A Second Lawn, Just 13 Songs Away

My rental house in San Marcos has a lawn, too, so today I drove down to what we call "Rio Vista" to mow in another county. In truth, our house on Cheatham is only 13 songs away, more or less, running up and down the Interstate that links Austin with San Antonio and Dallas. I put on my iPod on the car's radio and drive, trying to remain aware of scenery that can disappear once you're driven through it hundreds of times, like I have since last spring when we bought the house.

That ride south of the city once crossed only miles and miles of pastureland, but now the road to Rio Vista is is developing boils of serious commerce. The newest outlet of outdoor superstore Cabela's has roared up near Buda, with its signs now festooned on a massive water tower as well as the exterior of a building big enough to hold a Saturn V rocket. When one of these shopping meccas for the bass-boat and backpacking set rises up, there's usually a low-cost hotel built in its shadow. Cabela's is a destination, apparently a store you can't get enough of in a single day.

The Buda store, like all Cabela outlets, will house a miniature mountain and waterfall:

A 40-foot-high mountain replica, the centerpiece of the store's open showroom, with running waterfalls and streams, a trout pond and trophy animals in re-creations of their distinct habitats. Similar mountains, each called Conservation Mountain, have been built in other Cabela's stores as monuments to wildlife and salutes to the sportsmen and women who support wildlife conservation.

The construction in Buda illustrates the progress these shoulder counties north and south of Austin covet. Hays is still learning from Williamson County how to court commerce, but the Buda sprawl shows the county is learning fast. The highway on- and off-ramps are being beefed up with yards and yards of new concrete. HEB has decided a second store in the area is a high priority, so a new supergrocery is rising on the other side of the Loop 4 interchange. The traffic now jams up at the end of those ramps at sundown, as a line of pickups and SUVs muscles into a town of less than 1,000 residents. Buda was once important to the railroad. Now it's "gonna be somebody," as Eve told Addison DeWitt in the film All About Eve — apparently somebody with something to sell you. The countryside that surrounds that concrete is not dramatic enough to warrant saving.

In the meantime, the lawn at Rio Vista is doing fine, along with the family making a home out of our second house. I treat the ride toward lawn care like a long meditation, time away from the keyboard that can spark ideas.