Commentary: The sky welcomes you home

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, I began to think their lovely maple-leaf flags could have been a bit bigger, and it seemed they had the car-to-truck ratio backwards – but 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. Larry McMurtry once wrote of a man who returned to Texas after a long time away. Danny Deck, driving home, realized something had been wrong with him – a low-grade depression he hadn’t understood until the West Texas sky came back into view. It welcomed him, and in doing so, it healed something in him. Not all at once, but slowly and gently. As it did for Danny Deck, the sky welcomed me home with its white-streaked, azure-blue dome. Just east of El Paso, a train was passing – 2 1/2 miles of steel and noise – crawling across the desert like it had all 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 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 thought it must have been a scene similar to what the Apache once saw when the iron 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, 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 1,300 feet, and how the rows of cotton fields in August glow like they’ve been dusted with snow. That train? It wasn’t just hauling freight. It was connecting faraway places. San Diego to Houston. The train may have been stitched together by engineers and algorithms, but out here, it still looks wild – 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 a place on the map, but a place in the story. A story I’ve been a part of for a long time.

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