Small Towns, Big Country

Texas is a big place.

No, I mean a really big place.

It is the second largest state in the Union – Alaska is bigger but with a population of just over 700,000. Texas has over 28 million people within its borders and that number, like the Lone Star economy, is growing fast. Take Austin, for example, they tell me that 150 people a day are moving there from other parts of the States.

I’m really not surprised.

Some other things to ponder when considering Texas, the State has three of the largest cities in the US: Houston, Dallas, and San Antoine. Austin is coming in at number eleven on the national list and looks set to enter the top ten US Metropolitan Areas any time soon.

The secret is out there. Texas is a good place to live.

But it’s not all about large cities.

Thirty minutes out of Austin and I’m in small-town Texas. These are places surrounded by countryside, by pasture, by farmland, by a pace of life far distant from the coffee shops and hi-Tec of Downtown only a short drive away.

That’s what I love about Texas. It is not one state but a whole host of places – may be more a state of mind than anything else. City life, yes, you have it, great culture and the high-life, yes, it’s there to have, so too is American suburbia with all the modern amenities and comforts. But then, for me, there is unbeatable, bewitching charm of small-town Texas.

I drove out of Austin last Sunday morning. I headed east along deserted freeways and even more deserted side roads. The only traffic was the small but constant flow of family’s tucks and station wagons heading to the various clapperboard churches scattered all around the countryside. Those people were giving thanks for the harvest just in, and the land that still supported many families, in spite of everything.

That morning I had a particular destination in mind. It has a special place in my heart. And that Sunday I just had to be there, for a reason I’m still not sure about.

So I entered Bastrop city limits and soon had parked up. I walked along the wooden sidewalk, unchanged for many a decade. It has always reminded me of the Old West – perhaps that’s why I like it so much. A sense of permanence in an ever-changing world.

And then I saw it.

A diner. A simple Texan diner, but one that makes a good breakfast, in my view like no other in the State.

The welcome was as expected. Like an old lost friend I was shown to my seat and handed a menu. I was an old lost friend. You see I had lived near here, way back when more years than I care to admit…The men and women who worked there didn’t know this though. I did though; so they didn’t recognize me but I sure recognized all of them.

That’s why I was there. It was that welcome as much as the biscuits and gravy on that Sunday morning that I needed. It’s not that Texas is unfriendly. Hell no, it is one of the friendliest places in the US – and that’s saying something. It’s just that welcome can mean more to a man when sitting in the quiet of a Sunday morning as the radio played country music in the background and the waitress brought me a coffee with a smile that said “take your time”.

It may be a big country Texas, even priding itself on the sheer magnitude and diversity of the land mass it covers, but it has never lost its humanity. It has never forgotten that a big heart is more important than a big country.

Sounds corny?

Maybe.

I’m just telling you what I found here in Texas. A European outsider that was welcomed into homes and families, who does business as freely and as easily as any free-born American and has loved every minute of that experience.

Then again, maybe it’s the size of Texas. Perhaps, it is a case of the bigger the country, the bigger the heart? Okay, but what is also true is people see further here. Let me explain.

Depending on where you pull off the road and park up you can sit up on a ridge by the road and see for miles over long plains that stretch seemingly for infinity. Horizons like this give the mind something to wander over and wonder about. Your dreams seem too small in such a terrain. And what I’ve learned about Texas is that is probably the case – the State may be big, mighty big, but it takes larger than life people to fill up this Lone Star.

Take this town of Bastrop – home to the British fantasy and Science-fiction writer, Michael Moorcock. His novels may be alternately dystopian or utopian, but he knows where to come for the good life – right here in rural Texas.

The door of the diner swung open and a stately man walked in. He sat down like he knew the drill in the place. The waitress knew him. She filled his coffee mug straight away. He glanced over at me. I looked away. I was out of reach so could not hear his accent partly on account of the radio that still playing away happily in the corner – now it was Jim Reeves …My eyes came back to the other dinner guest. Then he did something that made me wonder. Forgoing the menu and ordering straight away, he pulled from his pocket a book. It was battered, falling apart even, and on its cover was a picture of London, or what looked like London, “War of the Worlds” – the HG Wells classic…

I was driving back to Austin. The sun was high in the sky. The land was as bright green as I had ever remembered it. All was I had expected. Then I thought of my stop that morning at Bastrop. The old and the new, the settled and the changing, the familiar and the unexpected – it was then I looked out over the plains way to the west of the freeway. That Sunday at about 11 am I resolved to plan for a bigger, a much bigger future, and with a new attitude determined to welcome all the good things that futurewould contain – but especially the unexpected.