I can somewhat relate to Brisket, though I ain’t cryin’ and shit.
My parents lived in Harlingen from 1993 to 2010, so I made the drive from Austin to the Valley many a times, especially while in undergrad and law school. Coming from North Carolina, “Godforsaken” was the label I used for that 5-hour stretch once you exit 35 in San Marcos (I avoided San Antonio because taking 123/181 to 37 shaved off about 20 minutes) all the way to Harlingen. My mom told me that her brother, a Navy pilot, was stationed in Beeville for a time before he went to Vietnam, so I thought, “I actually have some personal connection to this shithole.”
After a time, though, I developed an affinity for that part of Texas, and winding through towns like Segiun, Kennedy, Karnes City, and Stockdale, and the spaces in between, I started to see beauty, and embrace it as sort of a home as I slowly became tied to this state. After my parents moved to Georgetown in 2010, those road trips pretty much stopped. But we went to Port A when my daughter was a toddler, and then to a wedding in Corpus around 2017, and I actually geeked out over making that drive again. For nostalgia sake, I stopped in Mathis for some beef jerky.