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

Blue Highways: Western Crockett County, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapLet's pull off the side of the road for a minute in a remote and barren area of West Texas.  Turn off the engine and let the van cool.  The wind blows gently against the van, but we'll walk out and away and begin to see and really listen to what is around us.  We'll find life, nature, the universe and everything and we'll be fully aware of it as it begins to seep into our consciousness the longer we stay, watch and listen.  The road beckons, but for a moment, this is where we need to be.  Click on the map thumbnail to learn where it is.

Book Quote

"Driving through the miles of nothing, I decided to test the hypothesis and stopped somewhere in western Crockett County on the top of a broad mesa, just off Texas 29. At a distance, the land looked so rocky and dry, a religious man could believe that the First Hand never got around to the creation in here. Still, somebody had decided to string barbed wire around it.

"No plant grew higher than my head. For a while, I heard only miles of wind against the Ghost; but after the ringing in my ears stopped, I heard myself breathing, then a bird note, an answering call, another kind of birdsong, and another: mockingbird, mourning dove, an enigma. I heard the high zizz of flies the color of gray flannel and the deep buzz of a blue bumblebee."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 8

Vista in Crockett County, Texas. Is this similar to what William Least Heat-Moon saw when he pulled off the road? Photo at behrensranchsales.com. Click on photo to go to site.

Western Crockett County, Texas

I suppose this post is an extension of the last post on quests, in a way.  I was struck by William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) quote above where he turns off the road in a remote part of Texas (Google Earth image is my guess of the location) just to see what was there.  It takes him a while to clear his head of the ringing in his ears from the motor of Ghost Dancing and the other road sounds while he drives.  Once that happens, he really begins to see and hear what's there.  What he begins to see and hear are the sounds of life all around him.  It reaffirms that even in the most remote places, the planet is alive and we simply have to open our senses to it to understand that life on the deepest of levels.

I had a similar experience myself, many miles south of Crockett County.  I may have briefly written about this before but I'll write about it again because it was a very important and spiritual moment for me.

My wife and I had made a trip to Big Bend National Park.  It became one of our favorite places to go because of it's variety and some special moments we had there.  On the western side of the Chisos Mountains, the road drops precipitously off a mesa down to a desert plain below.  From the top of the mesa, one can see nothing but the desert and little speckles of desert plants.  But as one looks, the eye is arrested by the site, almost directly in the center of the plain, a large cottonwood tree.  It is so large and out of place that one cannot gaze on it and wonder why it is there.

My wife and I took the Chimneys Trail to some rock formations and the direction was toward this tree.  I convinced her to see if we could reach the tree but after about a half hour of hiking across desert we realized that the distance was deceiving.  Reluctantly, I turned away.

Some months later, I was offered to go on a weekend camping trip with a colleague to Big Bend again.  He liked to hike, so I told him about the tree.  He was game to try.  We arrived near Big Bend one evening, and slept in the car by the side of the road, and in the morning made the drive to the Chimneys Trail.  We set off down the trail in the morning.  The desert was quiet, as if it were awaiting the sun with trepidation, and all the animals were in their holes to sit out the heat of the day.  When we reached the Chimneys, we set off across desert.

My quest was to reach the big tree, because it was there.  And in fact, the quest became almost like the hopeless quests one reads about in literature.  After about an hour of hiking we reached a shallow arroyo and went across.  Then after 15 minutes, another arroyo, a little deeper.  This pattern continued.  The next arroyo was deeper still, and harder to find a way out of.

Five arroyos we crossed, with the last being the deepest.  It was like a small canyon.  Every time we would crest an arroyo, the tree stood beckoning in the distance, a shimmering green beacon.  The last arroyo was very near the tree, and it almost took us a half hour to find a way up the other side and out.  When we reached the top, there was the tree.

