I left Texas once. It was in 1973, when I was 8 years old. I don’t remember much about that day except for the sharp musk of jet fuel near the gate at Amarillo International Airport. My mother, sisters, and I were waiting to cross the tarmac to a plane that would take us out of Texas, where we’d spent our entire lives. We were headed to Iran, halfway around the world, where my father had taken a new job.
I spent the long years away thinking hard about how to get back to the Panhandle town of Pampa, where I’d grown up; and Amarillo, 55 miles to the southwest, where my parents and grandparents were from. I would even settle for Dallas, where I was born, or Houston, our last Texas home before we flew to Tehran. But as time passed, my ideas about the Texas I yearned to come back to had shifted to a steep nostalgia linked to memories of the land: the hard spring rains that revealed the faint glimmers of flint arrowheads, where none had been before; the catchable horny toads that sunned motionless on caprocks; the mudcats and water moccasins that slid though the brown waters of the creek that meandered through Palo Duro Canyon, where my cousins and uncles and aunts spent long, hot summers. There was also the Stuckey’s where my granddad bought me my first pocketknife; the squat, spherical tanks of chemicals at the plant where my dad worked along the highway outside of Pampa; the frail statue of a tiny white deer farther along the same two-lane highway on the way to Amarillo. These quiet images formed a delicate mantle of peace in my mind, one I could retreat to whenever disquiet rose.
It took
