The Blythe Archives:
The Emperor X Online Journal

|20100126
||DFW
Other than the unidentified man who smeared an eviscerated bird carcass across their mailbox and left it there to rot, Mom and Dad didn't seem to have much contact with people from the outside world -- at least not that year. They were seven months in to an eleven-month try at living in Plano, Texas, on the outskirts of Dallas's prairie exurbs, and they seemed to be more or less alone in their attempt. They had neighbors, of course, but the other families in the cul-de-sac kept fiercely to themselves, so there was little contact with anyone outside of work or the string of mini-mall churches they attended. Even the bird mangler, we later learned, was a former coworker with an ax to grind, so I guess even he doesn't count.

They'd recently followed jobs out west, and had set up camp in a new, unfinished development that was more of a suburban microchip than a neighborhood. Its roads were arranged in a fastidious grid, its open spaces dominated by power lines and a fleet of behemoth water towers, its alleys infested with bands of coyotes hoping to score easy meals by preying on penned-in yard pets. Their house was large and made of yellowish gray bricks, built in the nostalgic, pseudo-Main Street style then in fashion. Its interior was white and sterile, the sanded pine fencing that surrounded it high and claustrophobic. They were sealed off from the world just like thousands of other families in the half-dozen half-finished subdivisions within a half-mile radius. They were more alone than I'd ever seen them, and I couldn't help but feel bad for them or for anyone else who found themselves stuck there for too long, especially with the sneering coyotes and the animal sacrifices and the yawning prairie darkness to get lonely in.

But that very darkness was also Plano's sole charm. Their house was at the edge of urbanization, where perpendicular two-lane streets divided the land at regular intervals with little in between. The roads were extensions of existing thoroughfares, infrastructural vine runners built to cultivate affluent squalor -- shells of shopping centers in small tan deserts, dunes of engineering-grade dirt clods, skeletal wooden frames for next year's batch of mini-mansions, trenches for fiber-optic cable, rows of segmented concrete waterworks conduit awaiting installation beneath the dry brown grass, horse-sized spools of coiled high voltage cables. Wild plants thrived incongruously near useless fences and dimmed street lamps just like they would have in a post-industrial Rust Belt ruin. But Plano was no ruin. It was a blueprint, with weeds.

Night on the gridded plains was a muted tumult. Instead of a breeze and the drone of insects, the former grasslands offered the distant, steady roar of the freeway and the Doppler-shifting song of trucks and sirens and bass-heavy car stereos. Instead of the random glory of the heavens, the sky cast a sodium-yellow halo, warm and diffuse. A constant stream of airliners queued in neat, stepped rows, twinkling like purposeful starships on westbound approach to DFW. Outer Plano, and maybe all of exurban Dallas, played host to a pervasive, subtle, and terrifying grandeur.

I loved my parents, but I was not well prepared for that particular kind of sublime shock Plano delivered. I spent as little time there as my conscience would allow.

* * *
I returned to Texas two weeks ago to get some work done and to spend time with a good friend. I arrived in the morning on an overnight bus from El Paso, and got off rattled and refreshed from a night of contorted, chilly sleep in the bus's front row, next to the driver's blaring boom box. The Dallas terminal, run by a consortium of Mexican bus lines, was about the size of a large high school classroom, the floor cluttered with misaligned chairs and couches and luggage, the walls plastered with hand-made Spanish-language signs announcing trip times and ticket prices for destinations in Texas, Chihuahua, Sonora, and Guanajuato. I brushed my teeth, did a little bit of remote work for my company, got my bearings with a map, and set out for the nearest rail station, about a twenty minute walk through a run-down, nondescript light industrial zone near the city zoo.

What I thought was the most direct route turned out to be an overpass that flew over the zoo to another neighborhood. It put me directly over the train station, with no obvious way to get down to it. I hated the idea of wasting time by retracing my steps, so I leaped over the guardrail and off the overpass, chased by faint sounds of excited mammals from the pens below. I scrambled down a thorny garbage-strewn hill, skirting the property line of a small manufacturing warehouse, and made it to the station platform a few minutes later, scratched and dusty and on schedule.

The train ride through Dallas's southern reaches ran parallel with aging columns that used to support the elevated track of an abandoned freight railroad. Several fragile-looking bridges, disused and overgrown, still spanned a few creeks the old line crossed. Downtown Dallas loomed ahead, jumbled and apparently translucent, the thousands of mirrors on its facades reflecting and blending with the drab sky. The line dipped underground at Cityplace, a fluorescent island built beneath a skyscraper along the Central Expressway, and then continued at grade or on a series of elevated tracks and proud, tan viaducts through the city's northern districts, past megachurches and malls and box retail outlets and trailer homes, then through rolling hilly false-forest parks and the converted farmland surrounding the headquarters of Texas Instruments. By the time I got off the train it was full of people, northbound to Plano and to whatever busy vital denseness has replaced the proto-wasteland I remembered.

My stop was a few yards south of the interchange between the LBJ and Central freeways, and the snaking ribbonous knot of reinforced concrete and asphalt loomed against the mottled overcast, radiating white noise and the thick, intermittent wail of wet semi tires. I met my friend, and we walked towards the apartment complex I'd be staying in for awhile. Past a graffiti-covered concrete-lined creek, past a plant that manufactured semiconductor wafers, past a keyed-entry fence, two meandering rows of three-story apartment buildings enclosed an unkempt but park-like linear courtyard with two pools and a gym. A large woodcut sign by the gate of this white collar proletarian paradise announced its name in rounded bubble letters: "REFLECTIONS."

And that's where I am now, a few miles south of the coyote-patrolled frontier between the city proper and the cybernetic prairie, every now and then taking long runs and exploratory train rides along the concrete canyon of the Central.

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