No Sound But Light

What was the last road trip you were on?

It could have been two weeks ago on a drive from Austin to Dallas. Or two hours ago to make a run to the HEB. Road-tripping is the great American adventure. Written famously by Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson, to name just a few. And it’s a learned behavior that goes all the way down to the core of our behavior. Lewis & Clark and thousands of other American settlers traveled West. Their trips did not include highway exists for bathroom breaks, or counting license plates from other states. From what I have heard, the early American pioneers faced a different set of challenges than estimating if the gas in the car will last 40 miles when the “get gas” light has already been on for 15 minutes.

However, the shared experience that modern road trippers and historical ones share in common is the silence of the open landscape. It takes work to get to it sometimes, and you certainly need to stop and be in it. The state of Texas has plenty of room for these kinds of moments. Great movies like Blood Simple, Urban Cowboy, Paris Texas or The Wild Bunch capture these moments of great expanse with the air to let the vision breathe.

Maybe on that next grocery run, take the long way around. Take the back road. Roll down the window and see if you can find that spot of landscape that captures that open land feeling. And if not of open land, maybe just silence. Those still and quiet places can happen anywhere.