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: Balmorhea, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Clidk on Thumbnail for MapAn oasis, properly defined by Merriam-Webster, is a fertile or green region in a desert, or something that provides relief, refuge or a pleasant contrast.  Balmorhea, in my experience, qualifies as an oasis even if William Least Heat-Moon doesn't recognize it as such as he drives through.  Click on the thumbnail at right to see where Balmorhea is located, and enjoy our drive through West Texas while it lasts.

Book Quote

"The land rose steadily, then at Balmorhea the highland mesas became the eastern ridges of the Rocky Mountains.  Interstate 10, the only way west, differed here from a two=lane simply by extra strips of concrete - there were almost no towns to bypass.  And so, like the locomotive, Ghost Dancing lapped the miles across the Apache Mountains and Devil Ridge and onward.  Bugs popping the windshield left only clear fluid instead of a yellow and green pollen-laden goo of woodland insects; it was as if they extracted their colorless essence from the desert wind itself."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 9

Artesian spring fed pool at Balmorhea. Photo at Texas Parks and Wildlife Division site. Click on photo to go to host site.

Balmorhea, Texas

The things that one can find in West Texas are varied and surprising.  Balmorhea is a case in point.  I will again refer to a car trip my wife and I made to Big Bend National Park.  We were there for probably a long weekend - maybe five days or so.  The first trip we made there, we camped in the Chisos Mountains, but the second trip we couldn't get a campsite there so we stayed in a campsite down in the desert just north of the mountain range.  While the Chisos, even though they are situated in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, surprisingly have some alpine elements in their higher elevations, the weather is cooler, and there are facilities there where one can shower and refresh, down in the desert the facilities are more rudimentary and the weather is hotter.  We hiked in the desert quite a bit on that second trip, and the terrain and feel was very different from the mountains.

Long story short, on our way out we drove into Balmorhea.  My wife remembers that we drove out of the Davis Mountains and into a kind of valley that looked like a hot dry dusty plain.  And then, there was Balmorhea.  We had heard about the state park and the San Solomon Springs, and we were hot, dusty and hadn't had a shower in five days.

I'm not sure I truly understood the meaning of the word oasis until I gazed upon the pool at San Solomon Springs.  The water looked heavenly and after a quick shower that got the physical grime off of me, I jumped into the cold waters on a hot day and felt almost spiritually cleansed.  A section of the spring fed pool, closed off to casual swimmers but available to divers, had a lot of underwater plant and fish life, and to see an aquatic ecosystem in the middle of an otherwise pretty barren desert was quite amazing.  I think we spent a couple of hours there, before drying off, jumping into the car and heading off toward home in San Antonio.

But as I said, West Texas is full of surprises.  Go out to Marfa, located about 50 miles to the southwest of Balmorhea, and there you will find an old air force training base converted to the headquarters of the Chinati Foundation, which houses the art works and collection of Donald Judd as well as other artists and which brings artists-in-residence from all over the world to teach and create.  In Marfa, you'll also find the Marfa Lights, strange lights that appear near the mountains to the south of town and which nobody has been able to explain.  Some say the lights are ghosts, some say they are caused by atmospheric effects, and some even say they are of extraterrestrial origin.

Or go into the Davis Mountains.  In Fort Davis, about 30 miles southwest of Balmorhea, you can find WPA and CCC architecture and art, as well as some country that will really remind you of the old West of the movies.  The McDonald Observatory hosts Star Parties, where you can go and learn about constellations, look through powerful telescopes for Jupiter, Saturn and other planets, all under a dark night sky unsullied by large city ground light.

It was in this region that one of my most magical and astounding wildlife sightings occurred.  Driving around the Davis Mountains, my wife and I saw an eagle sitting on a fence post.  As we slowed down to try to get a photo, the eagle dropped down to the ground, and then to our astonishment slowly took off with a large snake in its talons.  It flew directly over our hood - I don't know what I would have done had the eagle dropped the snake on the hood or the windshield but the aftermath would have probably involved me having to change my pants.  But the eagle soared about 5 feet above the car, across the road, and over a low line of scrub trees on the other side.  My wife and I sat slack jawed for what seemed like five minutes, before we looked at each other saying "can you believe that!" and "I wish I had the camera ready."

