon: Did you still want to go to Katz’s?
EPILOGUE:
What I truly gathered from this trip was unexpected. I gathered an appreciation for my body and realized how I’d taken it for granted. When I got home and began to get out of the car, my legs literally collapsed underneath me. I was barely in pain but my legs were so exhausted, Brandon had to help me upstairs to the bathroom. I made a makeshift ice bath by stopping the drain with a towel, put on Frank Ocean’s Blonde, and ate my Katz’s Reuben. I typically don’t eat the pickle but I know that can help with cramps so I bit the bullet and downed it. It might have been the only thing that saved me from additional agony as I laid staring at the ceiling, tweaked off a Yerba Mate for the next 2 hours.
Sayonara.
-D
