When I'm driving on 75, through Dallas and into the universe of suburbs exploding north, I sometimes think about the early European settlers who moved to the Great Plains and succumbed to "prairie madness." Symptoms varied, but the afflicted blamed the sheer monotony of the landscape for feelings of extreme anxiety and even psychosis. There was more to it than the emptiness of the plains. The hardness of homesteading, separation from your old community, beef with the locals, whatever.
But I like the idea that a whole lot of Nothing is, on its own, enough to drive you crazy. There are no mountains or rivers or trees to orient you. Your closest neighbor from the old country is on a farm 10 miles away and you've got beef over lawn care near the property line. Don't try with the native population, who don't share your hang-ups about the scenery and already have good reason to dislike you. You're as alone as you've ever been.
You either pull deep, from your imagination or force of will or whatever mystical experience you can summon by engaging directly with all that big blue sky, and find a kind of self-sufficiency you never knew you had. Or you flip out and become a version of yourself that you don't recognize.
To really get at the psychogeography of this place, you have to take a ride. Start south of downtown Dallas. You'll pass through a knot of highways and a cluster of glass skyscrapers as you settle into a northbound lane on U.S. 75. There's no real core in a place like this, though, no sense of gravity outside of your car. You see the glass towers washed in sunlight and colored LED lighting, gliding by along with the billboards and corporate signage that define the American landscape as much as any amber waves of grain. You see the single-family subdivisions and strip malls unfurling to the end of the world — to Oklahoma, at least.
Eventually you may notice the defining feature of North Texas geography is the highway itself. This is the center of life in a place with no center, traffic flowing along the vast arterial network of a place 4 million people call home, the steady endless rhythm of lane changes and slowdowns occasionally broken by moments of violence and anger.
You see the heat radiating and the swept-away wreckage littering the roadside. You see the wide expanses of concrete stretching out to the vast horizon, the light towers and bridges puny against all that space. Sometimes you can barely tell where the road ends and the sky begins. You experience deja vu as the road signs seem to repeat themselves. You're alone in your car. You're surrounded by people in their cars but you're as good as ghosts to each other.
If this isn't Nothing, it can feel close to it. You can lose track of who you are in a place like this. You drive long enough, you miss an exit, and the prairie madness sneaks up on you.
Maybe this is also transcendence, a way to negate your self in favor of an existence that feels more all-encompassing. Another American dreamer, Jack Kerouac, wrote about the meditative quality of driving, the highway's dotted white line becoming a mantra in a push for meaning. There's a thin line between madness and enlightenment. While I don't know what Kerouac would have made of contemporary Texas sprawl, his study of Buddhism likely gave him a healthy appreciation of emptiness, of the idea that everything is contained in Nothing.
Of course, there's not Nothing in the 9,000 square miles that make up the Dallas-Fort Worth metro, which is barely part of the southern end of the Great Plains anyway. Never has been Nothing, or Nobody, for that matter — there are likely still bones and arrowheads buried under the concrete spillway at White Rock Lake. Dallas founder John Neely Bryan, a tradesman who later died in an Austin insane asylum and is himself buried in an unmarked grave, had his reasons: a convergence of old Caddo trails and new Texan trails at a natural ford on the Trinity River floodplain.
And yet a blank slate is the essential element in Dallas' founding myth, which played at least an equal role to geography in shaping the city's destiny. This is a place willed into existence on a mean and ugly plain by little more than the grasping efforts of salesmen and real estate developers. No navigable body of water, no mountain pass, no history, just bluster and dreams of money. Commercial ambition and committed glad-handing brought the settlers, the railroads, the banks.
The 19th century Americans and Europeans who settled here weren't mad farmers who couldn't hack the loneliness of frontier living. They were businessmen, visionaries, and the story they sold in Dallas has always dovetailed nicely with the other Texan myths about the men driving herds of lumbering livestock commodities up north.
The cowboys did the dirty work and got the glory. Meanwhile, it was the self-reliant dreamers in North Texas who turned a "billion steers into buildings made of mirrors," as David Berman put it with the appropriate amount of wonder and horror in the song "Dallas." Berman was no great admirer of the commercial impulse that draws so many business-minded strivers to this place, but his song's ambivalent attraction to the city and its "evil light" captures the magnetism of Dallas for dreamers of all kinds. "Some kind of strange magic happens when the city turns on her lights," Berman sings, and it's hard not to envision the cool glow of the downtown skyline at night, a view of empty skyscrapers that people in Dallas mostly appreciate through a windshield.
When you live somewhere long enough, even the most unexceptional landmarks become freighted with enough meaning to fill the empty landscape. There's a point west on I-30 between Dallas and Fort Worth, amid the roller coasters and ballparks, where I am suggesting to my now-wife that we may want to spend the rest of our lives together. In the backseat of my mother's car near Belt Line and Coit, we are marveling at the harvest moon. This median used to hold beds of flowers we'd pass on the way to see my grandparents. That CVS was my favorite Mexican restaurant in Oak Cliff.
Driving still, my reveries tend to get me unstuck in time. My father is teaching my older sister and me to drive in the parking lot of that Plano megachurch, and some warm early morning far in the future I am putting my daughter behind the wheel outside the Half Price Books flagship on Northwest Highway.
My dreams don't go much further than that, but this is enough for a good life in Dallas. It's enough for a life anywhere. I believe in at least one part of the myth, too. Whatever we have here we must build ourselves.