The Answers Lie in the Hills
The answers to everything are in those hills – Hill Country, that is, in central Texas.
24,000 square miles of rugged wonder; maybe the most authentic American landscape.
I’ve taken five lengthy drives through Hill Country, logged over a thousand miles with little more than the company of Marty Robbins, coffee, and a bag of Red Man.
Just three weeks ago, the color palette was drab:
dark olives, slate, pea soup, leather, brick,
every shade of hay, limestone, and the darkness of tobacco spit.
Telephone poles marched endlessly into oblivion,
along with barbed wire, stone fences,
and roads in various stages of disrepair.
Squatty oak trees were barren, and riverbeds were dry.
Wild turkeys and sheep outnumber cattle by a factor of a hundred to one.
I could count how many horses I saw on one hand.
Lizards with iridescent backs ran around rest stops.
I saw the same vistas that settlers encountered – plains, valleys, and swollen mounds,
some several hundred feet tall, rise out of the earth’s crust
with spectacular hues of honey, ginger, and pumpkin.
Everything contrasts with blue skies,
where cotton ball clouds float aimlessly at a snail’s pace.
Stillness abounds.
Occasionally, a tumbleweed rolls by with the clunkiness of a Ferris wheel.
Lonely, depressing graveyards, with chain-link fences, are outside of every town.
Ruins of old homes sit stoically in dusty pastures.
Ancient tractors, rusted to their core, are slowly disappearing.
Steel swing sets wait for children who are lost to time.
I saw a thousand-acre wildfire send plumes of smoke, miles long, into space.
I saw curtains of lace fall from the heavens,
without a single raindrop on my windshield.
I didn’t think it could get any more beautiful, until today.
The hills were alive with every shade of green.
Millions of oaks were inhaling the vigor of spring.
Bluebonnets, drunk in amethyst,
cover the countryside like Caesar’s robe.
Indian paintbrushes, the color of Honeycrisp apples,
are splattered about like fiery molecules under a gigantic microscope.
Yellow dandelions stand out like lollipops
against peach-colored Indian Blankets.
What was colorless weeks ago is now a psychedelic carpet.
And I got to see all of it –
like a million Crayolas were dropped from the heavens.
As I took a U-turn in Llano,
the question I needed an answer to became clear –
as clear as the turquoise streams that snake through Hill Country –
and I drove back to Austin in peace.
The answers to everything lie in those hills.
*Composed, Edited, and Published in Austin, TX
