My recent summer vacation took me from one
end of the almost endless Texas panhandle to the other. Taking the
not-interstate whenever possible, I cruised through towns like Happy, Tulia,
Stinnett, Hartley and Quitaque. As usual when in the western half of the state,
I kept the windows up and the AC on recirculate, to mitigate the stench of the
oilfields.
Living in Austin, a busy, overflowing, self-important little
city, one forgets that Texas is mostly a vast empty land. In some parts, the
oil wells and cattle far outnumber humans. The wind turbines are starting to
get a pretty good population going in some parts too. I drove through towns
where every place of business was boarded up. I stopped at gas stations with frighteningly
dysfunctional plumbing where clearly no employee had ever been trained in the
use of a mop. I walked into restaurants and immediately turned to walk out
again, overwhelmed by the stench of a chronically dirty kitchen. I drove around
wild turkeys sauntering down Main Street, clearly not used to being disturbed
by automotive traffic.
Texas has a carefully crafted self-image of rugged spaces,
lean ranchers, industrious farmers, adventurous roughnecks, blue skies, and
small towns filled with the virtues of community, tradition, and good sportsmanship.
The reality doesn’t quite match up. Perhaps once, when farms and ranches were
smaller, when distances were longer, when each little town had its own post
office and school and general store and doctor’s office and café. But that’s a
world that doesn’t exist anymore. Not even in the most remote parts of rural
America.
As the small towns crumble and the smartest and most
adventurous move away for bigger things, as their relevance dwindles and their
communities shrink, the ones who are left develop a hard, brittle anger that
has become the new hallmark of small-town life. Teachers hang crosses and flags
in their classroom and insist on the daily pledge. Preachers shout brimstone
and judgement from the pulpit. Confederate flags and Come and Take It bumper
stickers predominate. Pickup trucks tailgate aggressively and pass in a cloud
of dust. A “love it or leave it” creed is espoused by people who clearly no
longer love nor take pride in their own communities.
Most of Texas is only slightly arable. Farms here were never
cozy little affairs with a red barn and a white house and peonies in the yard.
It’s always been a hardscrabble place. For Texas farmers and ranchers, economic
survival requires a lot of land. Everything’s bigger in Texas because it has to
be. 160 acres just ain’t gonna cut it. The landscape is littered with
crumbling, abandoned houses and barns. Did their occupants sell out or die out?
I drove past a lot of “ranch for sale”
signs. A thousand acres is kind of on the small side. That’s a lot of barbed
wire fences.
Then slowly, as one slides down off the high plains towards
the hill country, small oak trees begin to appear. The hills round into
pleasant green mounds. Suddenly, there are hunting ranches with elaborately
rugged entrance gates, and vineyards with cute names. Towns abound with BBQ
pits and antique stores and rusty Texana. Snow in the Meadow blooms between the
cactus, and a soft gray rain is falling. Having come down from the Rockies to
this in one day, I see these homely hills in a new way. How comfortable the
hill country is, with its constant bouquet of wildflowers, the broad, welcoming
arms of its enormous oaks, the happy laughter of its hundreds of springs and
creeks and streams, its feminine curves of undulating hills, the endless music
of its birds.
Then you get closer to Austin, where the hills are covered
with mansions and malls and mega-churches and self-storage warehouses, where
skyscrapers and cranes are reflected in the quiet water of the Colorado River. People
crowd the parks and bars and jogging tails and greenbelts, enjoying their city
and their youth and their lives. Nothing could be more different from those
dying West Texas towns. Or maybe not? The roughneck and the rancher, the tech
hipster and the developer, they all take whatever they can get from this land.
Oil, cattle, rental income, an IPO, or an exciting single track trail – all the
same really. When your brain is numb from the hum of the road, does everything
make sense, or nothing?
I parked the car and got out, my legs stiff from long hours on
the road. I walked over to the oak tree in my yard and touched my hand to its bark.
A live oak tree has a distinct personality. It’s a friendly tree; it likes to
be touched and spoken to. The wet smells of my garden and the busy buzzing of
my bees filled my senses. Then a motorcycle screamed up the hill in front of my
house, leaving the scent of exhaust fumes behind. I turned to go inside.