Yes, West Texas seems barren if you fly over it, or look at it on a map or Google Earth, but if you go there, you will find amazing and magical things as well as some scenery that will remain with you the rest of your life.  If you find yourself ever in El Paso, it is well worth a drive to Balmorhea for a swim or into the Davis Mountains to take a look around.

Musical Interlude

Back to some Texas music.  Gary P. Nunn is an established Texas singer-songwriter, and his song What I Like About Texas is a nice tribute to a state with a lot of culture.

If you want to know more about Balmorhea

Balmorhea State Park
Encyclopedia of Earth: San Solomon Springs, Balmorhea
TexasEscapes.com: Balmorhea
Texas State Historical Association: Balmorhea
Wikipedia: Balmorhea

Next up: Eagle Flat, Texas

Blue Highways: Fort Stockton, Texas

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapTopping mesas, we see a golden light in the distance.  Is it a golden city of Cibola, such as we discussed a couple of posts past?  No, it's Fort Stockton, but if you've driven a long time it could just as easily pass as a golden place when you're hungry and tired.  To see where Fort Stockton, and its history of the West you've probably never heard of, is located click on the thumbnail of the map at right.

Book Quote

"From the top of another high mesa:  twelve miles west in the flat valley floor, the lights of Fort Stockton blinked white, blue, red, and yellow in the heat like a mirage.  How is it that desert towns look so fine and big at night?  It must be that little is hidden.  The glistering ahead could have been a golden city of Cibola.  But the reality of Fort Stockton was plywood and concrete block and the plastic signs of Holiday Inn and Mobil Oil.

"I found a Mexican cafe of adobe, with a whitewashed log ceiling, creekstone fireplace, and jukebox pumping out mariachi music.... At the next table sat three big, round men: an Indian wearing a silver headband, a Chicano in a droopy Pancho Villa mustache, and a Negro in faded overalls.  I thought what a litany of grievances that table could recite.  But the more I looked, the more I believed they were someone's vision of the West..."

Blue Highways: Part 4, Chapter 8

Paisano Pete, the official mascot of Fort Stockton. Photo by spacemanspiff at virtualtourist.com. Click on photo to go to site.

Fort Stockton, Texas

About two years ago, I made the 5-6 hour drive each Sunday evening from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Lubbock, Texas.  I was working in Lubbock at Texas Tech teaching political science, but my wife was living in Albuquerque.  It was part of my weekly ritual of driving home on Friday night, staying the weekend with her, and then driving back to be to work on Monday.  It was tiring, but also nice.  The drive was long but easy, with about a third of it on Interstate 40 and the rest through mostly uninhabited areas of New Mexico, and then sparsely inhabited areas of upper West Texas.

I especially liked driving at night after turning off the interstate toward Fort Sumner, New Mexico.  On nights before the moon had risen, or nights of no moon, it was almost completely dark save for the occasional car headlights coming at me.  When I reached an area where the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks paralleled the road, train headlamps shone for miles ahead of me and I would see them coming at me for at least 10 minutes before the train actually reached me.  And, like LHM says above, the lights of a town like Fort Sumner or Clovis would set the sky aglow for miles - a beacon toward which I would aim my vehicle, promising riches like a bathroom, road food like sodas, chips, candy or something else to keep me awake.  As the miles between me and these oases in the desert dwindled, I'd listen to music on my IPod, which sometimes would surprise and even scare me a little when the perfect song would pop up at the perfect time.  Once, I saw a freight train making an emergency stop on tracks paralleling the road between Fort Sumner and Clovis.  I though for a moment that I saw water pouring from the side of the train, and realized that I was actually seeing sparks from the locked up wheels of the train showering out from underneath the rail cars.  It was pretty amazing.

