Looking for Home

One day I awoke with an image I had just dreamed. I saw my great uncle, an old Texas-German farmer named Alfred, cutting his neighbor's hair. He tilted this man's head gently to one side and carefully snipped off stray locks, like he was trimming flower stems. The neighbor's young son watched and waited his turn on the steps nearby. I'd heard that Alfred used to do that—cut his neighbor's hair—but the dream image was so clear it was as if I were sitting on the porch with them. I swear, there was a tenderness in the way Alfred's gnarly fingers worked the comb through that man's hair. It was a little like a caress. I could make a whole story out of that gesture. There was something like digging in the soil to make things grow—Alfred's hands moving there. It said something about living in one place so long that even your neighbor's head becomes part of the landscape, known and shaped by your own hands.

In my dream, a young boy watches, almost bored, but waiting. That boy, whose name is Clinton, is now over sixty-five years old, and his face is creased and sun-scorched. The man with the scissors, Uncle Alfred, never married. Until his death a few years ago, he lived on the family homestead with his unmarried sister, Frieda.

I met Clinton one day when I drove to the small piece of property that I call "the shack," and my aunts and uncles call "the country place." It is the difference between those who lived here once, and one who only visits.

It's not much of a thing, this country place. The shack—the building my father lived in with some of his dozen brothers and sisters and their father—was never much, and has become both less and more through years of neglect. It has decayed into nothing but a place for the storage of things no longer useful in the endless flow of everyday life— an old cabinet, rusted bed springs, broken shovels, half-rotted paintings, memories.

This last thing, the memories the shack contains, make it more than it once was. Some buildings contain memory as well as boards and nails. My grandfather built this place from cedar posts and wood torn off bomb crates from the air force base in San Antonio. Two of my uncles own it now; they bought it from my grandfather when he was dying of cancer. The family had moved away from the country place many years earlier, because feeding thirteen children on the wages of a fence builder had been simply impossible.

 

I'm using these names and telling these stories as if I've always known them, as if they are part and parcel of my past, but let me tell you, they're not. They're fragments of a possible past. I might have grown up with Clinton's kids as cousins, if the world were other than it is. But since it is the way it is, I have only story fragments to work with when I try to understand how life in relationship to a place unfolds.

We sat, Clinton and I, on the tailgate of my truck and looked out beyond the shack toward the dry grass of the Burn while we talked.

"I sure did have a sweet spot for your aunt," he said.

"Which one?"

"Virginia. I was sweet on Virginia. We went out once, and I always looked for excuses to come over here to see her." He looked off with tears in his eyes. "I guess we might have been married," he said. "At least I'd have liked to marry her. But then they all moved away. To town. Too far."

My grandfather and his children moved forty miles away, to New Braunfels. I think about the fact that the woman I married was born in Austria, traveled back and forth with her parents to Iran, where her father was born, and grew up mostly in a smal1 town outside Chicago. Clinton and I do not live in the same world—our terms of time and place are utterly different. Yet, I still feel a pull, the yearning to live in one place thoroughly. Clinton has lived that way all his life. I have not lived in one place for more than a decade at a time, and it is possible that I never will. So what can a sense of place possibly mean for my life? What can it mean for so many of us cut loose from easy access to markers such as long-term residence and landownership that are conventionally thought of as the wellsprings of emplacedness?

When I returned to the Hill Country, I hunted, I thought, for some kind of connection to my history—shadowy patterns of the past of my family and its relation to this place. A great-great-uncle once served fifteen years as pastor for the old Catholic church in Fredericksburg. He died, still pastoring, the year I was born. My father almost married a woman from Fredericksburg. Many of my aunts, uncles, and cousins still live in the cities at the edge of the region. In many ways, I felt as if this area belonged, in some small way, to me—or more accurately, I belonged to it.

I have found some of that connection to past and place, but it has not been the simple sort of homecoming or return story often told by tellers with a simple "nostalgic" voice. In a 1966 television program designed to introduce then-president Lyndon Johnson's home region— the same area I am writing about—to the rest of the nation, a reporter asked: "What does all this land you see here, Mr. President—what does all this mean to you?" Johnson answered: "Well, the sun seems to be a little brighter, the climate a little warmer, the air a little fresher, the people a little kinder, and more understanding. I guess it is a good deal in what you are accustomed to.... I guess we all like home. Maybe I like it a little more than the average fellow."

