What it feels like to walk around holding a landscape you love and long for inside you
Last week I went to west Texas, the place I feel most at home in America; it's made me realise I'm carrying an expansive landscape inside me I'm always missing
Last night I ran dozens of gritty socks through the washing machine twice, rinsing the west Texas dust out of them. I really didn’t want to lose that Texas dust as I didn’t want to be back in Washington DC, but the kids and I bumped back to earth on an early morning flight from San Antonio on Sunday, while Pete flew from there to San Francisco for work. Wrenching out of Texas was hard, and going our separate ways made it even harder. My heart is hurting. We’d spent ten days in west Texas, which was perfect in every way, except that it had to end. I lived in west Texas in my 20s, which I wrote about in The Wild Other, and this trip was the third time I’ve been back since last autumn, but the first time I’ve been there with Pete and the children. They fell for it hard, of course, all of them. It would be difficult not to fall in love with this landscape, this life, these people. Last week I published a list of 50 things I’ve learned to think and live for a good life, and I’ve loved your responses to this in the comments. Today I’d like to add no 51, which is to live like a west Texan, because I’ve never spent time with a community more open-hearted, more generous, more creative and expansive in the way they live and communicate with one another.
There is something completely and absolutely intoxicating about this part of Texas; it’s border country, close enough to the Rio Grande to touch, and rugged and remote, a landscape of the hugest horizons snaked by an unending ribbon of road running ahead as you drive through it, but there are mountains here too, and lots of cactus, some flowering bright pink; these rainbow cactus punctuate the dusty yellow land, since the drought of the last decade or so has been especially ferocious here. Our socks were so dusty because we spent Friday night staying on a ranch owned by our friend Liz Rogers, way out in the countryside, twenty miles off the highway down a dirt road.
I met Liz in the tiny arts town of Marfa last autumn, and she is a complete force of nature, one of the finest criminal defense lawyers in Texas, who is generous and funny and absolutely brilliant, with an extraordinary talent for bringing people of all persuasions together. I’d like to be more west Texan in the way I live, and I’ll focus that further and say I’d like to be more Liz Rogers in the way I am, too. On Thursday she drove us around Marfa, looking at land art, in her convertible Pontiac Catalina, called Opal, then tore down the road out of town, the wind in our hair, just like we were in a movie about American Dreams; on Friday, she invited us to join her family Easter party, camping at her remote ranch house, which has no electricity and is basic and beautiful and the kind of place I feel completely at home. And it is a real place of home too, with all those things I love, like a big family taking turns to cook on outdoor stoves, surrounded by massive empty country, horses outside and in paintings on the wall too, scruffy rooms which have held many emotions, a strong sense of creative spirit in the bones of the house, a home that definitely felt a bit wild, actually completely perfect. Spending time there also reminded me of the landscape I’m holding inside me, all the time, and the cost - because there is a very real emotional cost - that comes with suppressing something inside that feels fundamental to your sense of being.