As a pre-Christmas present to myself last year, I bought a couple of suitcases—for flying home. I grew up in Austin but have lived in London now for most of the past 30 years. The suitcases look ordinary but have a specific function. They are designed to carry Bromptons, a classic English folding bike whose silhouette—small wheels, a single crossbar with a lovely distinctive curve—is one of the recognizable features of London life. People commute to work on them, but my teenage son, Henry, and I bought them for a different reason: It’s easy to throw them in the back of a car or onto a train and drive or ride out to the middle of beautiful landscapes, like the Cotswolds, the Cornish coast, the Yorkshire Dales, then unfold them and start biking. This year, I wanted to take my English son on a ride through the Texas Hill Country.
I love watching my kids step out of Austin-Bergstrom airport after a long flight. London around this time of year is usually wet and just cold enough to be miserable, and it gets dark at 4 p.m. Jet-lagged and half-dazed, we walk through the automatic doors and feel the lightness of the air even in December. It’s a moment that reminds me of my own childhood. My mother is German, and one of my most vivid memories is coming back to Texas after spending the summer at the house where she grew up: arriving late to face the wall of heat outside the old Mueller airport; dozing off with my brother and sisters in the car on the drive home; the loudness of an Austin summer evening, then the stuffiness of the house before the air conditioning takes hold; falling asleep again in my bed, kicking the sheets away and taking off my T-shirt under the slow creak of the ceiling fan. Texas weather feels more intimate than English weather because of the heat. It gets under your skin.
It’s nice to think my children might have inherited some of these feelings, even if most of the places, the restaurants and stores, that I associate with going home are now gone. From the backyard of our house in Central Austin, where I used to shoot hoops, we could smell the smoker from Ruby’s BBQ on Guadalupe Street. (For my London wedding—I married an English woman—my dad brought over 50 pounds of their chopped beef.) El Patio is still around, but I don’t think I’ve ever been inside it, even when I was a kid. Wheatsville Co-op, too, even though it’s closing by the end of this year. There was a Half Price Books, two minutes from my house, where my friends and I used to hang out and which maybe even played some part in my wanting to become a writer. That’s moved, as well. I got my first bike from the University Cyclery on the corner of Lamar Boulevard and 29th Street. It’s now a jewelry store. As kids you tend to think of your neighborhood as a permanent state of affairs, but then, as a parent, when you move somewhere to raise your own, you realize you’re just riding a wave, and the wave moves on.
My first bike was a sparkly red banana-seater with a small front wheel so you could turn on a dime. There was a bump in the sidewalk—a crape myrtle grew next to the road—that I used as a ramp, building speed, hoping to get a little airtime afterward. Every Christmas, when I came home from college, I saw it sitting in a long rack of our other childhood bikes, next to the wood piles by the air conditioning units—a kind of reproach. There’s a sadness to what happens to your childhood bikes after you leave. They grow old almost like animals, sagging, arthritic with middle age, and then, covered in cobwebs and dust, turn into ghosts of themselves before someone finally decides to deal with the shed or the garage and they disappear. Small, childish wheels are also a part of the appeal of Bromptons—riding them feels like being on your first bike.
I had hoped, while my kids were still kids, that we’d live in Texas for a year, that they’d know something of my childhood—not just America generally, but something about the neighborhood I grew up in and the space and the year-round warm weather that makes childhood an outdoor sport, and not an indoor one as it is in England from October onward. But it didn’t happen. My daughter is now at university, and my son, 16, is caught up in the two-year cycles of English high school exams. This means the window where this move is still possible for us has closed—except for the one week over Christmas when we fly to Austin and my kids can pretend, in the company of their American cousins, to be Texans.
One of my brothers-in-law, Asher, has borrowed a pickup from friends and comes to collect us early one morning, a few days after we arrive. He’s dumped his bike into the bed of the truck, but my son and I fold our Bromptons and stick them in the cab. Then we drive out along US 290 to Pedernales Falls, a state park about 35 miles west of downtown Austin.