My experience in the Hill Country coincides, at least superficially, with Johnson's description. When I first looked for a place to live in Fredericksburg, the small town at the region's center, the owners of a local realty gave me a bag of delicious pears from their orchard as a welcoming gift, despite the fact that I had already told them I'd found a place with another real estate agent. They weren't trying to buy a customer; they were welcoming a new neighbor.

But the easy relationship to place and people suggested by Johnson's words and that bag of pears does not provide an adequate basis for me to understand my own relationship to place. Too many of the markers that usually define place are fragmented in my life. I can hear a story about the way that two old farmers used to cut one another's hair, but I'll never sit on that porch myself. In an age of mobility, when the members of many families don't even live in the same state, much less the same local community, families struggle to find ways to maintain continuity across generations, and in many cases can't hold on to their places.

My father left home at a young age because of an abusive father. He also fled out of economic desperation and the lure of money and more that has steadily pulled people in this country away from rural places. His life path, and those of his brothers and sisters, fits into the story of the "unsettling" described by Wendell Berry in 1979 in The Unsettling of America. That story continues today; as a recent United States census reports, less than 2 percent of the American people still make a living off the land.

The personal and historical forces that severed my father's relationship to place ramify into my own life. I am heir to his unsettling, and my imagination and energy for the past several years has focused on healing what I see as the wound of this severing between a person and his or her place. Feeling a lack in my life, I return again and again to the idea that being rooted in a place and in a community will open possibilities of experience impossible to find in a wandering life. For me, the route toward that healing begins with stories.

 

I want to tell the story of the back room of the shack, the one my father told me about. He said a meteor smashed its roof. He said he almost got killed when that meteor came through late one night. He slept in that corner, he said, and that meteor almost hit him. That's how he told the story. I found out later from an aunt that the roof fell because the support beam rotted, and that it happened years after my dad had already run away to join the air force.

My uncles repaired the roof so they could use the shack as a hunting cabin. They go up to the old place sometimes to get a few deer. Sometimes they go during hunting season, sometimes they go when it's not deer season, but they go when they need meat to make sausage. Uncle Herbert makes the best sausage, but it's really rich, so his sister, Aunt Angie, says she can only eat half a ring before it gives her diarrhea.

I use the back room of the shack as a kitchen. It has a few old school desks and tables, and there's an electric skillet hanging from a nail. Uncle Herbert said he put in electricity a few years ago so there'd be light at night when they hunt. Most nights I cook over a fire, but in the morning I use the skillet to heat water for tea and oatmeal before I work in the garden I've begun here, or start out for a walk.

There's a painting tacked to the wall in the back room of the shack. My grandfather, Opa Ben, made it when the family still lived here. (They called it a home then, not a shack, as Uncle Herbert often reminds me.) Uncle Herbert said: "All I can remember about it is that painting was made there, while we was living there, and it was night, about four in the morning. I woke up and he was painting on that picture. He was working in the light of a coal-oil lamp, and in the morning there was this finished painting."

The painting compels me. A little boy with a cowboy hat on a string hanging behind his neck looks up at a ball he's tossed into the air, and his dog jumps beside him. A stone house with a wooden porch looms in the background. I asked Uncle Herbert if this was a specific house, maybe one where Opa Ben had lived, but Uncle Herbert said it was just something Opa Ben made up in his head. "He would say, I guess, that's how he thought it should look. That's what artists do; they don't necessarily see what they're painting, but it's in their mind."

I like this painting because of the layers of nostalgia it's got in it as it hangs there on the wall of the shack's back room. It speaks to me about Opa Ben, a hard man who treated his children and wife badly. He had no joyous early life, yet he had this nostalgic longing for childhood, at least as he imagined it could have been. Aunt Barbara says Opa Ben's childhood wasn't blessed. "He never forgave his sisters—Lucy, Hilda, or Frieda—any of them," Aunt Barbara told me. "He said, 'They did not let me go to school. Oma wouldn't let me go, or any of my sisters.' They said he didn't need the education, and he carried that on into his children."