But again, obstacles.  The tree was surrounded by the thorniest, impenetrable desert brush I have ever encountered.  We looked and looked around this thorny hedge but could not find a way through.  I was about to dejectedly give up when on a whim, I went to the edge of the arroyo.  The tree was right at the edge of the dropoff, and there, perilously close to the drop, was a small trail that went through a little tunnel in the brush and to the base of the tree!  We made it!

We sat under the tree.  The shade was nice and it was cool under the tree in the mid-day heat.  We looked out over the arroyo which stretched away on each side of us.  We were a little hyped up from our exertions but slowly, as my companion's eyes started to droop and he began to nap, and I became more attuned to our surroundings, I started to experience, and I mean really experience, the small ecosystem sustained by that tree all around me.  While walking through the desert, all I could hear was wind.  But under that tree, I realized I could hear not only wind rustling the cottonwood's leaves above me, but also the occasional drip of water condensing off the leaves.  I could hear insects of all kinds buzzing nearby.  It was quiet, punctuated only by my companion's occasional snore.  The tree literally buzzed, there in the emptiness and heat of the desert, with palpable life.  Because of it, I don't think I ever felt more alive.

A small piece of bark lay on the ground next to the trunk.  I took it and put it in my pocket.  I still have it to this day.  We stayed about an hour, and then refreshed, and with new life, we set back on our trek to the car.  I have no idea how far we hiked that day, but I know that for one hour, it was one of the few times in my life I was not distracted by anything and was fully engaged in my environment.  In a way, I had undertaken a quest, reached my goal, and found enlightenment from whatever you may call it.  God?  Nature?  The universe?  Whatever it was, I was reminded that there are things that are more beautiful and more powerful than me.

I'd like to think that, on top of a broad mesa in western Crockett County, that LHM experienced something similar.  Just after the quote above, he takes an inventory of the life that he can identify in what is supposed to be "barren" land.  He finds a lot of life around him.  He remarks that even though some might call it a land that God forgot, that someone still put barbed wire around it.  Barrenness is only an illusion, in my experience.  We can find importance and meaning, and even the trace of those who have gone before, pretty much wherever we go.

Musical Interlude

Here is an extended set of Lubbock music legends The Flatlanders.  The song I really wanted in this Texas musical interlude was If You Were a Bluebird, but I couldn't find a decent video of it being performed - either the song was cut off at the beginning or the sound was bad.  So, If You Were a Bluebird is at the end of this video.  Despite its length, it's worth watching Joe Ely, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore tell a story and you get two songs for the price of one - which is this case is free!  So what's not to like

If you want to know more about Western Crockett County

Crockett County
Texas State Historical Association: Crockett County
Wikipedia: Crockett County

Next up:  West of the Pecos, Texas

Blue Highways: Eldorado, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapOur quest continues.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) is on a quest for answers, understanding, and to be in touch with his country.  I am on a quest to map his trip, and in a life sense, to be happy and fulfilled.  You, Littourati, each have your own quest you are following.  To see where we are on our current quest, click on the map thumbnail at right.

Book Quote

"Straight as a chief's countenance, the road lay ahead, curves so long and gradual as to be imperceptible except on the map. For nearly a hundred miles due west of Eldorado, not a single town. It was the Texas some people see as barren waste when they cross it, the part they later describe at the motel bar as 'nothing.' They say, 'There's nothing out there.'"

 Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 8

"Welcome to Eldorado" sign in Eldorado, Texas. Photo by Billy Hathorn and hosted at Wikipedia. Click on photo to go to host site..

Eldorado, Texas

What's in a name?  If you live in a town called Eldorado, or El Dorado, then a lot.  It reflects the Spanish roots of a country, the United States, that outside its Southwest area largely focuses it's historical past on English colonization.  The term El Dorado is used as a place name for many towns in the United States and stands for the hopes and dreams of the other settlers of this country, the Spanish and mestizo explorers and conquerors that combed the Southwest looking for their own version of the American dream.

