Working

by Robert A. Caro

And as I came to the crest of that hill, suddenly there was something in front of me that made me pull over to the side of the road and get out of the car and stand there looking down. Because what I was seeing was something I had never seen before: emptiness—a vast emptiness. I later found out that it’s a valley, the valley of the Pedernales River. It’s about seventy-five miles long and fifteen miles across. When I stood there looking down on it that first time, for a few minutes I didn’t see a single sign of human beings in that immense space. Then something happened, the cloud moved from in front of the sun or whatever, and suddenly in the middle of this emptiness the sun was glinting off a little huddle of houses. That was Johnson City. When Lyndon Johnson was growing up in that town, there were 323 people there; when I got there, there were not that many more. As I stood on that hill, I realized that I was looking at something, was about to drive down into something, unlike anything I had ever seen before, in its emptiness, its loneliness, its isolation.

Scale+metaphor of lbj rise from nothing