All The Way Home

The Spartan was a sleek silver Royal Mansion model made of vintage aluminum and eleven metres from end to end. Built in the fifties, like the Airstream, it had a flat roof, rounded curves, and a streamlined elegance, and it sloped diagonally at each end. It reminded me of a classic train compartment.

Prior to my taking up residence, a broad-shouldered, ridiculously good-looking young man named Paul had lived in the trailer. Paul was a fire juggler by profession. I later came to realize that this was a completely normal occupation for somebody who lived in Austin. Cat joked that she was going to miss him, since he used to fire-juggle bare chested in the backyard at night. I worried Paul might be a tough act to follow.

I am a deeply skeptical person. I don’t believe in “signs.” The Secret makes me want to puke. Nevertheless, when Cat answered my Craigslist ad it was hard not to believe that I’d expressed my desire to the universe and the universe had responded. After that, the mission took on a life of its own. Buoyed by clarity, I spent my days dealing with the myriad chores of departure, divesting myself of my belongings, and preparing the rest for storage. I did this determinedly and, for the most part, unsentimentally. If I was going to cross the Rubicon, I had to travel light.

It’s an intriguing psychological exercise, distilling one’s life to its essence; each decision becomes a Rorschach test for the person that you were, and the person you hope to become. Since I was still a little hazy on the latter, I did occasionally have fits of angst — but my daughter’s former boyfriend, who kindly offered to help me purge and pitch, kept me in line. “Don’t keep anything you can’t carry with you,” he said. He was in his twenties and I was in my fifties, but the desire to be free is not age specific, and I found his observation strangely apt.

Looking back, it’s interesting that I can no longer remember most of what I discarded. Certainly, I don’t miss anything. What I do recall is feeling blissfully unencumbered with each trip to Goodwill. Occasionally, the full import of the uncertainty that lay ahead would surface from the deep, and I’d experience a sickening whoosh of fear. Mostly, though, I felt giddy and sure. In the end, my reason for going was simple: I needed to get clear about some things, and the only way to do so, it seemed, was to jettison my past, dismantle my present, and drive 2,600 kilometres to a place where nobody knew my name.

The only moment when I feared that the whole enterprise might end ignominiously was that first morning at the Detroit-Windsor border. Nothing about my intentions was illegal. Like thousands of snowbirds, I planned to spend six months visiting the US and didn’t need a visa; nevertheless, I came prepared. I had letters from magazines for which I worked in Canada, proof of sufficient funds in the bank, travel insurance, and contacts in Austin. But nothing is certain at the border these days, and I had driven the four hours from Toronto feeling vaguely anxious about making the crossing.

I pulled up to the kiosk just as an agent entered the booth. She asked me the standard questions — where was I going, how long did I intend to stay — but when I told her my plans, I think my failure to give her a precise return date triggered suspicion. She ordered me to pop the trunk, step out of the car, and go inside for questioning. In a flash, agents swarmed my vehicle.

Inside, I calmly awaited my fate, but it occurred to me that despite my honest intentions, a real possibility existed that I might be denied entry. And if that turned out to be the case, I’d have no choice but to turn around and go home — a prospect so irredeemably fraught, it didn’t even bear thinking about. Oh well, I thought, this is what you wanted, isn’t it? At least something is happening to you.

Fortunately, a more level-headed officer inside reviewed my documents, and I was given the go-ahead. My heart was racing, but I strode casually back to my car, and then drove across the border, pulling over on the other side to call a friend and recount my ordeal. The tale told, I blew off my agitation, set my gps, cranked up some Dylan, and got the hell out of Dodge. How does it feel, to be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown? Well, Bob, it felt fucking fantastic, if you want to know the truth. It was the closest I’d come to feeling fully alive for a long, long time.

I had only the sketchiest idea about Austin when I decided to move there. I knew that it was a college town and a state capital, and that lbj had famously proposed to Lady Bird there just after their first date, in the restaurant of the Driskill Hotel. I knew that it repeatedly turned up on those lists of the “Best Little Cities in America.” I knew that it had a thriving music and arts scene and a world-renowned literary archive, and, by Toronto standards, a remarkably cheap cost of living. I knew that it lay deep in the heart of Larry McMurtry country, and that the summers were scorchingly hot. I knew, or at least I had a feeling, because I had fallen in love with the genteel openness of Westerners and Southerners before, that it was a warm, friendly, unpretentious place.

Only after I arrived did I gain a real sense of how it was Texan in all the ways you’d want it to be Texan, which is to say you could find barbecue and cowboy boots and two-step dancing all over town, but it was also Texan with a hippie overlay — a paradox that struck me with particular ironic force the day I walked into Whole Foods Market and saw a No Firearms sign on the door.

Whole Foods began as a small natural foods store in Austin, and the moth-er ship is the size of a football field. The first time I visited, I spent two hours wandering the aisles staring slack jawed at the selections of pecans and pralines and chilies and smoked mesquite beef. Ranches are like vineyards in Texas, and the beef choices on display are enough to make a carnivore weep. But contradictions abound in Austin. The town is thick with herbalists and vegans and, anomalously for Texas, liberals: “a tiny blue dot in a red state,” as Norm put it. While the suburbs tend to be conservative, downtown, anti-Bush sentiment is everywhere. During my stay, I saw a doormat imprinted with the slogan “Give Bush the Boot,” spotted my all-time favourite bumper sticker — “Yeehaw is not a foreign policy” — and, with a war on and an election coming, observed a grassroots political engagement I had not seen since the ’60s.

Still, like most American cities, Austin remains deeply segregated: the black and Latino populations live on the east side of town and tend to stay there, except to work, a fact of life I never got used to. And yet, despite such endemic racial and socio-economic divides, there is no denying Austin’s eclectic and fascinating collision of cultures. I saw the requisite number of stetsons and rednecks and pickup trucks, of course, but the city is also swarming with tattooed hipsters, artists, and cosmic cowboys strumming on the pavement. My latent hippie gene drew me to the part of town where the counterculture reigned, and as a result I tended to see a particular slice of life in Austin; but in fact the place is a layered mix of University of Texas students and profs, high-tech workers (Dell, the computer company, is based just to the north), politicos, lobbyists, state employees, and blue- and white-collar workers.

The city prides itself on its “live and let live” attitude and willingness to embrace slackers and misfits, and nowhere is the town’s desire to preserve its idiosyncratic sensibility more evident than in its unofficial motto: “Keep Austin Weird.” (Austin’s eccentric, theory-expounding layabouts were memorably celebrated in Slacker, by resident filmmaker Richard Linklater, and it only took me a few days there to appreciate the movie’s hilarious authenticity.)

There were so many colourful characters in Austin, sometimes the place looked like the backlot at Universal Studios. In Bouldin Creek, for instance, a funky neighbourhood off South Congress Avenue, everybody seemed to know and love Leslie, a fifty-something transvestite with great legs and a killer butt, who could often be seen in thong, tiara, pink feather boa, Bluetooth earpiece, and diva pumps, bent over a lawn and going at it with a weed whacker. Such quirks were deeply appealing, but I knew for certain I’d come to the right place when I heard a native say, “There are no metrosexuals in Austin.”