All The Way Home

On the drive down, I was in the zone. I love road trips, but this was the longest I’d ever attempted alone, and I’d had a few anxious moments before setting out, partly because I’m directionally challenged and can barely find my way to Ikea. But the gps turned out to be a real compadre, and, freed from worrying I’d wind up in Omaha, I sailed along. The real high, though, was the giddy recognition that whatever happened I’d taken a risk and followed my heart. I had the sense nothing could touch me. Not even the fact that I no longer had a home could shake my conviction that I was on the right track. The fear of having tumbled so far from my idea of home that I’d never recover had paralyzed me in Toronto; but released from the pressure of having to define myself in any particular way, I felt as if I were floating in zero gravity.

Whatever its flaws, so much about America still charms, and even though I was sad to see the vulnerability in its eyes, driving through the heartland made me glad. I cruised along, observing the locals in their natural habitat, listening to the crackpots on talk radio, revelling in the wonderful strangeness of it all. Mostly, I stayed on the interstates, but occasionally I’d pull off the highway to investigate something that interested me, like the time I approached Hope, Arkansas, and spotted a sign marking the childhood home of William Jefferson Clinton. At night, I’d check into cheap motels, savour the pleasures of anonymity, channel-surf with great fascination, and dance around the room like Tom Cruise doing his underwear dance in Risky Business.

And then there was simply the sheer fun of confounding expectations and doing something so free spirited, so not grown-up. One afternoon, I checked into the Super 8 Motel in Texarkana and called my daughter. When she returned the call, she had no idea where she was phoning, until the receptionist drawled, “Sooper Ate Motelle, Texarrkaaana . . . ” My daughter had been unreservedly supportive of my adventure, but when she discovered where I was bunking for the night, her first thought was, “Where the hell is my mother?” I knew how she felt, but I also knew I was in the right place, geographically and otherwise. After a long, dark sleep, I was a traveller in my own life again. I was certain she appreciated that, too.

Austin bills itself as the live usic capital of the world, and more than anything else music is the heart and soul of the place. It seems to bubble up from the soil there, and the city so reveres its musicians that giant decorative guitars adorn the pavements, fiddlers play on street corners, and outdoor venues host bands all over town. You can hear stunningly accomplished American roots music at all hours. I heard blues, country, rockabilly, gospel, rock ‘n’ roll, Western swing — and I barely scratched the surface of what the city has to offer musically. But it’s not just the incredibly rich music scene in Austin that is so affecting; it’s the way the joyful presence of music informs the culture as a whole.

One day, soon after I arrived, I was shopping in h-e-b, the local supermarket chain. John Lennon’s “Watching the Wheels” came on the loudspeaker, and suddenly everyone in my aisle was singing along, as if a conductor had silently raised his baton and given the signal for the musical to begin. I watched, transfixed, as the stock boy skipped merrily down the aisle singing, the black woman, her grocery cart teeming with kids, chimed in, and the tattooed hipster girl harmonized melodically. All I kept thinking was that this would never happen in Loblaws.

About a week later, I attended the three-day Austin City Limits festival in Zilker Park. Dylan closed the show, and after his performance I slung my folding chair over my shoulder and made my way back to my car through a lovely neighbourhood with large, rambling lawns, and gracious houses set back from the street. It was a warm, fragrant evening, and I was floating on Dylan fumes, having also seen him onstage the night before in the outdoor amphitheatre of Stubb’s Bar-B-Q, a venue that held 2,200 and was so intimate it could have been someone’s backyard.

As I walked, I heard “Maggie’s Farm” wafting through the night air, and followed the music to a huge lawn where someone had mounted a large black and white poster of the young Dylan, a skinny angel from his “Blowin’ in the Wind” days. A light shone on the poster so Dylan’s image glowed radiantly in the night; in the background, his electrifying voice reverberated heavenward. The scene was deeply moving, and I stopped to take it in. Other concert-goers joined me, and we lingered there, gazing and listening in reverential silence. After a while, without saying a word, people dispersed, the music still echoing behind us.