El Dorado was the legend that fueled the exploration of the Spanish across South and North America.  It was said that somewhere in the interior of both continents, cities could be found that harbored fantastic riches.  In these cities were gold, and minerals and gemstones, that exceeded the wildest dreams.  In South America, while the Spanish tended to pursue El Dorado, in North America they sought the Seven Cities of Cibola, first reported by shipwrecked explorers such as Cabeza de Vaca and the Moorish Estevanico (Esteban).  In the Southwest, the Seven Cities were thought to be the Zuni pueblos, where mica windows in the adobe buildings reflected the setting sun's light such that the cities seemed to gleam radiantly from afar.

In some reflections I have been reading, the authors have challenged me to reflect on my life's "quest."  To me, a quest is a desire to find something and claim it as one's own.  We quest for many things.  To the Spaniards tramping around the Southwest in hostile environment and territory, the quest was to find fabulous riches.  Finding those riches would not only make the Spaniards happy (they thought), able to live the life of their dreams, and receive the fame and importance due them but also justify Spain's investment in the New World.  Later, American explorers of the Louisiana territories and the Southwest, and their business and political backers, reworked this idea of the quest into American "Manifest Destiny," which justified American settlement under the idea that it was God's will that the United States should spread from "sea to shining sea."  While it undoubtedly laid the seeds for the economic powerhouse that the United States has become, a country that has literally been an El Dorado for many of its citizens, it also allowed for those same political and economic leaders to justify the subjugation and persecution of the country's Native peoples. 

Nowadays, we often speak of questing in a personal sense - a quest for more enlightenment or personal growth, or to be more in touch with our religious beliefs.  We quest for happiness, for an end to loneliness, for love.  In the process of our quest, we may come close or even find what we seek, or we may forever circle it, not quite reaching the goal we have set.  We might, as a result of our quest, become fuller human beings.  We might also become so consumed by the goal that we lose sight of ourselves, and intentionally or unintentionally cause hurt.

To me, there seems to be two sides to the idea of the quest - a light and a dark side.  These sides are encapsulated in names like Eldorado, Texas.  On the good side, these towns symbolize the very qualities that made the United States the country it is.  People on a quest for land, homes and livelihood found isolated valleys and fertile plains and created lives that might have seemed for many of them the slice of heaven they hoped and longed for.  They built something out of nothing, and in the land and their hard work found the gold they sought.  On the not so good side, the influx of settlers pushed out those who had lived on and hunted those lands for many centuries and pushed them to the margins - a reality that many Native Americans are still trying to escape.  To them, El Dorado means not a golden place, but an ideal that brought greedy and rapacious foreigners to their homes.  I find it interesting that many Native American tribes, when the Spanish came to their villages and pueblos, got rid of them by telling them that fantastic and wealthy cities existed many miles away to the north.  Many Spanish expeditions were led on wild goose chases - even as they explored as far north as Kansas, they were really interested in finding these wealthy cities and not really exploring the country.

There is another example of the not-so-good side of such quests.  In 2008, Eldorado, Texas became a center of controversy and unwanted attention because of a recently-arrived group of people who seek their own version of El Dorado.  A large Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints compound called Yearning for Zion (YFZ) Ranch was built near the town. Their polygamist practices and allegations of sexual abuse led Texas authorities to raid the compound, busing away a number of children.  Many of the women were found to be or to have been underage brides and to have had children before becoming legal adults.  Some members of the compound were convicted of various sexual crimes, but today most of the children are back with their parents at the compound, whose leaders have said they will renounce underage marriage practices.

Many towns and cities in the United States, recalling both the bad and good sides of such quests, are named in the spirit of that which is just over the horizon.  How many?  Here's a roll call of towns and cities called, in one form or another, El Dorado.

