The Long Way Home: Brushcross, TX
A Barn Futurism Artifact
Aug 15th, 2064
After Lesath, I decided to take up the friendly offer of Clark, a man who I met while perusing the Recent-History Museum at The Boulton. He invited me to visit TerraMar, his amphibious vehicle startup in Brushcross, Texas.
I arrived yesterday afternoon in the city of Parvis by electric rail and was relieved to see that the station runs a small fleet of self-driving EVs for getting out-of-towners to their destinations. They were kind enough to let me charge my folding electric bike at one of their stations in case I needed it while I was in town. While I waited, I took a stroll around the block, passing by a memory cafe and opting for a refreshing lavender and honey tea from a nitro boba stand on the edge of a public plaza. It was a nice day out, and I enjoyed the shade in this alcove where people came to sit and read or enjoy a picnic.
My journey to a small ranch owned and operated by TerraMar would be a bit of a trek. The first leg would be 25 minutes by EV to the shipping district, followed by another hour in a passenger car on a freight train that makes a routine stop right at their barn. I could more reasonably take the EV all the way in, but I decided to follow Clark’s recommendation that I experience the line.
As the car hummed its way into more sparsely-populated lands, I noticed the shift in architectural styles from the newer trends of Neoclassical Futurism to the retro 2020s style Modern Farmhouse, with much older structures dotted throughout at various stages of refurbishment. Not long after getting settled on the train I noticed something else too - barns. More and more became lots and lots, and by the time I arrived at the TerraMar ranch it was the case that few if any ranch or residence I passed was lacking one.
The ranch was no exception, and offered me insight into the culture of the pastoral yet lively sprawl. The structure that their team works out of was built on the bones of a towering 19th century barn. The foundational frame was a 1-to-1 replacement of its original solid wood beams, and the interior featured a refurbished loft space for coworking above their logistics workspace. The roof above the loft invited light in through large windows of insulated glass. Stalls that had undoubtedly been occupied by animals in its past life now served as storage areas with garage doors for ease of access when it came time to ship. The exterior was made of corrugated metal but was painted red and white in tribute to the iconic image of a classic barn, despite there being no external wood to save from weathering.
According to Clark, the resurgence of barns in recent years could be attributed to their immense value as vessels of personal capital. Much like an automobile serves as an extension of one's personal autonomy—facilitating movement and independence—a barn embodies a similar extension of human will but through spatial and creative domains. In places like Brushcross and throughout rural Texas, barns have been reimagined and revitalized into workshops, startup incubators, and community hubs. These transformations reflect a broader cultural shift back to foundational values of self-sufficiency and innovation. By reclaiming and repurposing these spaces, residents are not only preserving a vital aspect of their heritage but are also reasserting a commitment to the quintessential American ethos of building and reshaping one’s surroundings.
✷
Today I joined Clark and his team in attending the annual Brushcross Innovations Fair, the event behind the timing of my visit.
I found myself at what could be described as a county-fair-meets-hackathon, a bustling, inventive congregation of minds and machines. The fair brought together local pioneers and their creations. Plots were laden with home-engineered gadgets and locally-crafted solutions, from e-vehicle retro mod hotrods to mass-market hyperspectral camera equipment retrofitted onto drones for surveying use.The event’s structure encouraged a unique blend of competition and cooperation, with a raffle to select the host, turning each iteration into a coveted opportunity for barn owners. This setting fostered a culture of mutual education and community, where knowledge - and a potluck meal - was freely exchanged among attendees of all ages.
Among the crowd was Erin, a mechanical engineer with a rogue spark in her eyes. She was showing off her most recent feat of jailbreaking a 2026 John Deere autonomous tractor. As we walked past her display—an earlier model electric tractor now equipped with a user-friendly interface—she shared insights into rural hacking culture, proclaiming that "It's about making technology work for us, not us for it," as she guided me through her modifications. We discussed the tension and balance between manual control and automation, a topic she was passionately pragmatic about, especially in a world leaning heavily towards the latter. She was surprised but pleased to find out that I myself could drive a car manually, since I’d been taught by my parents at the age of 15.
Erin also hinted at her next big project, one that would take her to the industrial gardens of Milwaukee—a venture aiming to blend bold manufacturing advancements with social ingenuity. She said I should come see it, and scribbled down a range of dates and a building number on the corner of my event flier.
As the evening drew to a close, the fair’s atmosphere buzzed with excited chatter about the day’s unveilings. Everyone enjoyed the cider that had been made communally by attendees and participants using a handful of presses brought by locals. Feeling inspired and curious, I made a note to myself to visit Milwaukee soon.
This vignette is part of a series, the previous entry can be read here:
We welcome you to become a paid subscriber for access to the internal notes behind The Long Way Home: Brushcross, TX.
Internal Notes for Barn Futurism Vignette
by Charles Rosenbauer
The vignette takes place in the countryside. Lots of fields and trees.
Almost every house has a barn. Some barns are agricultural in purpose, but in general they are simply large utility buildings. Personal capital, optimized for the spaciousness that rural areas provide. They can be used for a variety of purposes; agriculture, storage, social events, workshops, startup workspaces, etc.
Barns also have the opportunity to be beautiful in a way that generic, rectangular, gray sheds are not. They are practical buildings, but may have more care put into their design, as well as having a history of diverse barn aesthetics to take design ideas from.
