austin and dallas don't look that far away from each other on the map, but it's texas of course so they're a three-hour drive apart, or, using the standard conversion formula (multiply by 2), a six-hour amtrak ride. from what i had seen driving around the city the past couple of days, i expected that we might spend hours or perhaps the entire trip safely surrounded by suburban sprawl. instead, the train escaped the clutches of the city within a matter of minutes, its mass and scrupulous linearity granting it the inertia to escape the gravity well that keeps local drivers circling indefinitely. i felt some measure of relief as i stared out the window and saw that there is still an overwhelming amount of empty space left in texas, free to be turned into parking lots, H·E·Bs, whatburgers, buc-ee's, car washes, strip malls, big box stores, 5-over-1s, subdivisions, self-storage facilities, logistics warehouses.

i couldn't help but fantasize about how nice it would be to zip by all that boring rural land in a bullet train going 180 miles per hour, which would cut the travel time down to 90 minutes. high speed rail in texas seems like it should be a slam dunk: you've got three or four huge metro areas just far away enough from each other that driving between them becomes a hassle, and between them is nothing but flat, mostly empty land. the only wrinkle is that every inch of that empty land is owned by gun-toting texas ranchers who don't take too kindly to outsiders coming in and taking their land. instead, the high speed rail that should've connected the "texas triangle" became an air route operated by southwest airlines, so lucrative that they were able to expand enough to eventually become the world's largest low-cost carriermeanwhile, a group called the "texas central railway", dedicated to the fantasy of n700-series shinkansen speeding across the texas plains, has spent tens of millions of dollars and a decade in court with nothing to show for it yet besides maps and thousands of pages of documents.

not far into the trip, the downpour began. i thought texas was supposed to be dry, but it’s no match for my extraordinary rainbringing ability. i’ve gone to places that get one day of rain per year and gotten rained on. the rain ramped up steadily until it was falling in such excess that i started to wonder if this was the start of the foretold epocalipse. my eyes were glued to the windows, transfixed by the dramatic effects the sudden massive influx of water was having on the arid landscape: streams overflowing banks and turning groves into swamps, gushing drainage pipes struggling to keep up, depressions in fields transformed into ponds. at one point, everyone’s phone in the train car goes off sounding a buzzer: the national weather service had pushed an “imminent severe alert” to everyone’s phone declaring a FLASH FLOOD WARNING. i began to worry that the train might not make it to dallas, because in my experience amtrak hasn’t proven very resilient to extreme weather conditions. there was one time when the train i was on got "sticky brakes" because of the cold (it was a little bit chilly that day) and couldn't safely proceed. the staff told everyone to get off and go into the station, where they arranged ubers to the final destination of the 30-some remaining passengers. the whole operation went so smoothly that i couldn’t help but wonder if they had a lot of practice...

i got nervous every time the train slowed down, worried that at any moment we’d come to a permanent stop and i’d be stranded somewhere between dallas and austin, maybe waco, which on the map appears to be at the exact midpoint between the two cities. although it’s the birthplace of dr pepper, the real reason the name of that small texas town is familiar to most americans is because of a certain lurid event from its recent history. luckily, the train never quite lost its inertia, and continued to steadily roll along at a cautious crawl. this added an additional 1-2 hours to the journey, plenty of time to overhear the boomer two rows ahead narrate to his seatmate in excruciating detail the local history of some obscure country (he talked nonstop for nearly 6 hours, it was astonishing), or to worry that i might catch that concerning cough the person sitting next to me was carrying, perhaps as karmic retribution for that cough i had gotten called out for not covering while staying with my friend in austin.

at some point, i have an epiphany. the naïve observer may be tempted to look upon texas’ world-class suburbs and conclude that in a short century and a half, texas has transitioned from frontier to anti-frontier, complete and utter domestication. but, i realize, below the surface, on a socio-anthropological level, the deep suburban housing development actually represents the furthest frontier of human civilizational technology, in some senses the apex of civilization. americans (and the world) are voting with their feet: here is the future of this country, of civilization. austin has notched double digit percentage growth rates for every decade of its existence, twelve consecutive censuses. the same story is repeated across texas, across the sun belt from las vegas to miami, populations ballooning, suburban developments sprouting overnight like mushrooms. the settlers of this new domestic frontier are motivated by the same thing as the oregon trail pioneers wagon-training across the country for a slice of the willamette valley: the dream of a better life. even today, not so far away to the south, driven by dreams of those suburbs that so many take for granted, hundreds if not thousands put their lives on the line every day trying to cross a visceral, physical frontier. but there is yet danger within the domestic frontier, it isn't physical like in the savage frontiers of yesteryear, it is mental: can you avoid boredom, can you avoid insanity, can you avoid depression, can you avoid suicide?