Of the limited offering of restaurants in town, we favored the Raw Deal, a greasy spoon where, for five bucks, you could choose between the pork chop and the sirloin, accompanied by red beans and Pabst Blue Ribbon. The only other significant presence in town was the state capitol. Thirteen per cent of Austin residents were University of Texas students another five per cent were faculty and staff. The population then was a little more than three hundred thousand-the current size of Lexington, Kentucky.

In 1980, I joined the writing staff of Texas Monthly, in Austin. I’m not saying that we couldn’t have been happy in any of the places I’ve mentioned, but something kept us from profoundly identifying with them. I nursed a conception of an ideal community, one that combined qualities I loved about other places: the physical beauty, say, of Atlanta the joyful music-making of New Orleans an intellectual scene fed by an important university, as in Cambridge or Durham a place with a healthy energy and ready access to nature, such as Denver or Seattle a spot where we could comfortably find friends and safely raise children. Unconsciously, during those vagabond years, we were on the lookout for home. I have spent stretches of my professional life in the places you would expect-New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., all cities that I revere, but not places we chose to settle. In our married life, we have lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts Cairo, Egypt Quitman, Texas Durham, North Carolina Nashville and Atlanta-all desirable places with much to recommend. She was also on the run, from the racism and suffocating conformity of Mobile, Alabama. I grew up in Texas, in Abilene and Dallas, but as soon as the gate opened I fled the sterile culture, the retrograde politics, the absence of natural beauty. You may not understand the difference until you’ve found the city or the town or the patch of countryside that sounds a distinct internal chord. A person can live in many places but can settle in only one.

The astonishing color