I'm reading the first volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson. He grew up in Texas Hill Country, an area that straddles the imaginary east-west border of adequate rainfall necessary for farming. It's rough living, especially in the 19th and early 20th century. This passage, describing what the long, solitary months felt like to LBJ's mother--left alone while her husband was at the state capital of Austin serving in the legislature--is harrowing. Of all the things it reminds me of, it's that of the depths of a terrible psycheldic trip when you want it to end but it feels like it never will.

When Rebekah walked out the front door of that little house, there was nothing—a roadrunner streaking behind some rocks with something long and wet dangling from his beak, perhaps, or a rabbit disappearing around a bush so fast that all she really saw was the flash of a white tail—but otherwise nothing. There was no movement except for the ripple of the leaves in the scattered trees, no sound except for the constant whisper of the wind, unless, by happy chance, crows were cawing somewhere nearby. If Rebekah climbed, almost in desperation, the hill in back of the house, what she saw from its crest was more hills, an endless vista of hills, hills on which there was visible not a single house—somewhere up there, of course, was the Benner house, and the Weinheimer house and barn, but they were hidden from her by some rise—hills on which nothing moved, empty hills with, above them, empty sky; a hawk circling silently high overhead was an “event. But most of all, there was nothing human, no one to talk to. “If men loved Texas, women, even the Anglo pioneer women, hated it,” Fehrenbach has written. “… In diaries and letters a thousand separate farm wives left a record of fear that this country would drive them mad.” Not only brutally hard work, but loneliness—what Walter Prescott Webb, who grew up on a farm and could barely restrain his bitterness toward historians who glamorize farm life, calls “nauseating loneliness”—was the lot of a Hill Country farm wife.

Loneliness and dread. During the day, there might be a visitor, or at least an occasional passerby on the rutted road. At night, there was no one, no one at all. No matter in what direction Rebekah looked, not a light was visible. The gentle, dreamy, bookish woman would be alone, alone in the dark—sometimes, when clouds covered the moon, in pitch dark—alone in the dark when she went out on the porch to pump water, or out to the barn to feed the horses, alone with the rustlings in the trees and the sudden splashes in the river which could be a fish jumping or a small animal drinking, or someone coming, alone in the storms when the wind howled around the house and tore through its flimsy walls, blowing out the lamps and candles, alone in the night in the horrible nights after a norther, when the freeze came, and ice drove starving rodents from the fields to gnaw at the roofs and walls, and she could hear them chewing there in the dark—alone in bed with no human being to hear you if you should call.