My trips through West Texas some many miles south of Lubbock, in the general area where LHM is traveling, was a lot like my trips through eastern New Mexico on my way to Lubbock.  Largely uninhabited and sparsely vegetated.  Few trees.  The main challenge driving such areas is to maintain ones attention as the miles of road blur together.  An event like topping a mesa and seeing the glittering lights of a city provides a little rush of excitement, a little bit of adrenaline, and is a welcome relief from the miles of loneliness and boredom that may have set in.  At least I had an IPod so I could maintain my attention through music.  At the time LHM wrote, IPods were still in a distant future - the desktop computer was only just being conceived as a possibility.

I have been through Fort Stockton twice.  The first time I blew through on the freeway with my wife after a camping trip at Big Bend.  The second occasion was a gonzo trip I made with a 70 something neighbor lady who needed to deliver a van to a non-profit organization in Guanajuato, Mexico that she helped direct from the U.S., and I jumped at the chance to make that trip.  On that trip, we drove through downtown Fort Stockton and I think we stopped for some lunch at a local restaurant.  I did not see a similar diverse group there - mostly Hispanic Americans - and I don't remember anything overly remarkable about the town in my brief time there.

However, I have become aware that Fort Stockton was largely garrisoned in the years after the Civil War to protect settlers from the Indians.  The garrison in Fort Stockton was, at its peak, 87 percent African-American.  These were the famed Buffalo Soldiers that Bob Marley immortalized in his reggae tune.  Known for their bravery and as fierce fighters, their stories have largely been lost in the annals of the history of the western U.S.  We don't think of the West as being more than the white cowboys, ranchers, and even lawless and dangerous citizens that gave the West its enduring popular legacy.  But in fact, many African-Americans went West to escape slavery, and to carve out new lives away from the overt racism of the South and the implicit racism of the North.

I wonder if the man LHM describes as "a Negro in faded overalls" was a descendant of one of the Buffalo Soldiers stationed at Fort Stockton, or descendant of slaves brought to Texas, or if his heritage was of a later arrival in Texas?  It's an interesting snapshot that LHM presents - the first inhabitants of Texas represented by the Indian, the men brought in to not only till the land for the masters but also to fight the Indians represented by the Negro, and the group supplanting both of them, as well as whites, as the biggest population of the Southwest in the Chicano.  They may recite a litany of grievances of the past, and perhaps they will address those grievances as the face of our country's future. 

That minority groups might recite those grievances loudly from a position of greater power drives a lot of the extreme political discourse and punitive policies toward immigrants and government redistribution of wealth in our country today.  I was reading an article by Kathaleen Roberts in the Albuquerque Journal on February 23, 2011 which profiles the Buffalo Soldiers and their pivotal role in securing New Mexico and helping it become stable enough for statehood.  The article makes the case that if New Mexico hadn't had these African-American soldiers in its territory, all trying to prove themselves in the wake of slavery, and who evidently often fought when white soldiers fled from overwhelming numbers (their ferocity earned them their nickname from the Cheyenne, who considered an angry buffalo the most fierce thing they could face), New Mexico might not be celebrating its centennial next year.  The article makes the argument that the West was a lot more colorful than we are led to believe by our understanding and depictions of history.  Perhaps we should remember the debt America owes to peoples of many different ethnic heritages in its creation and expansion, and not sanitize history in political attempts to uphold ideological biases to meet certain ends.

Musical Interlude

It's not a Texas music video, but it seems appropriate given my topic above - Bob Marley's tribute to the Buffalo Soldier.

If you want to know more about Fort Stockton or Buffalo Soldiers

City of Fort Stockton
Fort Stockton Historic Site
Fort Stockton Pioneer (newspaper)
TexasEscapes.com: Fort Stockton
Tour Texas:  Fort Stockton
Wikipedia:  Fort Stockton

Buffalo Soldiers National Museum
Wikipedia: Buffalo Soldiers
Youtube: History of Buffalo Soldiers

Next up: Balmorhea, Texas

Littourati News: Blue Highways Google Earth File Updated

I've finally updated the Blue Highways Google Earth .kml file.  It now has all the stops up through the latest post, West of the Pecos, Texas.  You can find the file in the Google Earth link at left, or you can simply go here.  I will be better about keeping this file up to date from now on.

Michael

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