Amarillo

At six o’clock the road turned bare as we rode through Tennessee. From Nashville to Memphis is a long, dark stretch of gray and brown trees and fields where no one ever walks or works. I’ve often wondered who owns those empty spaces. The rains kicked up and splattered the windshield with drops as big as plums, ten seconds at a time, then dry a while before starting all over again. For hours and miles, nothing changed past Memphis, Little Rock, and Fort Smith, until the sun came up somewhere the other side of Oklahoma City. Clear dawn revealed the dead-end of Autumn, but hot as Summer. The enfolding hills of home had unfolded into horizons all the way to the curved edge of the Earth. The fields were golden stubble and brown and gray and white from no rain at this dead-end since August. These are fields where people work, but do not walk, because there is nowhere to go, as far as the eye could see, nowhere to go. In that unfolded expanse, there were sometimes brown gashes where older rains had surprised the ground with knife-edged, alkaline drops and left miniature grand canyons of momentary interest to whiz by. Finally, we arrived home, a place with roots deep in the Amarillo soil. The family was gathered there, faces of people who knew about horses and no rain, the sharp spikes of cactus and mesquite pounded into the surface of that thirsty soil. Their roots went deep enough to find a little harsh water to nourish the music of parched conversation over an informal Thanksgiving dinner. Later we weaved through the cactus and mesquite to a line of low buttes rising a hundred feet to flat tops where we could see across the quiet, dusty plain.A distant silver train caught the sun, and rolled silently beneath us in that Autumn heat. A jackrabbit skipped across our path like a stone on still water, and some tired bird of prey from nowhere sailed by, going nowhere. The heat of that dusty day bled into a tired Amarillo night, so we threw off the unnecessary coverings left in preparation for a cold dead end of Autumn that had not yet arrived. Vol Lindsey 11/98