El Dorado, Arkansas
El Dorado, California
El Dorado Hills, California
Eldorado Springs, Colorado
Eldorado, Georgia
Eldorado, Illinois
Eldorado, Iowa
El Dorado, Kansas
Eldorado, Maryland
Eldorado, Mississippi
El Dorado Springs, Missouri
Eldorado, Nebraska
Eldorado at Santa Fe, New Mexico
Eldorado, Ohio
Eldorado, Oklahoma
Eldorado, Oregon
Eldorado, Texas
Eldorado, Wisconsin

I don't make any claims that this is an exhaustive list.  I found these towns in two ways - typing "El Dorado" or "Eldorado" into Google Maps for every state.  I also looked at a list of settlements of the United States.  Some of these towns are larger, many of them are unincorporated communities.  This list does not list the myriads of businesses around the country that are given the name El Dorado.  However, 18 towns or cities in various states, most of which are in the Southwest or West but not all of them, with a variant of the name El Dorado is pretty impressive.

As for myself, I am realizing that my personal quest is to be productive, to better myself, to assist my community in any way I can, to love and be loved, to find happiness in my friends and loved ones, and to live a happy life.  Given my past history, which has involved some hard realities, my quest has been quite challenging.  In that way, I am no different from the settlers that created Eldorado, Texas or any of the other El Dorado's in the United States.  I am really no different than anybody else.  I am no different from LHM, who is on his own quest for personal healing through travel in Ghost Dancing around his country and interaction with the people he meets on the way.  Whether I find my city of gold beyond the horizon is a combination of my own desire and fortitude, and the whim of fortune.

Musical Interlude

For your Texas music interlude, a video of Joe Ely singing Tom Russell's song Gallo Del Cielo.  It's the story of a man on a quest, with his golden rooster that will get him there.  As some quests go, he takes it too far, and loses everything.  It's a wonderful song by a West Texas master singer-songwriter.

If you want to know more about Eldorado

Eldorado Success (newspaper)
TexasEscapes.com: Eldorado
Texas State Historical Association: Eldorado
Wikipedia: Eldorado

Next up:  Western Crockett County

Blue Highways: Grit, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWilliam Least Heat-Moon (LHM), with his temporary companion Porfirio Sanchez riding shotgun and us unseen in the back of Ghost Dancing, turns west into the long open stretches of Texas after making a passing mention to Grit.  We'll linger for a moment to reflect on grit and grittiness.  Click on the map thumbnail to place Grit on your mental map.

Book Quote

"At Grit, we turned west onto route 29, a road that struck a bold, narrow course straight into the heart of the Texas desert....

"The land was fenceposts and scrubby plants and not many of those. Mostly the acres were for the goats that produced the big crop here: mohair. It was the country of the San Saba River..."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 7

I couldn't find a photo of Grit, Texas. Here's another meaning of GRIT that I wasn't aware of. Photo on zazzle.com. Click on photo to go to site.

Grit, Texas

What does one write when confronted with a small, unincorporated place like Grit, Texas.  LHM clearly doesn't see need - just a passing mention when he turns onto a new road and heads straight as an arrow toward the west.  But I've made it my challenge to write something based on the impressions I get from the places LHM cites in Blue Highways.  Occasionally, I'll put a few of them together in a post if they are very small, and are near each other geographically.  LHM ran a few of them together in Blue Highways - i.e. Rosepine, Anacoco, Hornbeck and Zwolle in Louisiana - and I included them all together in one post.  But Grit stands out on its own, like a lot of small communities in Texas separated by many miles from one another.

The few things written about Grit seem to indicate that the townspeople wanted to call it by another name, Funston, to honor a Spanish-American war hero.  Another town already had that name, so they decided to use a more earthy name to acknowledge the quality of the soil used to grow cotton in the area.

