The lonesome Texas Panhandle

Greetings from Amarillo. When I drove into town this evening, I passed by the Jesus Christ Is Lord Travel Center . Texas, man, ain't no place like it. Pulled over at a Holiday Inn off the Interstate. There was a Mixed Martial Arts shindig going on in the Holidome. I poked my head in to look, and found myself being scowled at by a big, burly woman in a Mohawk, drinking a tall boy and Bogarting a Marlboro. Howdy, ma'am.

I've never driven this far north in Texas. Stopped at a Texas travel center in Wichita Falls to use the bathroom, and asked the nice lady behind the counter if there was ever a big tornado that hit Wichita Falls; I seemed to recall from my childhood that something like that had happened.

"It was 1979," she said. "That thing was a mile wide. I saw it." She spread a map of the city out on the desk to show me the path of the storm. It was hard for me to imagine the terror folks in Wichita Falls must have endured, watching that thing devour much of their city.

"I had a date that night," the woman said. "He lost his house in the storm, but he still walked all the way to my house to keep the date." What a mensch!

Onward I drove, under the blast-furnace sun ("106" read the temp sign in front of a bank). A friend down in Austin told me that the "desolation" of the Panhandle had to be seen to be believed. The pale-green, faintly rolling prairies just west of Wichita Falls didn't strike me as "desolate" at all. But as I motored on, I think I started to understand what he meant. This is farm territory, and I haven't seen a lonelier-looking landscape than when I drove halfway across Iowa, from Des Moines to Davenport, in late winter. The "big sky" loveliness became oppressive to me as I drove on, slowing down only to pass through little farm towns with many dead buildings hanging on to the roadsides like shells of cicadas. I passed through Clarendon, and chuckled at the homemade sign for the "It'll Do Motel." I know some of you readers are from this area, and see it with different eyes, but the feeling I got was one of, yes, desolation. I wondered if I would feel all Wendell Berry-ish about staying in place if this was the place I was from.

Of course I would feel deeply unsettled about this landscape; I come from a green, heavily wooded, hilly part of the country, almost the opposite of this. I can recognize a harsh beauty here, but vast stretches so barren of trees and people makes me feel deeply uncomfortable. I seemed to recall reading in the (magnificent) Willa Cather novel "My Antonia" that people would go mad out in these prairie-schooner houses, anchored amid the oceans of dirt and grass. I can see it. When I spotted a dirt devil skipping angrily across an enormous field to my right, I wondered where I would hide if the mile-wide tornado came for me out here.

UPDATE: Woke up early this morning thinking more about what I saw on the road yesterday. There were times out there on the long stretch between Wichita Falls and Amarillo when I wouldn't have been surprised to have seen a caravan of pioneer wagons topping a ridge. It really does look like a landscape out of the Old West. I wonder what kind of people such a landscape produces. I know at least a few of my readers come from this part of the world -- please tell us what it was like growing up there, and how you see the landscape as having shaped the souls of its people. Also: if you want to read a novel that gives you a good sense of what it's like there, which books would you suggest?