Blue Highways: Eagle Flat, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapDon't you ever feel like you just want to get rid of all the clutter in your life?  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) presents the desert as minimalist, which gets me to muse on the clutter and complexity in my life, and how I might use the desert as an inspiration to simplify.  If you want to see the spare and barren place in Texas that inspired all of reflection, click on the thumbnail of the map at right.

Book Quote

"Somewhere near Eagle Flat, before a rider-against-the-sky horizon, I stopped to rest from the buck of sidewinds.  Annual rainfall here averaged less than seven inches, and the Rio Grande to the south often ran dry before it crossed the desert.  Spindly ocotillo stalks, some twenty-five feet high and just coming into orange blossom, bent under the north wind.  Creosote bushes had cleared dead zones by secreting a toxic substance from their roots to insure whatever moisture fell they would get....

"Between the creosote and stony knobs streamlined by gritty winds grew grasses in self-contained clumps and cactuses compacted like fists.  Everything as spare and lean as a coyote's leg.  Under that sprawl of sky and space, the minimal land somehow reduced whatever came into it, laying itself austerly open as if barren of everything except simplicity.  But it was a simplicity of form - not content."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 9

A vista near Eagle Flat, Texas. Photo by "omd31473" at American Greetings Webshots. Click on photo to go to site.

Eagle Flat, Texas

I wish I were like the desert as LHM describes it.  Not the dead zones created by toxic creosote secretions in a desperate attempt to capture water.  Nor do I want to be a spindly ocotillo plant, or other spiny desert plant that lures one with beautiful blossoms but can pack a sharp stab if one gets too close or touches them.  I've met people like that in my life, have been hurt by a few of them, and I don't want to emulate them.

What I'd truly like to emulate at this stage in my life is the minimalism and the simplicity that the desert teaches.  I live a life of plenty, at least for me.  My wife and I both work, which in the economy as it stands as I write is a good thing.  We are busy people, always doing things.  Our calendars are packed with work things and events, public service, and entertainment.  My wife is more busy than I am usually, with her journalism, her radio work, and her presidency of a national women's journalism organization.  However, I often go 4-5 days a week without getting home until eight or nine at night.  I belong to a group that eats once a month with men who just got out of jail and are in a halfway house, a bit of normalcy and generosity that we hope they can carry with them and perhaps keep them from going back into jail.  I get together with friends.  My wife and I like to do cultural things together.  I stay at work often later than I need.  I manage to fill my time without even knowing how.

Our house reflects our lives, because we are not in it much.  It is cluttered and difficult to clean.  We don't spend the time we need to cull the things in our life down to what we need.  We get frustrated with it, but we continue live our lives and wonder when we'll ever get to making our home more manageable.  We keep bringing in more stuff, which we have to find room for.  We keep scheduling events, and the chores go undone.

Sometimes we have trouble communicating, because we are so involved with things that it limits the time we can have discussion together.  It has led to some difficult times between us.  The clutter of our lives makes it easy to get distracted from the hard things we should discuss.  In the past couple of years, frustration with this state of our lives, along with professional worries, lead me down a path that was destructive and hurtful.  It was a time of pain and guilt, and a time I exacerbated due to my actions.

My thoughts and feelings have also been a welter of complexity that in many cases hasn't served me in good stead.  I tend to be a sensitive person emotionally that overthinks things, puts two-and-two together when it doesn't add up in reality, and blames myself for pretty much everything.  When I perceive someone's hurt or pain, I make a great effort to help or to fix it.  I prop people emotionally, or at least try, and spiral downard if I can't do anything about it.  At the same time, I minimize my own emotional hurt and pain, and convince myself that I am a net cause of hurt and pain and inadequate to helping others.  Counseling, and the advice of friends, over the years has convinced me intellectually that I am being unrealistic if I think I'm the holder of all the bad in the world.  Emotionally, I'm still trying to get there.  Thankfully, my wife is taking this journey with me and we are moving forward, together.

I wrote before about how some have found stability through removing themselves in some way from the world.  I can't do that.  I'm drawn to it in some ways, especially during hard times, but that feels to me like just a reaction, not a lifestyle.  But I do look to the desert, and LHM's words remind me that the desert offers a lesson.

Here is a portion of the world where minimalism is not a luxury or a fad, but a necessity.  Life exists in balance.  In the desert, any plant or animal that exceeds its alotted portion will wreak untold havoc upon the rest of the ecosystem.  Any plant or animal that falls short will suffer personal consequences - it will go hungry or thirsty, or in the worst cases die.  Each plant and animal does what it needs to survive.  No more, no less.  It is a simplicity that I would do well to emulate both in my actions and in my thoughts and feelings, to simply accept myself as I am and be satisfied with that person in all my glories and all my faults - the blossoms and the spines.

The paradox, as LHM points out, is that the desert shows that simplicity of form does not mean simplicity of content.  It is in the letting go, the search for a simpler life, the search for harmony, and the desire for inner and outer peace that allows us, when we find it, to understand the complexity and the beauty that is us and our lives.  So, as I sit writing today, in my cluttered office in my cluttered house, I have Hildegard von Bingen's music playing in the background - her complex melodies underscoring the simplicity she desired of her daily life in a 12th century convent and her simple desire to be closer to God.  My house is situated in a desert gussied up by civilization, but at its heart still a desert and therefore, if I look, a further example of simplicity that can inspire me.  It was here long before humans showed up, and it will be here long after we, our dramas and complexities, are gone.  It has reached some kind of universal understanding that I cannot fathom, but that I can strive to understand if I set aside or at least minimize my complexities for a while.

