Interstate 35

 

On April 29th, after I documented great wildflowers in the median of the Capital of Texas Highway that borders my Great Hills neighborhood, we headed out after lunch toward Georgetown, about 20 miles north of Austin. The main highway through there is Interstate 35, whose margins and embankments in some sections did justice to Texas’s wildflower season. One such place was the southwest quadrant of the intersection with Leander Rd., where Engelmann daisies (Engelmannia perestenia) punctuated a dense colony of firewheels (Gaillardia pulchella). In the same quadrant a Texas thistle (Cirsium texanum) towered over the firewheels; that picture gives you a better feel for how large and dense the firewheel colony was.

 

 

 

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Rep. John McDowell:  … Don’t [Russians] do things at all like Americans? Don’t they walk across town to visit their mother-in-law or somebody?

Ayn Rand: Look, it is very hard to explain. It is almost impossible to convey to a free people what it is like to live in a totalitarian dictatorship. I can tell you a lot of details. I can never completely convince you, because you are free. It is in a way good that you can’t even conceive of what it is like. Certainly they have friends and mothers-in-law. They try to live a human life, but you understand it is totally inhuman. Try to imagine what it is like if you are in constant terror from morning till night and at night you are waiting for the doorbell to ring, where you are afraid of anything and everybody, living in a country where human life is nothing, less than nothing, and you know it. You don’t know who or when is going to do what to you because you may have friends who spy on you, where there is no law and any rights of any kind.…

 

That’s from a 1947 hearing in the U.S. House of Representatives. Just like my father, Ayn Rand grew up under the tyranny of the Soviet Union and managed to escape and come to the United States in the mid-1920s. Tomorrow we’ll jump ahead a century from their arrival.

 

  

© 2024 Steven Schwartzman