This weekend my family will be embarking on our annual pilgrimage to West Texas -- Leakey, Texas to be more exact. It is time for the Welch family reunion. No, I'm not a Welch, neither are my parents or grandparents. But my great-grandmother has a sister who married a Welch and then proceeded to have 11 children (10 of whom made it to adulthood). The entire gang, including my great-grandmother when she was living, treks to the hills of West Texas; in essence we return home. It's kind of like salmon going up stream to their birthplace to spawn...except no one dies...and I don't want to think about spawning...
I always approach the trip with a bit of trepidation -- not because I fear the folks that I will see but rather because inevitably from my time in the mountains a different Valerie blooms. My accent thickens, I lose my distaste for "creepy-crawlies", and I relish the smell of the grass after the rains. Why the trepidation? My only reason is because Leakey, Texas and its surrounding areas are my home, despite the fact that I have never lived there. I think there is a small part of me that worries one day I will make the drive up there never to return.
This brings me to another interesting point -- that a place I have never actually resided in seems like home to me. That's the beauty of the place though -- I am in essence returning to the place of my forefathers -- and some how I recognize that fact. My grandfather was born up there -- in Sabinal to be exact. This tidbit has always made me a bit nostalgic about the area, but it wasn't until I had the privilege of traveling the road from Houston to Leakey with Bill Evans that I truly appreciated the idea of returning home. I expected like any other over-confident college freshman that the trip with my grandparents would be boring...full of useless driving advice and lots of snoring. The journey was much more than that -- it was a journey into my grandfather's past and thus my own. My grandfather spun tales for the 5 hours that we journeyed -- pointing out landmarks that no historical society was even aware and telling stories of people and familes long gone. The most amazing thing was how well, after all the years he had been gone, he could tell the change of the counties by the passing landscape -- landscape that to me, the untrained eye, looked all the same. I consider this trip with my grandfather to be one of the highlights of my life -- he died two years later. I had the invaluable experience of learning about my past, about my family's past, about my state's history, about just THE PAST.
Bill Evans passed on all of his wisdom and values and anecdotes via a lost art in our society -- oral tradition. I recently read an essay by Momaday entitled "The Way to Rainy Mountain" -- the author, a Native American, re-lived an experience similar to my own. The essay was touted as an excellent example of the oral tradition of Native American people. While true that histories like the Momaday piece are vital, it seems to me that more importantly are the personal oral traditions -- the ones that will never be published in a book, that will never be recorded for public posterity. These traditions are the very things that give us all our roots -- and everyone knows that the stronger the root system the stronger the tree that grows. It is my hope to give these roots to Jack and his children -- stories of my life, my parents' life, my grandparents' life and stories of the train that swept off the track from the torrential rains in Uvalde county back when Bill Evans was a young man.
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