Then there's the nostalgia Uncle Herbert connects to that painting. Well, not the painting alone, but the story of how he hung it on the wall there. Uncle Herbert bought the old place from my grandmother's "estate" after she died. That is, he and one of his brothers paid a market price for the property, and that money was divided evenly between the other eleven kids. When Uncle Herbert went to clean the place so they could fix the roof, he found the canvas in a trash pile. It was torn from its frame and ragged around the edges, but he nailed it to the wall anyway. He said, "Of course, us kids wrecked everything we had. It's surprising we had the pictures we did have. That one happened to be on a canvas. My father bought the canvas material and bought light wood, and stretched it himself, and put it on himself. It was painted at that house, and it got wrecked up, and when Stephen and I got the house it was laying in some trash pile, and I dug it out, and said, 'Oh, let's put it up there.'" So Uncle Herbert added his layer of nostalgia atop Opa Ben's.

And now I'm adding mine. The painting makes me think all these thoughts about my family now, after my return to them following a long absence. I barely knew Uncle Herbert or Aunt Barbara or my father's other kin because my dad ran away from home when he was only a teenager. As the oldest, he bore the full brunt of Opa Ben's abuse, so he left to join the air force, distancing himself from his brothers and sisters.

The nostalgia I add to this painting connects precisely to all of the stories it brings out of my uncles, my aunts, and me. They tell me Opa Ben did a lot of paintings, and I've seen some of them hanging in the living rooms of various relatives. We had one in our house when I was young—a painting on wood of a deer running in a snowy landscape. It only now strikes me how odd it was that Opa Ben should paint snow, huge piles of it, on the ground. It's odd because Opa Ben spent his entire life in the Texas Hill Country where it rarely snows, and never comes in such piles. "That's what artists do. They don't necessarily see what they're painting, but it's in their mind."

We usually consider nostalgia something to be dismissed. It's just the way some people think "the good old days" had to be better than now. But I wonder whether something more complicated might be going on. Nostalgia comes from two Greek roots, nostos-, "to return home," and algos-, "pain." Thus, nostalgia literally means, "to return home and suffer pain." In current conventional usage it is a mildly derisive term suggesting a "homesickness" for a past that never existed. People who are nostalgic are thought to be seeking an escape from the complexities of contemporary life by idealizing the past. But there are other etymological memories contained in the word. The Greek root comes out of the Indo-European base *nes-, *nos-, "to retum; to unite," and the etymological dictionaries claim connections for nostalgia in the Gothic ga-nisan, "to heal," and nasjan, "to save." Old English amplifies with gi-nesan, "to survive, be healed." These etymological connections suggest partial explanations for the persistent return of nostalgia in a world where, by some predictions, it should have long ago been eradicated like smallpox. In the contemporary United States, where constant movement leads some people to feel "homeless" even when they have a house, the longing in nostalgia offers both a source of suffering, algos, and an attempt to heal that suffering through nostos.

I've been thinking about the way the Hill Country seems to be a place of nostalgia. Antique shops dot the roads everywhere. One shop owner told me most of his customers come from Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas.

The Hill Country town of Fredericksburg—due to its rural, German character—hovers near the top ten in the list of tourist attractions in Texas. Groups from Germany visit every year, and I know of at least two shops on the main street, a bakery and a weaving studio, owned and run by Germans who chose to move to Texas because Fredericksburg felt more heimlich, "homelike," than Germany itself. One weekend I walked the main street of town and heard Spanish, Japanese, Danish, and an African language being spoken along with the inevitable English and German.

What kind of nostalgia is this, that it should have such powerful familial, regional, national, and even transnational attraction? I once read that in the late nineteenth century tradition began to replace religion as a moral force. Some have gone so far as to say: "Memory is what we have now in place of religion" (Kammen 1991, 194). This seems interesting to me. It's more than just something clever or ironic or witty to say. It suggests a contemporary longing for connectedness to places, to the stories of places, to the memories embedded in them. Lawrence Goodwyn, in an essay accompanying a set of photographs of the places and people of the Hill Country, wrote:

