Sunday, August 28, 2016

The Hills

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 cafĂ©. 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.