Fertile

The thing that surprises many when they leave Austin airport is how green the land is all around.

Europeans think that Texas is a desert. Something propagated endlessly by Western films – ghost towns with the tumbleweed drifting across a forlorn town square is the image most conjured up on celluloid.

Nothing could be further from the truth though. The land around Austin looks like the British Isles, southern England, just greener and definitely sunnier.

This is no desert. Think about it for a minute: nearly twenty million Texans could not live in a desert; instead, they live happily in the fertile plain of north east Texas.

So when land here, and drive out of the airport you see land that is arable and cultivated. It reminds me of old California at its best.

Maybe this is why so many Americans are moving here. Last I heard, 150 people a week were relocating to Austin alone. They see Texas as having all the benefits of California and none of its many drawbacks – not just the over crowding and the expense of living in places like LA and San Fran, but the fault lines…Texas has no earthquakes, no tornadoes, and only a few hurricanes – mostly on the football field come to think of it. Believe me I like living somewhere that the earth doesn’t start moving on of its own accord.

It’s not just the physical advantages though. Crime is low and real estate is low too, at least by comparison with the West Coast. Texas may be more conservative politically and socially than our friends out West but it also feels more at ease with itself, like an America that many thought was lost forever.

In the past, for many, the frontier, the new horizon was California. Who can forget the book, and later film, of The Grapes of Wrath and Steinbeck’s chronicling of the movement of poor Mid-Westerners to the then Promised Land. That trek worked for many in real life, no doubt about it. The boom in the US economy of the 1950s and 60s was no better exemplified than how California transformed itself from a sleepy backwater with orange groves and sunshine at the start of the twentieth century into the place that best revealed theurban desires of the Western World, desires that incidentally had been manufactured in an LA suburb, Hollywood.

That was then. Time marches on. No longer do we live in the twentieth century, we have moved on, and so have our desires, so too have our dreams. California is no longer a Nirvana. The Hollywood dream has for many become a nightmare, one of overcrowding, pollution, and crime. Those that still head West find upon arrival that that even the‘dream’ has long ago left town.

There was a song in the Sixties called California Dreaming. It was catchy; it was popular; it hit the Zeitgeist square just like Maury Willis used to hit the ball out of sight at Dodgers Stadium back in the day.

Nobody is humming it today. We need a new song – Texan Dreaming. Don’t take my word for it. The statistics speak for themselves. Texas is growing. People from all over the States are, like the characters in the Steinbeck tale, going after a new dream, a better America and it is not West more South by South West.

And, why not? Texas has the 10th largest economy in the world – yes, that’s in the whole world. It has space; it has sun; it has city life; it has country life, and everything in between. You come here and you build, and then, believe me,prepare to inhabit your own dream.

But this time it’s the type of people who are coming south. Not the poor of Steinbeck’s 1930s, but the brightest and the hippest around, those who are thinking of new futures both economically and technologically. Established hi-tech companies with global reach are sitting next to start-ups looking for the right environment in which to grow their nascent business dreams. Live and let live, I say, and let’s all make those dreams come true – that remains the America we Europeans know exists. It really does in places like Austin.

It’s a well-worn phrase that birds of a feather flock together. And what I see flocking down here to Austin Downtown along Interstate 35 are an interesting bunch, to say the least. A lot are entrepreneurs, and you know how much they interest me. Because entrepreneurs create things, opportunities, jobs, lifestyles. They make things happen. They have a ‘can do’ attitude and like to be with others who share that mindset. They like to live somewhere that gets business, a place that promotes enterprise and initiative.

So no surprise at all, they are coming to Texas in droves, and to Austin in particular.

When these newcomers arrive at Austin airport they will drive these same freeways I mentioned earlier. They shall see this blessed fertile land in front of them in the bright sunshine and they too will start to dream even bigger than they could have imagined.

There is no such thing as co-incidence.

Don’t you think?

This fertile land a new home for fertile minds? Yes, I think that’s right, and in any event it’s hard to be creative in a desert or a jungle for that matter.

Words like ‘dynamic’, ‘growing’, ‘buzzing’ are all used when talking about the Austin area right now. Long may it continue: I’m just glad I’m here already – ready for that experience cause you know it is going to be good.

Just as a desert is a dead zone for most creatures, a fertile environment helps all who live there to grow. Looking in the rear view as I drove past the airport exit, I realized that the land itself was giving those in the arrivals lounge not just a welcome but an indication of what is possible in this new frontier.

I pressed hard on the gas and sped towards Downtown once more convinced that anything is possible for those prepared to take risks, to make that trip, and to ‘till the soil’ once more.

Yes, anything is possible here.

Ends