A fundamental American dilemma defines itself in the Hill Country today—a kind of dislocation, a confusion about the meaning of the past and our connection to it. This kind of dislocation is not a problem merely for the Germans of the Hill Country but for millions of contemporary Americans as well. It is a problem that many urban newcomers to the Hill Country are trying to escape. With this sense of dislocation comes its corollary, a sense of longing. (Watriss and Baldwin 1991, 39)

It seems this system of nostalgia requires rural or marginalized areas to convey some feeling of richness and fullness for modern urban American culture. Rural places such as the Hill Country and "exotic" cultures like that of Native American peoples become identified as bearers of tradition and rootedness to the earth; and mobile, urban Americans eagerly seek to find a connection, if only briefly and incompletely, by purchasing antiques and "sacred" objects.

The Texas Hill Country has been in my mind since I was a boy. My father moved restlessly during my childhood, dragging his family from one place to another, hoping always to find better work, more money, friendlier folks, a new life. I recall coming into the Hill Country as if it were a foreign land—exotic, full of strange people speaking German, smelling of dry wind and thick cedar brakes, and waking my imagination with its bone-shaped limestones and sparkling rivers. We lived in cities and towns on the urban fringes of the Hill Country—Austin, New Braunfels, San Antonio—but the country remained always the elusive place of intense visits and vivid stories. I spent extended time in the region only after I had grown and set off on my own.

A friend from Houston once told me that the Hill Country is where most Texans would choose to live if they could pick anywhere in the state. If you come from East Texas, my friend told me, you love the feeling of space and openness the region gives. When you rise up out of the humid coastal plain above the Balcones Escarpment, my friend said, you can just feel yourself getting healthier. When you approach the area from the west, the small, well-kept towns remind you civilization does exist in Texas, and the startling sight of spring-fed streams and rivers soaks into you like a cold drink for your parched West Texas soul.

What I found when I moved as an adult to the Hill Country both confirmed and called into question this sense of the place as a home to be desired. Through family and friends, I discovered the stories that tie my past to the land. Through my own wanderings and conversations with the people who live in the region as it is today, I experienced the richness of the place and people and witnessed, disturbingly, a process of flattening that seems to remove the richness of experience replacing it with a tourist economy lacking depth and local viability. On any given Saturday, you will find thousands of people shopping the streets of Fredericksburg, the town at the center ofthe region's current economic boom. You can buy anything from dulcimers to decoys, from thousand-dollar antiques and furniture made from African hardwoods to Wild West paraphernalia; but if you look closely at the numbers, you'll find that the town's top business is health care—hospitals and nursing homes employ more people than any other industry. You can be a tourist here, or a retiree, but many of the indicators of a healthy economic culture evolving to meet local needs seem lacking. An organic vegetable farm in the area closed for lack of customers, though you can buy a hundred different flavors of peach preserves in town. Few restaurants that avoid the German menu of sausage and sauerkraut and schnitzel last for any time in town. You can rent a room for a night in one of the area's 300-plus bed and breakfasts, but forget the idea of finding a rental house unless money is no real obstacle. Prices for land that has never been more than marginal for farming and barely adequate for ranching have shot up to $2,000 to $I0,000 per acre.

Many books feed the myth and the mystique ofthe Texas Hill Country as a place. While I've enjoyed reading the stories of pioneers and colorful characters, there always seems to be something missing from these historical accounts and tall tales. I wondered where the experiences of people like my family—the backbreaking and fruitless work and hurtful struggles with poverty—fit with the idyllic tales of harmony with the Indians and steadily improving fortunes of hardworking German families. When I finally met my aunts and uncles on my own terms, as an adult, they introduced me to stories of the Hill Country that I'd neither read nor heard; and despite the hardships, there were stories of joy and living as well as suffering and dying. But they were stories of everyday folks, not folk heroes or victims.

I knew immediately that I wanted to help those stories get told and shared as a counterbalance to the myth, so I began tape-recording my conversations with aunts and uncles. This led me deeper into questioning both what life had been like in the Hill Country in the past and what life is like there now.

