A Strange Continent

Ben Markovits, an Austin-raised writer long settled in London, returns home with his teenage son and a pair of folding bikes for a ride through the Hill Country. As they pedal from Pedernales Falls toward Salt Lick BBQ, the shifting Texas landscape prompts reflections on English density versus Texan sprawl and on the deeper divide between the two cultures. By journey’s end, Markovits is left reckoning with how places—and our idea of “home”—keep changing, even as we try to return to them, a question that lingers long after the ride is over.

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.