Me vs. The Pine Curtain

I really couldn’t be more “East Texas”: I grew up in Longview. My parents are from Kilgore. My grandmother was a Rangerette. My first memories of going out to eat are inhaling obscene amounts of fried catfish at the original David Beard’s in Ore City. I saw Waylon and Willie at the Black-eyed Pea Jamboree in Athens when I was eight. And I owned a cowboy belt with my name tooled into the back by the time I was six. But for some reason, admitting to others that I grew up “behind the Pine Curtain” has always been a bit of an embarrassment for me. I tried like Hell (with little success) to disguise my substantial drawl. I was jealous of my big-city friends who claimed "cool" places like Houston, Dallas, San Antonio or Austin as the hometowns. And slowly—deliberately—I became very removed from the big-haired, small town girl that I was when I moved away to attend college in 1987.

But last September, I finally got over it.

A group of friends of mine who were longtime campers and then counselors at a small, family run summer camp near Timpson (now THAT’S deep east Texas) decided to gather there for a reunion of sorts. I had spent at least two magical, sweaty weeks at that camp every summer for eleven years, but hadn’t been back there since my last stint as a counselor in 1990. As I drove through the small towns on my way there (Tatum...Carthage...Teneha), I had to catch my breath due to the sheer abundance of natural splendor outside my windows. Somehow, despite my familiarity with them, I had never really seen those hills and trees the way I saw them that early autumn afternoon. Through older eyes, the landscape seemed proud and epic. When I finally turned on to the mile-long red dirt road that leads to the camp’s gates, I was overcome with nostalgia. Just like it’d always been, the narrow road was encased in tall trees—mostly pines—so thick you couldn’t see more than a few feet back into them. It felt like I was traveling down some mystical corridor, transporting me back in time.

By the time I rounded the last long curve and drove through the camp gates, I found myself in a full-on sob: Despite the thirteen years that had passed since the last time I’d gone through those gates, nothing had changed at all. Time had frozen. I thought about how much I had personally been through in those years—college, studying abroad, grad school, two out-of-state moves, a marriage, deaths of my grandparents, a divorce, my father’s death, and a half-dozen different jobs and hair colors—and I was overwhelmed with emotion. The whole time that the world had been changing around me, this place had remained untouched, unspoiled and perfect. This astounding sameness was as comforting to me as a mother’s hug. It was that moment when all the sheepishness I’d ever felt about being from deep east Texas fell away. I finally realized how lucky I am to have grown up in the cradle of that indescribable beauty, so surrounded by it in fact, that I took it completely for granted.