My family is not, has never been, one of history's winners. We've gathered no bounty, brought forth no eras. The first Syring in the Hill Country, Christophe Süring, came overland from New Orleans, not with the wave of settlers from Germany. As near as I can reckon based on written sources, he married a New Braunfels widow who had land claims through her husband, and so, through the borrowed "glory" of some other person's pioneering, we came to have our foothold in the hills. It has never been a sure one. A few generations later the Syrings ended up with a marginal ranch of a few hundred acres in Kendall County. It didn't last long. My grandfather's father left it to an eldest son who ended up a bachelor without children, and the acres of cedar brakes, thin soil, stones, and a stunningly beautiful stretch of cypress-lined creek passed from my family before any of us "made good."

There are no uncles who hit it big, no aunts who married out of their class and "brung us up" in the world. We are a family of meat packers, mechanics, waitresses, data-entry clerks, and truck drivers. If anything, my generation is even further from that elusive American dream of success over generations. F lipping burgers, selling drugs, fixing cars— these are the things we do.

I'm something of an aberration and I know it. I read books. I write. I teach a little. But perhaps I'm not so much of an exception as I think. My family loves language, loves stories. Put three of us in a room and what do we do?

Tell stories, of course.

If you leave us alone in a room long enough, we'll eventually come round to telling stories about the hills. They make us into a group, a family, a community. Whether we've lived there for years or only visited, we feel as though the Hill Country gives us a claim to saying, "I am here. I've lived. I've been a part of the way things are."

This book tells many interconnected stories, but I've divided the stories into sections to give the themes and ideas some shape.

Part 1, "Speaking in Tongues, Telling Tales: Family Stories," introduces the Syring family. As the various conversations I've had with aunts, uncles, and cousins unfold, they evoke the landscapes of experience and stories that compose the collective tale of the Syring family. It is an essayistic grappling with family, home, and particularly, place, as well as my attempts to understand the emotional and intellectual ramifications of trying both to live in a place and to understand the constraints— social, emotional, economic, environmental—of that place.

Part 2, "Honey Creek Church—Chapter and Verse," gathers several short stories focused around a single place to explore how places become containers for memory and story.

Part 3, Migrations toward Home: Fredericksburg, Texas," includes most of the research I did while living in Fredericksburg, the community at the heart of the Texas Hill Country, and the economic center of the region's current tourist "boom." While I am critical of the use of tourism to revive the town's economy, I do not perform a direct critique of heritage tourism with Fredericksburg as my case study. Instead, I examine some of the problems with creating Fredericksburg as a "home" for German Americans, their descendants, and newcomers to the area. I also highlight some of the regenerative stories of the place that occur despite economic opportunism.

Finally, "Closings: Beginning Again," both closes the circle of my explorations and suggests how the whole process of questioning undertaken here begins over again and again.

Many writers have cited statistics that say one out of four or five people in the United States moves every year. Here, for example, is John Daniels:

This cottage at the end of the trail, which my wife and I rent, is my twenty-ninth dwelling in forty years—I recalled them the other day while driving I-280 to San Francisco. This is our third summer here. How many more, we can't say—very likely only one or two.... I, and millions of others in this country where the average family moves once every four years...skim freely from place to place, home to home, reasonably happy and very possessive of our independence, but also just a bit baffled, a bit stifled in our easy movement, sure of what belongs to us but not at all sure of what we belong to. Fluent in mobility, we try haltingly to learn the alphabet of place. (Daniels 1992, 205-206)

My life has been a movement between the Texas Hill Country of my father's family and the Midwest of my mother's family. In the course of such movement, the questions of what family, home, place, and community mean have become complex and crucial for me. In a society as mobile as the United States, such questions loom large.

I don't pretend to know everything or most or even much about what the Hill Country is like, but it seems possible to describe what one person's encounter with the place, people and problems has been like, and to use that description to unpack a few broader ideas. Texas is such a place of self-mythicizing, always telling larger-than-life stories about what it is as a place. If, as Larry McMurtry observed in the 1970s, the rural, pastoral way of life has passed in Texas, then I must ask: What kind of life has come into being in the rural places and small towns that continue to exist in today's urbanized Texas? What happened to that young boy sitting on the porch? What happened to his children and their children? Are the people of those times still holding place?

The short answer is they're still here, but they've changed a lot.

The long answer is this book, which is part autobiography, part essay, part story collection, and mostly a record of ways of looking at the life of a place.