I live in West Texas, in a town I like to call the Worst Place in America. I won't name names. Really, though, there aren't a whole lot of towns out here, so you can probably guess.
It was hard to move here, I'll admit. I lived in a crappy hotel for a week before I found my apartment, a place where dead cockroaches and the stale scent of old carpet greeted me when I walked in, and the door doesn't fit on the hinge properly and lets all manner of creepy-crawlies invade. But there was nowhere else to go. The booming oil and gas industry claimed all the housing (and then made it so I pay twice what I should in rent).
Plastic bags and other trash clings to everything and flutters when the wind blows (which is all the time). The number of gas stations per capita is absurdly high because my town is the only thing on the Interstate for miles and miles in either direction. The sound of the tractor-trailers roars all day long. As for a social scene for 20-somethings, or the prospect of meeting the Man of My Dreams, well, neither of those things exist.
As they like to say of Alaska, the odds are good but the goods are odd.
Why didn't I just hop back into my moving van and drive straight back to Austin, you ask? Well, because all that was waiting for me there was my old job as a barista at Starbucks, making minimum wage (with a Master's degree under my belt, I might add).
I came here for my career. I promised myself I'd stay a year.
And now I have. (Which, incidentally, makes it the longest I've stayed at the same job if you don't count graduate school, which took 23 months.)
I made sacrifices, sure. I got used to things I thought I'd never get used to.
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| Big Bend National Park |
I used to think I had to live near water; now I no longer shake my fist in anger when the storm that's been building on the horizon all day, growing ever closer hour by hour and wafting the scent of rain and the sound of thunder into town, magically disappears on the edge as if repelled by the Worst Place in the World-ness of this city. Even God doesn't want to touch this place, I always think, with bitterness. But I've gotten used to it.
I got used to the cockroaches. I cut a water bottle in half and keep it on the table to scoop up the dead ones in the summer. I plug the sinks at night. I can't stand the crunch when I squish the live ones, so I've perfected my aim for throwing heavy things at them.
I got used to the spider living under my pantry. He might be highly venomous; I have no idea. He eats flies and mosquitoes and for that I'm grateful. I even wrote a story about him (or her).
I even got used to the seclusion. I got used to spending all my free time watching Netflix, writing, and playing my guitar. I got in touch with my inner introvert, channeling all the bitterness and self-loathing I fear from loneliness into my fingers, and purging all of it in my rare moments of socialization with coworkers, so that they never even suspect it.I got used to the desert.
Funny thing is, I grew up in it: Mesa, Arizona, suburb of Phoenix, in the middle of the Sonoran Desert with its endemic saguaro cacti. I never remembered hating it. Why would I? I had nothing to compare it to. It was only when I went off to college in the Northwest, and worked jobs in Colorado and Yellowstone and later the Ozark hills of Missouri, that I realized what I was missing.Rain. Snow. Creeks. Trees. Shade.
I vowed I could never again live without them. Like Tolkien's lost Elves who have never seen the sea, but feel it in their blood, the forest was in mine. It always had been. And once I saw it, I knew I could never go back. It was a cruel fate that found me hopping from job to job for the next twelve years, only to land right back in the ecosystem I had vowed never to return to, with its heat and thorns and fangs and venom.
And the funny thing is, I kind of like it. Took me a year to realize it.
I may have traded Sonora for Chihuahua, saguaro for lechugilla, but it's much the same. There's something magical about a place that's so hostile that everything in it will kill to protect its niche, the niche it worked so hard to find. There's something magical about the way the red rocks glow after the sun sets, and every living creature awakens and moves where before you would swear there was nothing. There's magic in the smell of the rain because it is so scarce, magic that no one who has not suffered through drought could ever appreciate.
All the pictures on this blog post were taken by me, on and off the job right here in the Trans-Pecos. Once you get past the dryness, the heat, and the cockroaches, it's a pretty amazing place.
Maybe the desert is in my blood, too.
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