All The Way Home

I left for Austin, Texas, last September, on a splendid Saturday of the Labour Day weekend. Dawn was breaking as I headed west along the Queen Elizabeth Way toward the US border and a more expansive idea of myself. It was unclear what lay in store. I was just thrilled to be moving again.

This was my first trip to Austin, except for a few days the previous spring, when I’d flown down to see if it would be a good place to do some writing and take a sabbatical from my life. Among other things, I wanted to meet my prospective landlords, Cat and Norm Ballinger. I’d connected with them in March after posting an ad in the Austin section on Craigslist, indicating that I was a writer looking for an “apartment, house or idiosyncratic space.

“Two hours later, a reply landed in my inbox. “Idiosyncratic is us,” it read. “We have a furnished 1954 Spartan travel trailer in So. Austin (Travis Heights). Tree-filled 1-acre lot next to our 3-storey straw bale home. Can walk to #16 bus from here. Husb. is a poet/musician/carpenter. I am a retired artist/therapist. Call when you get to town and we can meet.” I didn’t know it then, but the scene and characters were quintessentially Austin.

The official reason I gave for going to Austin was to work on a book, but the unofficial reason was that I hoped to regain a sense of myself after a difficult period in my life. Beginning four years earlier, within the span of a year and a half, my mother died, my husband and I separated, and I had to move out of our family home. When I finally crawled out of the wreckage, I had no idea who I was, let alone where to go or what to do.

Losing my mother would have been painful under any circumstances — she had been my guiding light. But coming as her loss did, when the distances in my marriage had widened into oceanic gulfs, I was stranded in my grief. A ruined marriage is always cause for mourning, but when two people lose a rare simpatico as well as a shared life, the sorrow redoubles. My husband and I had been together for fourteen years when we separated, and, looking back, I think the marriage was probably destined to come to the place that it did. But the fact remains we had once been good together, good in a way that you don’t often see, good in a way that others remarked on. A friend once described our union as “the modern ideal, with Seinfeldian overtones”; we preferred to think of ourselves as The Honeymooners.

There were flaws in the foundation, to be sure, but until it took a dark turn what I remember most about my marriage was how much fun we had. We were buddies in a flirty, high school sort of way. We laughed until we needed oxygen. We made adventures out of the most mundane tasks, like going to the video store together. For a time, our relationship was so intellectually engaged, nuanced in its understanding of one another, and brazen in its willingness to accept the darkest corners of each other’s psyches, I doubt either of us will ever replicate it with another person.

But by the time it all unravelled, the atmosphere had turned toxic, and I would have sold my soul, or what was left of it, to be free. Still, whatever its ending, losing a love like that sent me spiralling into the void. When it was finally over, I was so unhinged it was all I could do just to keep from going under.

I didn’t even have the distraction of work; in the darkness, I couldn’t find my voice. Nor did I have the elixir of my daughter’s company. She had left for university when the tide in my marriage started to turn, and by the time she graduated and returned to live in Toronto for a time before moving to Los Angeles, she had her own complicated feelings about a mother who had gone missing; as a result, it was sometimes difficult for her to make herself available in the ways that I needed.

And then there was my home. Since the mid-’90s, my husband and I had lived in a loft in the Queen West neighbourhood, a spectacular space that, to me at least, symbolized who we were as a couple, and served as the perfect backdrop for the life I’d always dreamed of living — a sophisticated, downtown, bourgeois bohemian life. Losing that home had towering implications, less because it signalled my downward mobility than because it meant the death of a dream. When I moved out — I couldn’t afford to carry it, and my husband bought me out — I bade farewell not only to my home, but to a powerful idea of myself. Still, as traumatic as my leaving was, I doubt I’d have lasted there for long; by the end of our marriage, that stunning, airy space felt like a mausoleum, and I wandered through it like a character from The Shining.

For the next couple of years, I did what people do when they try to move on: found a new place, made plans, did my best to be optimistic. By most appearances, I was on my way, but in my heart I was only going through the motions.

Toronto became a particularly intense target for my ennui. I’d lived in the city my entire life, but suddenly its culture began to feel oppressive, and its preoccupations with media and money and real estate struck me as shallow and empty. The chattering classes chattered, and my eyes glazed over. I had no interest in competitive conversations or self-conscious affectations, and little patience for the conspicuous consumption and narcissistic obsessions of our age that accosted me at every turn. I couldn’t pick up the Style section of the Globe and Mail without profound feelings of revulsion.

No doubt my disenchantment was merely a projection on my part, having less to do with Toronto’s perceived failings than with my own sense of stuckness, but I continued to feel dislocated and blank. Close friends provided solace; otherwise, I was at sea.

The only way I could imagine freeing myself was by disappearing for a while. Leaving, I hoped, would shift my focus, allow me to reconnect with myself, and put some distance between a past I had outgrown and a future I had yet to im-agine. If what I hoped to discover was unclear, at least I knew what I didn’t want: to live in a diminished way among the remnants of my former life.

And so the notion of a tabula rasa became an insistent refrain. Once I realized this much, I began to cast about for a destination. I knew it would be in America — I was looking for a sense of otherness, but not the burden of wrestling with another language. And I was fairly certain that I wanted to land somewhere in the West or South. I’d travelled there extensively and had always been drawn back. I considered Savannah, Georgia, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, two towns I’d visited, both with much to recommend them. But I’d never been to Austin and had always been intrigued by it; Austin seemed a place where I could feel at home. Besides, I had long been infatuated with the idea of knocking around in a vintage trailer, so when Cat replied to my Craigslist ad, resistance was more or less futile.

I first set eyes on the Spartan trailer when I flew down to Austin on my spring reconnaissance mission and met the Ballingers. Both were in their fifties: Cat was a slyly playful woman with hair that fell to her calves, and a wild, exuberant laugh; Norm, a gentle, easygoing man with a deeply intuitive aura about him.