A book and back in Texas

It is hard to say at what point exactly a wave of nostalgia fell over me, but The Son, by Philipp Meyer, certainly brought it out. It's a Texas epic spanning two hundred years, and in that, like few novels have accomplished, you see the full depth of an infamous place layered in blood and power and greed. Texas smashed different types of people against one another over years and years and years, one epoch clinging on for dear life while the next quickly unhinged it, and any examination of history makes you realize this all repeats itself again and again. So that is Texas to me: that is, a microcosm, an intense, confined dose of the world as it has always been, just rougher around the edges without much to water it down; a story of survival and opportunity, untouched land to sprawling cities, buffalo to cattle to railroad to oil; a crossroads of Indians to Spanish to Mexicans to Americans, all in so short a time.

"But that is the story of the human race. Soil to sand, fertile to barren, fruit to thorns. It is all we know how to do."

And so in reading about the time of the Comanches, when the Llano spread out untouched for as far as the eye could see and buffalo were more numerous than people, I found myself drifting back to walks and drives and nights on the town around the emblems of my youth. The Fort Worth Stockyards, the State Capitol, old town Dallas, the Texas Hill Country, the Alamo, the Riverwalk, the Arboretum. Small towns that aren't so small anymore, Georgetown, Shiner, Fredericksburg, Greene, Bastrop, Mesquite, McKinney, San Marcos, all dots on a map which millions of personalities from Davy Crockett to George W. Bush once called home. All these dots and black and white photos, street names and old town cemeteries, former flags and constitutions and kings, gun laws and death penalties, cowboys and fraternity kids, arrowheads and oil wells, Texas Rangers and state troopers, stadiums turned mega churches, they add up and make Texas what it is, both a place and undoubtedly a state of mind, and in that an ever evolving identity.

I've cursed it and I've defended it all over the world, and there are parts I love and parts that make me irate, but I am proud my earliest memories are there, and I'm proud to speak of it knowingly when I'm somewhere else far away.

A few predictions

I'm not often wrong when I do make predictions, so I'll paint a picture now as the days roll by: a quiet beach with no one on it, the kind you see in pictures and wonder how there is still a place that remote in a world so developed, where the sand is fine and the palm trees come right up to the water and when it is dark you listen to the waves and look up and see real stars; rain that comes frequently and out of nowhere, one minute absent and the next minute blurring the sky, drifting in fast from the water and disappearing as fast as it came; turtles that come on shore in the night to lay their eggs and mellow stray dogs without a care in the world napping right in the middle of rural roads and curious little monkeys screeching up in the trees, jumping from branch to branch; sprawled out on a swinging chair, head resting in a lap, kindles, paperbacks, notebooks, the sun warming everything it touches; intertwined legs on a towel, drunk off something, talking and talking and talking and talking and talking and talking; not wanting to go to bed at night because you do not want the night to end, and not wanting to get up in the morning because you do not want the morning to end; an overwhelming hard to describe protection instinct, wanting to keep something safe and okay and maybe even yours, and wanting it to see the things you see and enjoy.

So the days keep rolling by, July, August, and September, in a steady way, where you aren't gasping for breath or making giant leaps of faith, nothing radical, outlandish, or improbable, but just putting one foot in front of the other, like each step is the most natural thing in the world, even if those steps stop tomorrow and even if they wander on forever.