The sky welcomes you home

The start of the school year means it’s the end of summer travel season for many families. As Texans well know, depending on where you live in the state, it can take longer to travel out of it than to cross several state lines beyond our borders. Texas Standard commentator W.F. Strong reflects on coming […]

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Episode Transcript

(00:00):
Last week, I returned home from
a couple of weeks in British
Columbia.
Canada was green and
lush and cool.
The Canadians lived up to their
legendary kindness.
I had no complaints.
I loved their culture and
heavenly climate.
But after 10 days being from Texas,

(00:22):
I began to think their lovely maple
leaf flags could have been a little
bit bigger.
And it seemed they had the
car-to-truck ratio backwards.
But that was not about them.
That was just my homesickness
settling in.
As I drove back into West Texas,
the sky pulled at me as
if I had been gone too long.

(00:44):
McMurtry once wrote of a man
returned to Texas after a long
time away.
Danny Deck, driving home,
realized something had been wrong
with him, a low-grade depression.
And he hadn't understood.
Until the West Texas sky
came back into view it
welcomed him and in
doing so it healed something

(01:05):
in him, not all at once
but slowly and gently.
As it did for Danny
Deck, the sky welcomed me
home with its white straight
azure blue dome.
Just east of El
Paso, a train was passing.
Two and a half miles of
steel and noise crawling
across the desert like it had all

(01:25):
the time in the world and nowhere
better to be.
Double-stacked containers,
international names painted
in bright letters locomotives
huffing like draft horses from
another century and
overhead that sky
endless ancient
infinite. There

(01:46):
was a dirt road shooting off to the
side of i-10 that climbed a sandy
hill 300 yards off the road.
I took that impromptu exit
and climbed the hill, almost
needing my four-wheel drive.
From that peak I could see the train
stretching out for miles and
I thought it must have been a scene
similar to what the Apache
once saw when the Iron

(02:08):
Horse first crossed their lands.
I stayed there for 30 minutes
absorbing the scene taking
photographs and internalizing
the frustration that I
could never capture the perfection
of that scene.
I couldn't preserve its grandeur
with the deep purple mountains of
Mexico in the distance

(02:29):
dwarfing the valley
below.
The sky comes back and
you remember.
You remember with fondness the
geometry of home.
The harsh bends of a mesquite tree
with its rough bark.
The long straight stretches of
Highway 90 and how it vaults
over the Pecos at 1300
feet, and how the rows of

(02:51):
cotton fields in August glow like
they've been dusted with snow.
That train, it wasn't just hauling
freight, it was connecting far
away places, San Diego
to Houston.
The train may have been stitched
together by engineers
and algorithms, but out
here, it still looks wild,

(03:11):
raw, unstoppable and
free.
The sun was dropping as I watched
it, golden light falling
like spilled whiskey across the
rails.
The desert glowed.
And for a moment, I thought about
how lucky I was to
be standing where I was.
Not just in a place on the map,

(03:33):
but in a place in the story.
A story I've been a part
of for a very
long time.
I'm W.F. Strong.
These are stories from Texas,
and this one, this
one is home.