My parents used to take us to Pedernales when we were kids, usually after a trip to Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, to scramble among the rocks and burn off lunch. This time we are headed in the opposite direction, about a 40-mile ride, to work up an appetite. Texas barbecue was the main course at our wedding at my wife’s childhood home in North London, as I said, and it was also the cause of our only real disagreement about the reception. I wanted to serve it with Wonder Bread, or the closest English equivalent we could find. But she thought it would send out the wrong signal—it would look phony, like a kind of reverse-affectation. I had entered a world where everything you did, including everything you ate, said something about your social class.
She was a vegetarian when we started going out, and still was, on her first visit to Texas in 1996, just after she graduated from Oxford, where I was living with an old high school buddy, working at a café and trying to write. But she loved Austin, the strip-mall storefronts, the weather, even the car journeys on the run-down roads. When I dropped her off at the Mueller airport afterward, we didn’t know if we would see each other again; I had to circle twice before I let her out. You forget, years later, how uncertain all these futures are, partly because the past rearranges itself behind whatever happens. My wife grew up on American movies and TV but also on an idea of its open spaces, cultural and geographical, inherited from her parents. They Greyhounded across America when they were young, when you could only bring 50 pounds sterling into the country. Her dad’s favorite music is the Everly Brothers. Maybe this made the gap between us smaller.
It’s also true that American childhoods are heavily inspired by Englishness. They steal our pop culture; we get taught their books, by Austen and Dickens and Shakespeare. It’s strange to think how much of my Texas education was, in fact, set in England, with its queens and balls and cockneys and London fogs. And not just in school. While the grackles scratched the patchy grass outside my bedroom window, I read my Half Price Books edition of The Hobbit, whose shire is really a dream of an English countryside, with its streams and hedgerows, pubs and village greens.
You can still find this countryside, if you look for it, even just outside London. It’s where I learned to love biking, in middle age, when I stopped playing basketball—one childish pleasure replacing another. Part of the charm of the English landscape is its density. Every acre seems somehow accounted for, by fields or woods or villages, each with its own church and distinct architecture, even though the villages are only a few miles apart. Tolkien draws on this fact, too. When Bilbo sets off on his adventures, all he has to do is start walking, up the hill out of one small world and down the valley into another.
The appeal of the Hill Country is almost the opposite: the sense of expanse, the charm not of what’s there, but of what isn’t. Anything human. Just miles and miles of cedar, or whatever the scrub trees are that line the curbless backroads we’re riding through. Vacant land, long yellow winter grasses.
We start out in the park and can’t tell when we leave it. There are almost no cars, and at one point I say to Henry, “We might be the first people ever to ride Bromptons here.” This is the feeling we’re trying to talk ourselves into: what it must have been like to travel deeper into a strange continent, where nobody owns anything and nothing is accounted for. Aside from the telephone poles and the odd road sign. Henry stops to take a picture next to one of them. It says only: HILL BLOCKS VIEW.
We started biking together during the pandemic. It was an excuse for me to get Henry out of the house. And for a teenage son, part of the joy of biking with your father is that you don’t have to talk much, even if the whole experience is a kind of ongoing conversation between you, between youth and age, as we chase each other up the hills and he gets stronger and I get older, year after year. Most of what we say is, “What gear are you in?” At one point, we stop by the side of the road for a water break, when a voice out of nowhere asks, “Can I help you?” It sounds both robotic and anxious, on repeat. At first, I think it’s Henry’s phone, but then we spot the intercom next to a gate and a long driveway leading toward emptiness. It contributes eerily to our sense of being watched in the landscape, of hidden threat. We ride on.
Last year I gave Henry Lonesome Dove to read, the classic Larry McMurtry novel about a pair of Texas Rangers turned cattlemen, and he raced through it and the three other books in the series in a month. This is part of why I wanted to ride the Hill Country with him, to travel through the landscape where the book is set. I wanted my kids to grow up, as I did, with the sense that they have an identity elsewhere—to offer them not just an escape hatch, but a sense of detachment from wherever they happen to be.
I remember once, at a dinner party in North London, talking to our hosts’ 13-year-old son. When I asked him about school, about what he was into, he said, “Oh, I’m an all-rounder.” It’s a phrase that comes from cricket, to describe someone who both bats and bowls—hits and pitches, in baseball terms. It wasn’t a brag; it was just a description. He liked a lot of different subjects. There was also a kind of modesty in his answer because it implied that at a school like his—a posh private school—there would always be people who are better than you at any particular thing. This was a boy whose place in the culture had been identified: I’m an all-rounder.
