Home in Texas

Hello, it's me, I haven't been here for a long, long time (credit to Todd Rundgren). A barnstorming couple of weeks that took me from the snowy 13,000' peaks and upscale but hollow carb infested town of Breckenridge to the sea level debacle of repeating chain(store) DNA that is Houston, TX. And now I'm back in a place so different from the rest of the USA that I am reawakened (again). I'm still staggering from the 16 hour drive from Houston to Taos that spanned Sunday into Monday, but something happened out there in south Texas. There is hill country that rises like green sea swells after the lushness and big muddy rivers of places like Flatonia, Iraan, San Angelo and San Antonio. Into a long, glowlit dusk after San Antone, I drove Montez into a rollercoaster of sandstone ridges and valleys where the air cooled and dried from the swampy oil slick of Houston, and frenzied birdsong echoed in the thick, lowset oaks, magnolias and mulberries. A talkshow station crackled in from Dallas, a woman writer of a Christian book called "Angry Conversations with God" bantered with two hip male Christian hosts about the book and her prideful, reckless foibles on the empty road until she wound her way back to God. It all made sense, what she said, and they had such a self deprecating, knowing hipness that me and my friend who was traveling with me, both of us pagan buddhist animists, were riveted and called them the Hiptians. But, as all good things do, the reception faded into the static scales of the engine's fluctuations and we went quiet as the dusk held on, orange and low flame blue with hints of cranberry and blueberry. And the road rose through cuts in the white sandstone where you could see the bone of the land, the layers of lifetimes piled up in wavy rows. I looked out to the north and the south and breathed into the trees knowing this place, it knowing me. South Texas, somewhere between San Antonio and El Paso, Mexico just a little farther south, a place I'd never been before, but I knew it, and it gave me peace, a crack in my heart to release the scent of home. My breathing went downward into my belly and I felt locked in, like I could drive forever. It reminded me of the Bonzai Forest, this place of hills and knobs and chilly, dry air. Darkness finally came springing loose the stars and, low on gas, I pulled off at the historic town of Sonora where I had to drive four miles to find the gas station downtown. It was a sleepy place with the leaves just popping on the locust trees and a pickup in every driveway. There were a few historical markers but I was too tired to read them. Strangely, the clerk in the gasmart had no discernible Texas accent, but then again, this place was nowhere and I knew it, so it wasn't necessarily Texas or the dot showing on the map. Like those mad singing birds filling the giant magnolia in Flatonia hours earlier, I, too, heard the hum of a place in my dreams and it just happened to be called Texas.