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The start of the school year means it’s the end of summer travel season for many families. As Texans well know, depending on where you live in the state, it can take longer to travel out of it than to cross several state lines beyond our borders.
Texas Standard commentator W.F. Strong reflects on coming back to Texas.
The full transcript of this episode of Stories from Texas is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
W.F. Strong: [00:00:00] Last week, I returned home from a couple of weeks in British Columbia. Canada was green and lush and cool. The Canadians lived up to their legendary kindness. I had no complaints. I loved their culture and heavenly climate. But after 10 days being from Texas, I began to think their lovely maple leaf flags could have been a little bit bigger. And it seemed they had the car-to-truck ratio backwards. But that was not about them. That was just my homesickness settling in. As I drove back into West Texas, the sky pulled at me as if I had been gone too long. McMurtry once wrote of a man returned to Texas after a long time away. Danny Deck, driving home, realized something had been wrong with him, a low-grade depression. And he hadn’t understood. Until the West Texas sky came back into view it welcomed him and in doing so it healed something in him, not all at once but slowly and gently. As it did for Danny Deck, the sky welcomed me home with its white straight azure blue dome. Just east of El Paso, a train was passing. Two and a half miles of steel and noise crawling across the desert like it had all the time in the world and nowhere better to be. Double-stacked containers, international names painted in bright letters locomotives huffing like draft horses from another century and overhead that sky endless ancient infinite. There was a dirt road shooting off to the side of i-10 that climbed a sandy hill 300 yards off the road. I took that impromptu exit and climbed the hill, almost needing my four-wheel drive. From that peak I could see the train stretching out for miles and I thought it must have been a scene similar to what the Apache once saw when the Iron Horse first crossed their lands. I stayed there for 30 minutes absorbing the scene taking photographs and internalizing the frustration that I could never capture the perfection of that scene. I couldn’t preserve its grandeur with the deep purple mountains of Mexico in the distance dwarfing the valley below. The sky comes back and you remember. You remember with fondness the geometry of home. The harsh bends of a mesquite tree with its rough bark. The long straight stretches of Highway 90 and how it vaults over the Pecos at 1300 feet, and how the rows of cotton fields in August glow like they’ve been dusted with snow. That train, it wasn’t just hauling freight, it was connecting far away places, San Diego to Houston. The train may have been stitched together by engineers and algorithms, but out here, it still looks wild, raw, unstoppable and free. The sun was dropping as I watched it, golden light falling like spilled whiskey across the rails. The desert glowed. And for a moment, I thought about how lucky I was to be standing where I was. Not just in a place on the map, but in a place in the story. A story I’ve been a part of for a very long time. I’m W.F. Strong. These are stories from Texas, and this one, this one is home.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