In my lexicon, grit can symbolize one of two things.  The first is the soil itself.  Gritty soil to me is hard, tough soil.  It is loose and rough and abrasive.  It is the kind of soil that doesn't hold water very well, and a strong wind can take and loft it in the air, and deposit it anywhere it likes.  If you're out on a windy day, and you can taste the dirt in your mouth and when you bite down there is a little crunchiness between your teeth, that's grit.  My wife's family lived in Denton, Texas for two years in the 1960s when her father was the president of what was then North Texas State University, and my wife's mother said that she could never keep the grit and dirt out of the house.  It blew in through the windows and the doors.  When we lived in San Antonio, every once in a while a wind would raise up a dust storm.  You'd look up at the street lights and see a reddish, brown halo around them, and the air would be filled with an earthy smell.  We get the same type of effect here in New Mexico when the wind kicks up, and the house can never be kept free of dirt and dust because if you live in such places, you have to share your lives with the soil you live on.

It's probably that same quality that allows us to refer to people as "gritty."  One who has grit is a lot like such soil  Certainly Texans have been portrayed as loose, rough and abrasive.  They also have been portrayed as not holding their water very well, preferring liquor.  Of course, this might seem to clash with conservative, Christian values that tend to permeate Texas society.  However, there really is no clash.  Imagine a town like Grit, carved out of the soil that provided its name.  There was nothing there.  Summers are hot, winters are cold.  There's not much shade except for the trees planted by those trying to tame the land.  It takes a special kind of toughness to create a sustainable and living environment in such an area.  It takes a fortitude, a belief that not only is one providing for self but for a greater purpose.  Family, community, and God.  That is a different type of grittiness.  But if we were to see a spectrum of what "grit" really means, we'd see it encompasses the whole of human nature and therefore the whole of a person.  It's why cowboys in movies can be portrayed as gamblers, hard drinkers and socializers, and killers on one hand, yet also be tongue-tied around women and attend church on Sundays.

I think that if someone decided, if one day there is an epitaph written somewhere on a gravestone or some other small memorial to my life, to describe me as having grit, I would take that as a huge compliment.  It would mean that I was a full person.  And should my ashes be let loose into the world, or as my flesh and bones slowly broke down underground, I would become, once again, the essence of grit.

Musical interlude

I sort of outsmarted myself and put the video I should have used here in the last post.  No matter.  Texas is full of tough and gritty musicians that play tough and gritty music.  One person that I've been introduced to in recent years is James McMurtry.  If the name sounds familiar, it's because this singer-songwriter is the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry of The Last Picture Show and Lonesome Dove fame.  James has developed quite a name for himself as musician, and many of his songs are set in North and West Texas - a little bit away from where we are with LHM but appropriate nonetheless.

Levelland actually fits quite well with this post.  Levelland is a small town due west of Lubbock, Texas.  The portrait he provides in the song could be painted for many small towns in Texas, including Grit.  Enjoy the song and video.

If you want to know more about Grit

This is about all there is.  I told you it's a small place!

TexasEscapes.com: Grit
Texas State Historical Association: Grit

Next up: Eldorado, Texas

Blue Highways: Mason, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe travel the unending lonely miles with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM).  His narrative self doesn't necessarily know we are riding along with him in Ghost Dancing, but as we see him tackle the vastness of Texas we reflect upon loneliness.  Click on the map thumbnail to see where Mason, Texas sits on our journey.

Book Quote

"The land was fenceposts and scrubby plants and not many of those.  It was the country of the San Saba River, a route of deserted stone cavalry forts built six generations ago to control the "Indian trouble."  In 1861, the post at Mason was under the direction of a lieutenant-colonel suddenly called to Washington by President Lincoln and offered field command of forces being readied for a civil war.  The officer declined, and Fort Mason became his last U.S. Army duty.  Robert E. Lee never forgot the isolated place."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 7

Mason, Texas. Photo on City-Data.com. Click on photo to go to site.

