I’m back home in Houston after nine days on the road. I started the latest leg of my book tour in Chicago before driving down to St. Louis and then Springfield. I then had to drive back up to St. Louis where I flew to New York City for shows in Yonkers, Staten Island and Brooklyn. It was a great trip full of wonderful discussions about WHERE WOLF and werewolves, amazing movie theater audiences, fantastic food and - for at least one stretch of a highway - dead armadillos.
The dead armadillos weren’t why my trip was wonderful, I should clarify. I just found it interesting that, as I drove through Missouri from Springfield to St. Louis, I should see so many dead armadillos along the side of the road. I stopped counting the unfortunate roadkill victims at twenty but I couldn’t get their tiny little corpses out of my head.
I’ve always had a soft spot for armadillos, a critter I have long considered to be an unofficial mascot of Texas. As a kid, I owned t-shirts emblazoned with pictures of armadillos. I’m pretty sure I picked up a stuffed armadillo toy or two as a kid. I wrote reports on the critter and cut out photos of them from my Ranger Rick magazines to staple to my wall. My ultimate covet, though, was a taxidermied armadillo clutching a beer bottle - a staple impulse purchase item that was invariably displayed at every Texas road stop during the ‘90s.
I was fascinated by the unique appearance of the armadillo - a mammal with an unmistakably reptilian appearance. It looked more like an alien creature sprung forth from the imagination of a particularly intoxicated dreamer than anything Earth’s biology would churn out. Armadillos - with their scaly exterior shell and penchant for rolling up into little balls (is this actually true? I don’t want to look it up because my heart would break if I learned this was just an urban legend) represents, at least to me, the “Don’t Mess With Texas” attitude I loved about the Lone Star State.
That said, I have very rarely actually seen an armadillo out in the wild in Texas. I once spotted one in North Houston as I left the Alamo Drafthouse - Vintage Park after a late-night movie screening. I followed the armadillo as it scurried through the parking lot. Despite the late hour, I was abuzz with excitement at seeing the critter in the flesh. I always assumed that spotting armadillos was a rare treat - something reserved only for the truest of Texans.
Cut to me driving down I-44 in Missouri and passing a dead armadillo every five miles. Is this where all the armadillos had gone? To be crushed by the tires of unappreciative Missourians?
The nine-banded armadillo first crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico to Texas in the late 19th century. Humans - impressed with the creature (as they should be) helped its geographic spread by bringing it to Florida around the same time. By 1995, the nine-banded armadillo was now living in Oklahoma, Louisana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. In the decades since, the critter has made its home in Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, and South Carolina. Because of the fact that the armadillo doesn’t have many natural predators, it’s expected that it will eventually reach Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Connecticut.
The bottom line is this - armadillos are on the move. They enjoyed their time in Texas but have decided that it’s better to risk becoming road splatter in favor of a cooler climate and the opportunities to be found up north. I can’t help but consider this myself as I tour outside of Texas.
I have lived in Texas my entire life. I love the myth of Texas - rugged individualism, wide open skies brimming with opportunities, a slight air of danger - but the danger almost mythic in scope. You’re just as likely to be killed by a rattlesnake or a twister as offed by heart disease in Texas. Texas is a land where you can reinvent yourself and find your fortune. Texas is like Narnia, Oz and Australia all rolled into one majestic tumbleweed of imagination and intrigue.
Lately, though, Texas has also become synonymous with hate and fear. The government is tripping over itself in a race with Florida to see how quickly it can erase the rights and liberties of the LGBTQ community. You just have to drive across the state to see barns painted with faded MAGA messages or see headlines in the opinion sections of small-town Texas community papers about how drag queens are secret groomers out to sell your children into sexual slavery. It’s really sobering stuff, to travel through Texas.
This isn’t really anything new, though. Texas has a long history of racism, sexism, violence, and deep, unsettling ugliness. I was able to overlook these elements because the myth was so strong. Like with armadillos, I focused on the stuff I loved about the state and ignored the stuff that made my heart hurt.
But the more time I spend outside of Texas the more I start to wonder what I’m still doing in this state. Is this a place where I want to raise a family? Is the myth of Texas just a sheet pinned to a clothesline waving in the wind, a chainsaw-wielding maniac hiding behind it waiting to shove me and my loved ones onto a meathook? Is Texas’ dangers all-too-real?
Texas sucks so much that even the armadillos are getting the hell out of here.
At what point do I follow?
Missourian here. I have to say, while my first deceased armadillo sighting in Missouri filled me with sadness, I was also excited that we finally had armadillos.
I'm not going to purport that I know how other Missourians feel, but "unappreciative" feels like the logical sentiment, as the bulk of us also don't know how beneficial opossums are. At any rate, I hope for their sake that they're just traveling through, as our state is also very angry right now.
You're not wrong about any of this, and we're having the same discussion.