When I was his age, we’d have called ourselves nerds. At McCallum High, in Austin, a friend of mine started bringing a copy of economist Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations to class sophomore year. I used to carry an old edition of the poems of Alexander Pope for the same reason—because I wanted to read it during break, but also as a teenage flag-flying exercise. This is who I am. I don’t mean that Austin kids were weirder than London kids, but maybe our weirdness had more space around it. At that posh English school, there are societies of the like-minded we could have joined—the Econ Club, the Prosody Club, etc.—and probably we’d have made some good friends. But in our case, whatever strange interest these things turned into could grow in peace and loneliness.
Whereas in England, my children know that whenever they open their mouths, or mention the school they went to, or even the neighborhood they grew up in, they’re saying something fairly articulate about who they are. Even if, as I watch my son pedaling ahead of me up the hill—in his Piccadilly blue Brompton (named after a line on the London Underground, it’s about as English a bike as you can get)—he just seems like a kid. One of the things he wants for Christmas is a pair of cowboy boots.
When my German grandmother came to visit us in Austin for the first time, she said to my mom, “This place wasn’t written into your stars at birth.” I don’t think it was a criticism of where my mother had made her life. It was more an expression of wonder at the places history takes you. My mother was 7 and living on the Baltic shoreline in a quiet suburb of Flensburg, a northern provincial city on the Danish border, when World War II ended. Texas must have seemed inconceivably far away.
My family moved to Austin in 1975. In those days the population was about 300,000, and it was still a nice campus town. I was 2 years old, but for much of my childhood that was my experience of it, too. Even Slacker, which came out in 1990, felt a little more self-conscious than I did about the vibe, though I love that movie. Of course, I was just a dumb kid and would never have worn cowboy boots; I was more into Air Jordans. My world was circumscribed by the school bus and where in the neighborhood you could walk or bike to. These days, Austin’s population has crested 1 million, and part of what I plan on talking about with Asher, a New York transplant, is whether that has changed the culture his children are growing up in. When I was young, almost no one in Austin went to private school, but that’s changing. I wonder if the city is becoming more like New York or London—places where, as a child, you must learn to position yourself in a very crowded space.
It’s hard to pin down these shifts, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. And maybe we would have had a great conversation, except by now we are straggling out in a long line along the road. Asher can’t get his bike out of second gear, which makes you feel like you’re dragging a tire behind you up the hills. There is still a lot of empty land. And even if we have to put in a couple of miles on the hard shoulder of 290, what follows afterward is the sweetest stretch of the whole ride—quiet lanes running alongside and over a stream, a wooded bluff in the distance. Water is the big event in this type of landscape, in the same way that a church spire in England lures you over the hills.
And yet, after lunch I see a woman taking out the trash, her house almost a football field away from the road. I stop to tell her what an amazing place this is to live in and ask how long she’s been here. “Over 30 years,” she says. Has it changed much? “Well,” she says, “it’s starting to fill in.” For the next few miles, I try to imagine their decision to move here—she didn’t seem particularly old. When the kids were born—in her late 20s? The feeling they must have had of setting off for pastures new … open country, a clean slate. But biking on, we see what she means: new-build houses surrounded by fences. They feel less like outposts in the wilderness and more like the beginnings of a neighborhood. Henry takes a picture of one of the gates. It says High Gate Ranch, the name of our part of London.
Suburban-style traffic kicks in 6 miles from the restaurant, as Asher starts slowing down. The bike, and the hills, have defeated him, and he sends us on without him, like the left-behind in an escape movie. I can’t make it any farther. Tell them I love them. He hitches a ride in a pickup and climbs out, bike and all, just as my son and I turn into the Salt Lick’s dusty parking lot. We’re meeting my wife and daughter for lunch—both now big barbecue fans. They are already sitting at one of the long wooden tables, alongside my parents and sisters and their kids. An old high school buddy—the twin brother of the Adam Smith fan—and his family, who have flown in for the holiday from Atlanta, are also there. Because nobody really ends up where they start out. Even if you stay home, it keeps changing around you.
Sometimes, though, despite all that, different worlds come together. To commemorate this, my son takes one more photo—of our folded bikes in front of the firepit, to show that we’ve made it.