Musical Interlude

In the spirit of how I wrote above, I made a video of pictures I took in West Texas, specifically Big Bend, the Davis Mountains and the Guadalupe Mountains.  Unfortunately, the video didn't turn out as well as I'd like - my video software on my desktop is not as good as it could be - but the music is from the same Hildegard von Bingen album I was listening to as I wrote.  The video will give you the sense of the desert out there.  I'll upgrade the video when I get access to my laptop - which is with my wife on a trip right now.

Addendum:  Evidently, if you're in Germany you can't see my video with the Hildegard von Bingen music as it's been blocked.  So, below is a silent version.  Find Hildegard's O Vis Aeternitatis, put it on, and watch the video.  Sorry - but evidently one just can't put music to a video any more and post it on the web.  What is the Internet coming to?

If you want to know more about Eagle Flat...

...today you will just have to be content with the minimalism that the desert has to offer.  There isn't anything  in Eagle Flat but the desert, which is in the spirit of this post anyway.  Take some time, if you can, to sit with Hildegard von Bingen or in silence, even if it's only for a minute.  Take away the complexities of life and enjoy the feeling of being.

Next up: El Paso, Texas

Blue Highways: West of the Pecos, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe're driving along with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM).  The dusk is starting to get deeper.  There, against the paling light of the horizon, we see an almost perfect cone, rising like a temple out of the landscape.  We'll stop, climb it's height with LHM, and do some reflection.  See where I think this geographical feature that so caught LHM's attention is located by clicking on the map thumbnail at right.

Book quote

"West of the Pecos, a strangely truncated cone rose from the valley. In the oblique evening light, its silhouette looked like a Mayan temple, so perfect was its symmetry. I stopped again, started climbing, stirring a panic of lizards on the way up. From the top, the rubbled land below - veined with the highway and arroyos, topographical relief absorbed in the dusk - looked like a roadmap.

"....The night, taking up the shadows and details, wiped the face of the desert into a simple, uncluttered blackness until there were only three things: land, wind, stars. I was there too, but my presence I felt more than I saw. It was as if I had been reduced to mind, to an edge of consciousness. Men, ascetics, in all eras have gone into deserts to lose themselves - Jesus, Saint Anthony, Saint Basil, and numberless medicine men - maybe because such a losing happens almost as a matter of course here if you avail yourself. The Sioux once chanted, 'All over the sky a sacred voice is calling.'"

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 8

Is this where William Least Heat-Moon climbed his "Mayan temple" in the desert west of the Pecos? Image from Google Earth's street view at 30.919661°, longitude -101.981235°West of the Pecos, Texas

One of the coolest things invented, I think, is the programming code that first started out as Keyhole, and is now Google Earth.  LHM didn't give exact directions about where he found things along the side of the road, and there are some landmarks - a stream, a tree - that are going to be absolutely impossible to find.  But with the help of Google Earth, and especially it's street view feature, I think I was able to find exactly this very spot that LHM writes about west of the Pecos River.  If anyone is traveling along what once was Texas 29, now U.S. 190, toward Fort Stockton after passing through Iraan, Texas and then over the Pecos, you'll find this particular landmark at  latitude 30.919661°, longitude -101.981235°.  The picture above was captured from Google Earth, and is what makes me think it's the right place, though of course there is no way of really knowing.  However, it appears to be the only place along that road that matches the description.

LHM seems to exhibit a lot of patterns on this trip.  He likes to stop at interesting places that are off the road.  He likes to climb to the top of things - he did so at the Caddo Mounds, and now here.  He also frequently evokes references to losing oneself.  He does a lengthy exploration of people voluntarily removing themselves from society at a trappist monastery in Georgia.  He refers to Jesus, saints and others in the quote above who have availed themselves of the desert to explore their deeper humanity and spirituality in a search for answers.

I think we can make our own deserts or we can find the physical desert, but the manifestation of the desert is different depending on which one we are in.  Since I've been living in a desert, the differences and the connections are more intermingled for me than they have been in the past.  Before, when I lived in other non-desert places, the actual desert was so far removed from my ordinary experience that seeing one or being in one was really a clash of sensibilities.  I wondered how anyone could possibly live there.

But often, regardless of where I was located, I was in a desert of my own making.  When I felt lonely, when if I withdrew from people because I was emotionally hurt or angry, or when I sought solace in meditation or prayer or some other type of reflective activity, I was inhabiting a desert of my own creation.  It is written that Jesus went into the desert and was tempted by Satan.  Every time I partook of activities in attempts to forestall something that I needed to do or take care of something that I should address, I was succumbing to those temptations and trapping myself in my desert.

The physical desert brings everything into stark relief.  In the desert you really are alone, and you feel very physically separated from other people.  You have withdrawn and it is difficult not to meditate or pray or reflect.  You are putting life aside for a moment to be there, because even though time doesn't really stop, it feels like it has.  The desert invites you to look at your life and put it in perspective.  The desert can tempt you with visions of what your life is and ought to be.  Medicine men go to the desert and some take narcotics like peyote in a ritual meant to draw the spirits and release those visions in stark detail, but the ordinary person need not go to such extremes to have similar desert revelations.

LHM says that he felt his presence and that he had been reduced to mind.  It is an amazing feeling to be at once so small and so big.  It puts us in our rightful place.  Yes, we are small in the cosmic sense, but yes, we are big because we can see, hear, experience so much and even our smallest actions can have large effects on our world.  Go to the desert to see, and you just may See.

Musical interlude

This is not a musician from Texas, but the topic made me think of this song anyhow.  Blind Willie McTell was a very influential blues artist in the 20s and 30s.  Searching the Desert for the Blues is a testament that no matter what our situation, we create our own deserts even in the midst of plenty.

If you want to know more about this area

I don't have anything for you.  It's a lonely stretch of land between Iraan and Fort Stockton.  It's all well, however.  Like LHM, you can take this space and time to do some reflection if you wish.

Next up: Fort Stockton, Texas