SIX AND A HALF MILLION SEEDLINGS SPROUTING
BASTROP FIRST CAUGHT my attention in 2013, when I saw its burned out, ash-covered landscape in the David Gordon Green film Prince Avalanche. It’s an oddball story about two highway workers, played by Emile Hirsch and Paul Rudd, who spend a summer painting lines along a country road destroyed by a wildfire. The backdrop was no Hollywood set. It was the Lost Pines of Bastrop after the catastrophic 2011 Complex Fire, the largest wildfire in Texas history. From Sept. 4 to Oct. 29, the fire burned roughly 33,000 acres. I knew about it from the news and from friends, but the movie captured my imagination. It made me curious about this Central Texas town I’d passed by so many times while growing up in Houston and road-tripping to Austin.
The recovery is still a work in progress, though. As of fall 2021, over 6.5 million pine seedlings have been planted on public and private lands, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service. Right after the fire, “it looked like an apocalyptic landscape,” says Chris Hrasky, drummer for the Austinbased instrumental rock band Explosions in the Sky. Hrasky had brought Green to Bastrop so he could see the potential shooting location for himself, and when Green scanned the charcoal-colored pines, he was sold. Explosions in the Sky ended up scoring Prince Avalanche, which now serves as a time capsule of what Bastrop looked like in May 2012, less than a year after the fire was finally put out.
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