Cat's Musings

Wide Open Spaces

Guess I'll go back home this summer
Should have gone there long ago
I wonder who I'll meet
When I walk up Main Street?
-Guess I'll Go Back Home (This Summer), Willard Robison

Good morning, afternoon, or whenever you read this.

Nostalgia is stupid.

I grew up in a mid-sized city called Bryan, Texas. It's in the Brazos Valley on the edge of South East Texas. It has a handful of nice amenities you might not expect to find owing to its proximity to Texas A&M over in College Station. Yet, it also has a small town feeling. This is because those urban elements are softened by remoteness: It is positioned roughly between Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. Urban, meet rural.

Bryan Texas Main Street at Sunset

The place is very red and, if you're not a college student or Christian, you don't have too much to do on the weekends outside of a really nice Friday night festival downtown, and an absolutely amazing Saturday morning farmer's market. Also located downtown. Downtown Bryan is seriously awesome.

But the past few months, I have been missing the place terribly. My mental health had began to spiral, and so I decided to go back to my hometown. Maybe that would help my depression?

I spent the night camping at a nearby farm. I sat in my camp chair in the pasture. I watched the fields turn alight with gold as the sun descended into the horizon. I watched as the stars revealed themselves one by one as the darkening night blanketed the world in indigo. I could still see the ambient light from both Houston and Bryan, but the sky above me was darker than the skies back home. The heavens stretched forever on that cloudless night, and I lost myself within them.

The next morning, I decided to tour some of the places key to my growing up. My first destination was actually just outside of town, the first real place I remember calling home. The house was about twenty minutes from town, down some old gravel roads, that winded through trees, around a lake, and then threaded through wide, rolling pastures. It was a tiny little place, a pathetically small two bedroom rental. I don't know how it could fit two bedrooms, looking at it now.

Maybe it lost a room?

Yet, as I took the view in, I couldn't help but marvel - the pasture stretched off in every direction. Even the drive was beautiful, aside from some new developments that were steadily encroaching; these were a brief interruption.

Open land to the horizon

Then I went to my next house. Then the next one. Then the next one. Each one was boring placelessness, including the one I had considered my favorite growing up. Without the stories from my youth, tearing up the neighborhood with my friends and our bikes, it was just housing. Nothing special. I drove by my old high school where I had done marching band for four years. It was a sad and generic, and nothing more. I did enjoy walking down main street though.

Then I went out to the last location on my list - another country property I initially despised when my parents moved out there after my graduation. Located down a remote country highway, surrounded between two small towns and a handful of pastures, I found my last 'childhood' home. It was a trailer unit on 2.7 acres of pasture. As I looked out over the grasses, and up into the limitless sky, I found myself pondering:

How had I ever hated this place?

I stopped at a diner for coffee before I drove home. Almost every location on my nostalgia tour had been a disappointment in differing ways, especially those I viewed as my favorite spots growing up. The first exception was the food my visit downtown. The second, however, was the rural stops.

All the times I found myself smiling widest were the times I stood in wide open spaces, grass beneath my feet, a clear eye on the horizon, and a yawning sky above me. And with that revelation, I could see - I did not miss Bryan. I missed empty. I missed open land, the smell of grass, the sinking of the sun behind the earth's surface. I don't seek a place. I seek space.

I don't know what I'll do with this information, but it's good to know.

Good night.

#adventure #nature #rambling