FORTUNATE SON

The longtime Montanan returns to his native turf to size up the lay of the land.

Texas, writes Bass, is a place of pronounced duality: a land of promise and opportunity but also “hell on horses and women,” a place where East, West, and South converge to create a place that “almost always was one thing, but it was also almost always that thing’s opposite.” For all its supposed open country, Texas is full of fences. That was one of the reasons, writes the author, that he pushed farther west, extending his stride so that he didn’t have to hop over barbed wire so often. One of his pieces, for instance, concerns a rare bit of true wilderness, a boggy bayou south and east of his boyhood home of Houston, a place full of ibises and other birds. “We have not yet traveled very far at all,” he writes, “skittering across the shining, shallow water, before there rises suddenly before us a howl of birds, a cyclone of birds—magnificent black-and-white birds with long legs, long bills, long wings.” That lyricism meets with sharp moments of disapproval (without public land, he writes, Texans have a bond with these out-of-the-way places) and disdain (of Donald Trump, every environmentalist’s favorite villain, he proclaims, “It is my Texas parochialism, in me since childhood, that tells him to keep his sorry New York developer-ass out of the Lone Star state”). Mostly, though, the author’s account is an evenhanded appreciation of a place that mostly exists in his memory, the landscape ever more gnawed and swallowed up by development and other artifacts of supposed progress. Repeating William Carlos Williams’ dictum “No ideas but in things” at several points, Bass looks at the better angels of reality: “intelligent, beautiful-eyed dogs,” NASA’s quests in space, roadless places, and, of course, football.

Fans of the author’s writing and collectors of Texas literature alike will prize his homecoming.