Homeward

30 October 2008

West of Bryan, you enter Lee County and the Hill Country of central Texas. The area has a rich German, Czech and Wendish tradition. My great, great grandparents were of the latter, immigrating here from what is now southeastern Germany. My grandparents lived here, and this place feels like home.

I first stopped for some kolaches, sweet bread filled with fruit. My grandmother made a poppy seed kolache, unrivaled and unreplicable. Just past West Yegua Creek, in Lincoln, is the land they tended when I was a young child. My first memories are in this place. They include a rusty gate, a barbecue pit, a peanut field, a series of barns, a nail on the top of a tin chicken coop, flying cow patties, creaky stairs, feisty geese, the creek, an olive tree, many oaks, cousins and family. Much of the place is still as it was, though in greater disrepair, and I wandered the fields by the dry creek as sunlight filtered through an oak arcade.

Just to the south is Giddings, where my grandparents moved as they grew older. I stopped at the City Meat Market for some barbecue. Texas barbecue is charred in deep, brick pits. The heat and smoke is convected in from a fire built outside the pit. The walls are covered in soot. The meat is smoked long and tender, and served on butcher paper that quickly saturates in grease. Tastes of childhood. My grandparents lived here until I left Texas after high school, and my memories are clearer, including dominoes with my grandfather and great uncle, working with him on the house, tending the garden, pickling and preserving and baking in my grandmother's warm kitchen.

I rode back roads through Serbin and Northrup, Wendish settlements, full of oaks draped with Spanish moss and rolling ranchland. It was night when I climbed the unlit road to the Lost Pines. The next day I strolled the back road that connects Buescher and Bastrop, where I came out on the final highway into Austin.

Apparently your body knows when you have almost finished. For almost the entire ride, I felt invincible. Sure, tired at moments, but never impaired. I never needed to fight malady to accomplish a goal. The knowledge of impending arrival must release the mind from its guardianship over the body. I was now free to be exhausted. Add to that several flat tires, questionable food and water choices, and treacherous highway interchanges. My leisurely and triumphant ride home became a hellish fight to muster the energy needed to find haven.

However, arrival overcomes the preceding difficulty. Austin rolls along steep hills. I climbed one more, coasted into my sister's driveway, yodeled for my niece and nephews, and submerged exhausted in the grass under the oak's speckled shade.

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