For the first time in three years, Anne Rapp is going home. The widely admired filmmaker, who got her big break four decades ago as script supervisor on the Texas classic Tender Mercies, is making the 385-mile drive from Austin, where she’s lived since 1999, to the Panhandle hamlet of Estelline. These trips are always bittersweet. She’s looking forward to visiting her oldest friends and her homestead, but every time she returns, she sees how much the town has changed. She doesn’t like watching it disappear.
It’s early October 2022, and the drive, normally about six and a half hours, takes longer than it should when Rapp is behind the wheel. Every time she tells a story, she reflexively slows to below the speed limit (“If I’m ever going forty, tell me,” she says), and does she ever have stories. About how her great-grandfather bought the family cotton farm, in 1898. How as a toddler she uttered her first sentence, “Damn, here comes the sand,” when the windows on their house started rattling, signaling yet another dust storm. How when she was five, she and her younger sister watched their house explode, slightly injuring their mother, after their father accidentally hit a gas pipe with his tractor.