Rural areas are filled with people who often have actively chosen not to live in the city. In a world where the majority of people live in the city, this often results in more than a few very strange people living in the country, and the increased isolation and barrier to communication that this lifestyle provides (at least as an option for those who choose to live it in that way) can support eccentricities. There may be a few very strange people who live in the area who are occasionally the subject of stories.
Rural areas may also be filled with the kind of people who desire large amounts of space. Collectors and hoarders, who perhaps may serve as valuable sources of diverse, old machinery and items, though often some repairs may be necessary. Salvage and scrapyards are common as well. Old traditions and technologies often survive longer out here, antique stores and historical societies aren’t too uncommon. Seeing someone using some surprisingly old machinery may not be out of the ordinary; my dad owns and regularly uses a cement mixer that’s close to a century old; if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.
Some of the technologies of today may be old-fashioned items in people’s collections of the future.
Not everyone in the countryside is a hermit of course. Meeting people is less regular, socialization is more intentional. When things are more spread apart, people must drive and travel frequently, often fairly far. Sparse traffic and high speed limits make long-distance travel reasonably quick, and self-driving cars may in fact work well in such areas, at least in places with suitable terrain.
Some social events, such as bonfires, can occur regularly, weather permitting. Some other events may be seasonal and based on conditions of the people involved; for example, someone who owns a number of apple trees may have an annual apple pressing party. Fishing and hunting events may revolve around the seasons for these things. Food-related events, particularly focused on bulk production of niche food items, are a valuable social technology. People come together to make some food together - perhaps apple cider, sauerkraut, some kind of sausage from a niche animal someone farms or hunts - and help to produce the food while socializing, and at the end can take some of it home.
Many rural people own heavy equipment. If you live in the city, it may be pretty uncommon to know someone who owns a tractor, or a skid-steer, or an excavator, or a cement mixer, or a dump truck. In the countryside, it may be uncommon to not know such a person. Much of this equipment may be somewhat old and heavily repaired. While perhaps you can pay someone to do work for you, in many cases barter may suffice. “I’ll pour cement for your new shed if you cut down this tree for me and buy me some beer” is the kind of exchange to expect.
The vignette takes place near a freight railway, along which numerous barns connect. These specific barns are primarily industrial and agricultural, with a few startups. Medium-scale business within the reach of small-scale teams and even families are possible, and perhaps even common out here. The freight train is much slower than most cars and trucks in the area, and is mostly optimized for efficiency. It carries bulk goods cheaply between local companies on the line, as well as to nearby shipping ports, where much longer-distance transport is easy.
Today, US freight rail costs approximately $0.04 / ton / mile. Moving a ton of cargo 50 miles costs $2. A 20-foot shipping container has a weight limit of 28 tons, or approximately $1.12 per mile to transport. With electric rail that utilizes cheaper electricity and regenerative braking, this cost is likely to be much lower.
It’s likely that modern freight rail is far from exploiting computational logistics to its full potential, and a great deal of additional use-cases could be provided by leaning into this more heavily. Digitally-controlled railroad switches could route trains with much greater flexibility, and autonomous cranes could load, unload, and sort containers automatically. Two-lane rail with regular switches would permit bidirectional traffic and routing around stopped trains. It’s not uncommon for trains today to make stops directly at major factories, and with an increased logistical budget this may be able to support a larger number of smaller stops.
If the supply of freight rail increases over time and the cost to operate it drops, the distance that things can be shipped affordably increases. This also means that the complexity of supply chains, which may involve shipping things back and forth between many different locations, can also increase. Lower rail costs can result in lower prices, but may also allow for less efficient strategies as well. Some companies may rely on longer trains for more efficiency, others may benefit from shorter trains that make more frequent stops, even if costs are somewhat higher.
It may also make sense for supply chains to consolidate onto individual rail lines; companies can ship things relatively short distances to other companies on the same rail rather than shipping things much further distances to a company much further away. The rails are lined with both large manufacturers for large-scale production, as well as small barns for startups and bespoke manufacturers.
The highest complexity and longest supply chains will likely still rely heavily on much cheaper water transport, as well as cheap, bulk commodities such as ore, lumber, steel, and grain.
The startup in the vignette is imagined to be aiming to eventually fill a role like an old manufacturing company such as Allis-Chalmers, which manufactured a very wide variety of machinery across mining, agricultural, construction, power generation, textiles, and many other industries. The “amphibious vehicle” idea specifically came from a line of amphibious ATVs that they produced in the 1980s; these vehicles are still in use and continue to have demand, despite the company that produced them being defunct for decades. The startup is starting small, and focusing on niche products such as amphibious vehicles. We are assuming they are being produced in Texas because of local supply chains and then being shipped out to some place like Florida.
The event in the vignette is imagined to be a blend between Silicon Valley and rural social technologies, like a hackathon meets a county fair. In many cases, the dynamics of a particular type of social event may be shaped by practical constraints; there may be many idealistic approaches to sharing innovations that are made impractical by the business realities of production, though these may take very different forms when it comes to, for example, software. Rural areas often maintain a much larger vocabulary of social technologies, and may be able to blend something that works in the tech sector with a wider variety of tools if it suits their needs.
It’s also imagined that computing technology - both hardware and software - has become much simpler and easier to use and tinker with, though this will likely be expanded upon in greater depth in future stories and vignettes.
Thank you for supporting Possibilia Magazine. If you know someone who might enjoy The Long Way Home: Brushcross, TX, please share!