At such moments, it was hard not to fall in love with Austin. And there were many such moments. All I had to do was follow the music. One night, I went to hear a band I loved at a local bar called Jovita’s. I almost never go to bars to hear live music in Toronto; few have an atmosphere I’d enjoy. But in Austin, the bars I encountered were unassuming, laid-back places, and welcoming to people of all ages. It’s not the promise of a scene that draws people to them; it’s the shared love of music. As a result, I felt perfectly comfortable on my own.

The joint was jumping at Jovita’s that night, as always, and I sat near the dance floor like a regular, tapping my foot to the rollicking strains of Western swing. Soon, a roguish charmer of a cowboy insisted on two-stepping me around the dance floor all night, while I tripped over my feet and beamed like an overjoyed kid. Some time later, my daughter came to visit. She wasn’t in the door of the Continental Club fifteen seconds before a tall drink of water in a stetson, string tie, and singularly cool red Western shirt grabbed her by the hand and began throwing her around the dance floor. I don’t think she sat out a dance for four days. “I feel like a woman in this town,” she said. I just smiled knowingly.

When I think about the time I spent in Austin and what it meant to me, it was the music more than anything that gave me back myself. Simply spending time in a place where people burst spontaneously into song, and build shrines to Bob Dylan, and ask you to dance because there’s music playing — and what else would you do when there’s music playing? — reminded me of what mattered in life, or at least what mattered to me. That was a gift, and I kept it in a safe place and never took it lightly.

The trailer turned out to be a surprisingly comfortable place to hang out. It was a stone’s throw from the adobe-like straw bale house Norm had built. The Ballingers were warm and hospitable without being intrusive. We had little in common in terms of background and lifestyle, but none of that mattered. They welcomed me into their world, and the more time I spent there the more I realized how irrelevant were many of my own preoccupations. Their property was only ten or fifteen minutes by car from anywhere you might want to be in Austin, but it was set back from the street, and most days I heard only birdsong and the romantic rumble of passing trains.

Inside, the trailer had a spacious feel, with high ceilings and plenty of light. Once I’d outfitted it with a desk and chair, it had everything I needed, including wireless Internet, a porch for barbecuing, AC, and a rabbit-eared TV. I came to think of it as the Texas version of a cottage. (As for the paint job, I’d have preferred Benjamin Moore’s Cloud White, but Cat’s tastes leaned more toward hippie turquoise.) It was the perfect place to write. But even when I wasn’t working, I spent a good deal of my time in Austin alone. I enjoyed companionship when I had the chance to receive it, but I didn’t feel the need to seek it out. I was grateful for the opportunity my writing afforded me to enjoy a renewed acquaintance with myself.

I was working on a project I’d begun some years before and had put in a drawer, a darkly comic novel about marriage and middle age. One of the reasons I’d been keen to leave Toronto was because the story had been calling to me again, and I wanted to see if I could buy the time to find out where it might lead. I’d worried that it might be hard to mine such material, but from a distance my imagination was free to roam, and exploring that landscape in a comic vein turned out to be deeply pleasurable.

I cannot overstate how happy it made me to see the absurdity in life again. Black humour has always been my salve against the darkness, and it was through that lens that my husband and I once navigated the world. When we split up, I honestly believed that I would never laugh again. Certainly, I doubted that I would ever cause laughter again. But there I was, sitting in a trailer in Austin, channelling my suffering into a story, and the story was entertaining me, and I could finally see its ending, and I knew I was going to be okay. Whatever had gone down, the past no longer had any power over me. It was all just material now, and the only thing I cared about was getting it right. Whether I finished the book and whether it was ever published were less important than the fact that I was weeping with laughter again. That was when I knew I was cured.

On New Year’s Eve, the Ballingers threw a party. Among the guests were an artist, a poet, an academic, a playwright, a lawyer, a musician, and a calligrapher who also played the lute and fiddle. At one point, a few of us went outside and were warming ourselves by the heat of the chiminea. When Rick, the lawyer/record collector, discovered that I was Canadian, he proudly announced that he had a collection of Stompin’ Tom Connors records he’d had to track down on the Internet, as they weren’t available in the US. Emily, his playwright wife, added that they’d even checked a map to see if there actually was a place called Tuktoyaktuk. Then Russell, the musician, informed me that he’d been married to a French-Canadian woman and for many years had lived in Quebec City. He missed Canada, and asked after Knowlton Nash.