DAY 34: Unvisited Cities

DEL RIO, TEXAS, ANOTHER CHEAP MOTEL, UP LATE | MONDAY, APRIL 12, 2010 - We came into San Antonio in the afternoon. We knew nothing about it. Not really. San Antonio Spurs. The Alamo. We got off some back road. Came in through the outer rings. It felt like Las Vegas at first. All the houses with the same roofs tightly packed, pushed out into the farmland and wildflowers. We got on San Pedro. Soon we were in neighborhoods. Then the bumpy roads with the weird shops and the gas stations and the grime and the bright paint and the forgotten cornices and the long grass and vacant lots. Then the city itself. An old city. So many of the buildings like ship prows, anchoring the intersections with a tower above an ornate door, the entry flanked by wings eight stories up.


We immediately loved San Antonio. There is an entire gondola city they call the riverwalk here. The sun was gone, night falling. People sitting at outdoor restaurants all along the San Antonio River under giant trees tucked between downtown buildings. Maybe in two days, or in a week, this would become old. Would become the place for tourists that we would no longer go, would scorn. But we were hungry and the lights were low along the walk along the river. It was lively, smelled good.

New York. DC. New Orleans. These are some of the big ones. The ones where people travel to. Where you hear the foreign tongues. But then there are the Austins, the San Antonios. The Rich Share, North Carolinas, the Natchitoches. All these cities that you would never choose. Not to fly to. Too out of the way. Not quite enough there to draw anyone with any regularity. But because we are driving, we pass through. These places appear on the road through the windshield, through a happenstance, a detour, an accident. They are the unvisited cities. Never wondered about really. And then you are there and you see that you could live in this place. And also, that this place is living without you. That it goes on making and remaking itself, just as it was when you arrived and when you leave. And that there are a thousand others, if you had time to drive down every road, or just one more, another seven miles, and you would discover another beautiful place and walk into another auto parts store with a javelina head mounted on the wall, another person at a counter, their meal half-finished, waiting for a conversation, to not yet head home.

Austin was lowslung, spread out, without center hardly. Good graffiti. Good murals, in that updated Frida Kahlo Day of the Dead whitey way. The people weird and cool. At Frank restaurant on a Sunday we ate at the counter, split a plate of fried chicken and bacon-stuffed waffles and listened to the baseball-cap bohemian next to us, a former Stanford engineer turned artist and IT guy. The waiter overheard us. We were verging into lakes and rope swings. And he told us about a place not far, some falls we could go to, Sculpture Falls. So we went. We hiked in and found the water, this local place, all the cars parked on the side of the road, and we waded in the green water and I swam. 

It was Austin. We arrived on a Saturday afternoon. We felt like we should go to a show. But we were road weary, or just weary. We got bamboozled in a priceline bidding thing and ended up in a motel too far north. We only found the coolness of it all in the morning, in the overcast of Sunday while runners were finishing their 5Ks, clogging up the streets. Our Austin was at the counter at Frank, among hipsters, a waiter pouring coffee into beakers, another serving bloody marys with bacon. The place old brick, but inside all architecturally slick, the music going, the bicycles outside, everyone impossibly thin and chique. And the place was new, only eight months. To us, it had been there forever. Everyone had been. It would be this way always, already was. A morning exaggerated into a city, an era.

Frank: a hot dog. A hot dog as emblem of cool. A frank flag framed in wood behind glass above the bar, above all the bottles of beer, a hot dog, a frank. The words: "Come and take it." The same words, we learned later, in San Antonio, that the white Texans had said to the Mexican Army. They had a cannon, the whites did, about all they had. They were defending it. This was in the 1830s. They were outnumbered, in Mexican territory, and brazen. "Come and take it," they said.


We'd thought Austin would be the one beacon of Texas. And maybe Marfa too, where we're headed now, closing in on. So one, maybe two beacons. But Austin was more hidden then we'd have thought. More hideout than beacon. It was low, bright, blinking with retro shindigs, a little like LA, pastel and skinny with tacos and sunburned runaways, fifty-nine flavors if you can find them, keep driving the strange streets until you are there. And the people will talk to you. Very kind. So much fish too, to be had, and crawfish. And where is the water all the fish are swimming in?

Then San Antonio, city of ancient prowed buildings and Spanish missions. The Alamo at night, lit up, fronting a plaza, guarded by police in tan suits and white cowboy hats. Texas that was Mexico's. Texans that were Mexican. A river like a Las Vegas Venice running through it, but with tourists packed in flat-bottom boats instead of gondolas, with restaurants serving barbecue and frozen margaritas beneath cottonwoods. It was so perfect at night we figured the water was chlorinated. We figured it couldn't be real. Then we decided it was for tourists and we could accept it then, run our hands along the stout cast iron rivetted beams of the bridges as we passed under, walking along the dark river, the buses passing by overhead.  It could be true once or twice, but not every day.

In all the crossings of the country, driving, I've never crossed by back roads in spring. All these cities and towns now connected by wildflowers. It has been driving snow, or bald, brown fields, salted roads, or the heat and the blared green of early summer, or the clarity and edge of fall. But not spring. As though now, finally.

We keep putting diesel in. Some of it biodiesel. But much less than we'd hoped. The whole thing is imperfect. But also unstoppable. Like vodka uncorked on a train to Siberia. The road is so long. You cannot cork it again. You have to finish it, and you have the time, more time than you want. So drink it. You are at the counter.

And today, driving along 90, west of San Antonio, the land began to open. The land fell away like time, the road cut through all the stratified sand and shell, wind carved and brittled. The overcast of the last two days finally gathered into a brief hard rain like it rains out here, in the southwest, just pounding against the windshield and hiding away the day.


We keep driving. We've been on the road for over a month. And just now, there seems to be enough space and silence. These roads out here, two lanes, one in each direction, and flatland as far as you can see, this is what I think of, of what it is, driving across the country. It is out here, getting this way, maybe west of the Mississippi, when you can dream these empty dreams you already know, that have been handed down and been dipped and cliched to death, but here you can, you can experience a literal limitlessness, all land and sky firsthand and decide for yourself.