Back Down South

I have gone south on Interstate 35 more times than I can count over the years. They are some of my earliest memories, and some of my best, alone on the open road as the sun comes up and still when the sun goes down. I know the flat moonlike landscape of Kansas too well, ditto the dense forests and perfect lakes in Minnesota. I know it is Missouri when the hills start to roll, and Texas when the world goes dry and flat. It is a strange and special part of the country to me, and one I will probably always come back to after being somewhere else.

The most worn and well-known path sits between Austin and Dallas, that three plus hour span that separates my first recognizable family home from the first place that was mine alone. In the middle lies a million small unknown towns, the true just-off-the-interstate Texas. The two 35s join up at Hillsborough, and then you must stop for a kolache in West. Waco marks the halfway point, and Temple says you are an hour out. The IKEA of Round Rock says you are entering city limits, and then finally the numbered streets begin, the longhorn football stadium and the tower fly by out your right-side window, and baby skyscrapers line the horizon by Town Lake.

Austin has turned into a once a year trip, a meeting place of old friends who once roamed the city with me and are now dispersed across the globe. Every time I go I am reminded it is a city of littered memories, virtually every hidden alleyway shooting back to a good conversation or a bad night alone or something that did not have to be that way but was. This is youth I suppose, and what college is made for, but the feelings are grey and yank at my stomach from time to time. It's good, helpful even, to be around people around back then too, those that feel similarly bittersweet about this wonderful city; I imagine I'm not the only one who finds value in both coming and going each time we stencil this all into our itineraries.

Visiting the old bars on Rainey Street reminds you change is good, and part of me finds it fitting that in a few short months Lustre Pearl will be bulldozed, erased forever, new condominiums built up in its place. So many people still have not left that drunken world and it very easily could have been me back there pouring beer and coming home at 5am feeling empty. There are plenty of reasons to desire Austin again; its coffee shops and drinking joints and running trails and delightful fall weather and hill country and beautiful girls in dresses on a friday night resonated back then and do with me now. That all crashes into the many periods of exponential growth that are never particularly fun to revisit.

The goodbyes in Austin happened swiftly like they have happened before, and things continue on like they always have. The front porches that once sustained the toughest of conversations are still there, now supporting someone else. New underage students scurry about on Sixth Street hoping for a stroke of luck. Someone else probably stands up on Mount Bonnell at night, entranced by the red lights flickering on, and off, and on, and off, and on, and off. People leave and fresh people arrive and it is exciting for them, something new, like it once was for me. It will always be there indeed, cycling people through the same lovely motions, forever, and I can always come back and pick out which stage certain people fall. After a while -- it could have been a week or a month -- I drove north on Interstate 35, passing everything in reverse, leaving Speedway and Alta Vista and all the other little realities in the rear view mirror. I did not look back too much because I've done it so many times already.