A person can live in many places but can settle in only one. For much of my life, I was on the move. I grew up in Texas, in Abilene and Dallas, but as soon as the gate opened I fled the sterile culture, the retrograde politics, the absence of natural beauty.
I met my wife, Roberta, in New Orleans. She was also on the run, from the racism and suffocating conformity of Mobile, Alabama. We travelled the world. I have spent stretches of my professional life in the places you would expect—New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D. Unconsciously, during those vagabond years, we were on the lookout for home. I nursed a conception of an ideal community, one that combined qualities I loved about other places: the physical beauty, say, of Atlanta; the joyful music-making of New Orleans; an intellectual scene fed by an important university, as in Cambridge or Durham; a place with a healthy energy and ready access to nature, such as Denver or Seattle; a spot where we could comfortably find friends and safely raise children.
In , I joined the writing staff of Texas Monthly , in Austin. The population then was a little more than three hundred thousand—the current size of Lexington, Kentucky. Thirteen per cent of Austin residents were University of Texas students; another five per cent were faculty and staff. The only other significant presence in town was the state capitol.
You could park free on most streets. Of the limited offering of restaurants in town, we favored the Raw Deal, a greasy spoon where, for five bucks, you could choose between the pork chop and the sirloin, accompanied by red beans and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Life in Austin was offbeat, affordable, spontaneous, blithe, and slyly amused, as if we were in on some hilarious secret the rest of the world was unaware of. Even then, the place had a reputation for being cool, but in my experience it was just extremely relaxed, almost to the point of stupor.
Staying, though, violated my resolution to keep my distance from Texas. But Roberta declared that she was never going to live anyplace else. An origin story explained the character. Oat, a student at U. There was no remedy, so he attached wheels to the bucket, like an early Segway. After various adventures, Oat Willie wound up in New York, arriving as fog smothered the city. People were stranded. The city was pretty, with cypress-lined Lady Bird Lake dividing it between north and south.