Mason, Texas

When you are out in the middle of nowhere, life takes on a new meaning.  I think that if you're a person like Robert E. Lee, in the years before the Civil War when Texas was a newly acquired state and you are commanding an isolated fort somewhere in the middle of nowhere to protect against Indians, your perspectives would have to change.  You would struggle with loneliness, especially in the days where "texting" meant a letter that would take weeks, if not months, to reach you by wagon train, and your reply would take just as long in return, and only if Indians or some disaster didn't intercept your correspondence and leave it forgotten and rotting by the side of the trail.  I wonder if it changed Lee?  He was a brilliant soldier and commander, but he was a reluctant warrior.  He was not eager for the nation to split, he was not eager to join the Confederate Armies but did so out of a commitment to his home state of Virginia.  He opposed Virigina's secession, saying that no greater calamity could occur than the dissolution of the Union.  I like to think that his experience in the vastness of Texas did have some impact on Robert E. Lee, especially as LHM says he never forgot Fort Mason.  I wonder if, under the unending sky, surrounded by Texas hill country giving way to the endless and vast horizon, and hearing the coyotes yip and just maybe a lone wolf howl, he felt his insignificance arrayed against forces much bigger than him, and realized that we humans and our petty concerns are really nothing more than emotional winds blowing on a speck of dust somewhere in the vastness of the cosmos. 

I've never had to put that theory to the test.  I've never lived in an isolated fort, though some might say my hometown of Fort Bragg was somewhat isolated.  I have sometimes felt like I was living in isolation.  My recent sojourn in Lubbock, Texas, where I lived for a year from 2008-2009, gave me some sense of isolation.  It wasn't that I was alone on the prairie.  In fact, I was in a city of some 200,000 people.  However, I felt isolated.  All my friends were many miles away, my wife was in a city some 5½ hours distant, and I didn't really know anybody.  As far as my mind was concerned, I might as well have been on my own in the middle of nothingness.

In thinking what Fort Mason might have been like for Robert E. Lee, I am drawn to my only experience at a place like it - a day visit to Fort Craig in New Mexico.  It was an isolated fort on the banks of the Rio Grande south of present day Socorro, and the descriptions of camp life in that arid, dusty, windswept region make it seem like the garrison was at the end of the known world. In between chasing Indian raiding parties and a battle engagement with Confederate forces in the Civil War, the soldiers at the fort would have endured long times of boredom with only the camp duties to keep them occupied.  At the time, there were few settlements in the area, so even companionship of friendly or romantic varieties would have been limited.  As I stood in the middle of the remaining foundations and the crumbling walls of the fort on a very hot summer day, I could hear the wind blowing through the desert grasses and I thought that it would be very lonely indeed for a soldier to realize, if he thought of it much, that the only thing separating him from unending silence was the human activity at the camp.

LHM, in a way, is traveling through a representation of his own inner desert, made barren by the difficult experience of the dissolution of his romantic relationship and other life troubles.  As he begins to drive through vast, lonely Texas expanses, he has to confront himself and understand what it is to be his own companion.  He occasionally is relieved of this loneliness - in this chapter he spends a good part of the drive with a hitcher name Porfirio Sanchez.  But eventually Sanchez will get out of the van and take his own road and LHM will be forced to drive hours with only himself as his companion, confronting the harsh and rugged landscape of his own loneliness and loss.

We really don't need to go find the end of the world to see how close we are to loneliness and emptiness.  We don't need to buy a van and drive around the country unless we really want to live a lonely experience that way.  We simply need to move forward in our lives and realize that sometimes, our lives' roads will take us through amazing vistas, and sometimes, we will be led through dark lonely valleys.  We might experience our loneliness in within the teeming masses, or feel connected with everyone and everything around us in the middle of an uninhabited jungle or a barren desert.  In the end, we will experience whatever we are led into, and we will be better for it.

Musical Interlude

A song by Asleep at the Wheel, a Texas band that has made two sets of very highly regarded homage recordings to Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, really captures the loneliness of the west, from the perspective of a cowboy driving cattle.  Enjoy Dusty Skies.

If you want to know more about Mason

Hill Country Visitor Visitor Guide to Mason
Mason County News (newspaper)
TexasEscapes.com: Mason
Texas State Historical Association: Mason
Wikipedia: Mason

Next up: Grit, Texas