By Clint Younts.
A few weeks ago, I had to venture up north into the Land of the Weird, a city that is jam-packed full of nuts and incredibly bad drivers. Driving down I-35 was scarier than going on a road trip with Justin Bieber. Speeding cars and creeping 18-wheelers had me puckered like a snail on a salt lick. I was praying that I’d make it back to Hays County without any damage to my truck except for a nasty stain in the driver’s seat.
Once I reached the Buda City Limit sign, I was able to exhale a bit, but dang it if there wasn’t still a mess of cars and trucks cluttering the highway. All the way to my exit, tailgaters followed me like flies behind a cattle trailer, and even as I got onto a city street, there was still heavy traffic, cars lined up at new street lights. It made me wonder if I was suffering from highway hypnosis and mistakenly drove into downtown San Antonio.
As I trekked back home I looked at the new homes and businesses that have sprung up. A spankin’-new community college sits where purebred Hereford cows once grazed. Houses continue to be built in a neighborhood that has year-round water restrictions. The gravel road that I used to drive my grandmother’s Ford Falcon down to take my younger kinfolk to a swimming hole is now a 4-lane major thoroughfare.
As I pulled into our driveway, I left behind the sights of city life as I slowly cruised on back to my house nestled in a grove of majestic oaks and elm trees. Unfortunately, the infernal sounds of city life carried over the pasture, invading the solitude of my planked sanctuary.
As I sat under the naked limbs of a towering elm tree, sipping “tonic water” to calm my nerves, I began to travel again, this time down Memory Lane. I may not remember what I ate for supper, but I can recall the years of my youth with vivid clarity.
I recalled visiting my grandparents as a young boy back in the ’60s. They resided on the family ranch where I currently live. Back then, this area of Hays County was still pretty wild. The land housed more armadillos than humans. Neighbors were few and far between. Pastures stocked with cattle stretched from Buda to Kyle and beyond. Buda’s population was well under 1000, and Kyle was only a tad larger.
The closest shopping center was in downtown Austin or over in San Marcos. My grandparents did their shopping at the Buda grocery or the Bon Ton in Kyle. There was no HEB or WalMart back then. Even if there had been one, I doubt they would’ve shopped there. Forty years ago, there was no McDonald’s or Chili’s. If you wanted to eat out, you went to a country diner or grabbed some barbecue and sat at a picnic table.
As a young boy, I loved leaving the big city of Lubbock to get back to the Wild West of Buda. I roamed the range with a plastic six-gun strapped to my hip, fighting Comanches and banditos with my fellow Texas Rangers until our grandmother, a petite lady with a voice that could travel miles, called us in for dinner, often a PB&J sandwich and milk straight from their dairy barn. Occasionally she served us barbecue and fresh corn on the cob that we had shucked before buckling our gun belts and saddling up the ponies that our grandmother issued us from her broom closet.
Our visits were infrequent but I cherished every moment of being out in the country, watching the cows and deer graze. We’d sit outside at night under bright stars. The evenings were tranquil but far from quiet. Crickets chirped, tree frogs sang. Owls hooted, coyotes howled. An occasional train would pass a few miles away, but there was no sound of traffic. No deafening roar of a motorcycle or the obnoxious sound of rap music booming from some car whose driver will be stone deaf at the age of 30.
So, here I was, sitting out on my deck after my harrowing trip through Austin, my hand gripping an empty bottle of “tonic water”, when Maw says some friends from college will be visiting family in Round Top, and we are invited to join them for the weekend. I figured I didn’t have much else to do, not with my aching back preventing me from doing any ranch work and with college football being over. It would be good to get away for a day or two.
What I hadn’t planned on was a trip through time. Less than two hours from Buda lies another little town with quaint little shops and small diners surrounding the town square. There was no huge box store or fancy restaurant chain cluttering up this town.
As we drove out of Round Top back to the home of our gracious hosts, we passed farms and ranches, a few churches with adjacent cemeteries. Old farm houses along with a few more modern homes were scattered along the narrow two-lane back roads. I can imagine strangers in search of land for creating shopping centers or large subdivisions being run out of the county by the local folks carrying pitch forks and broomsticks.
That Saturday night, standing out under a blanket of stars, I was in awe of the silence of my surroundings. I was serenaded by crickets and tree frogs with a barn owl as a back-up singer. I heard no cars, loud music or barking dogs. The following dawn, I slipped outdoors with my coffee cup to watch the sun rise over the ancient oaks and towering pine trees. Crows were chattering as a deer emerged from the woods to graze in the meadow.
Travelling back home to Buda, we scooted through Austin. Looping expressways, towering buildings and acres of car dealers hid all the beauty of a once-present Texas landscape. Driving through Buda, I leered at Cabela’s, WalMart and other store chains erected on land that once supported dairies and ranches. Farmland was sold to big city developers, and urban sprawl dragged its ugly butt across county lines. In the near future, as more and more pastures become topped with asphalt, the only beef you’ll see ’round these parts will be on your plate at Logan’s Steakhouse. Hopefully, there will still be one small family farm sitting south of Austin where an old cowpoke with a 6-gun strapped to his arthritic hip sits in his beat-up Chevy truck and watches his cows graze alongside deer. In the passenger seat, there sits a small wide-eyed boy from the big city of Buda who is visiting his grandparents out here in the country. One day, when he’s older, I’ll tell him stories of the Wild West when I was his age.
Clint Younts takes his grandson out on the tractor so the little tyke will know country sounds.
