Essays
Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado
The Landscape of the Boom and Bust Economic Cycle (Luboock to Lenorah)
April 10, 2002
Thousands of Midlanders have made the drive to Lubbock, and many have been more than a dozen times. Texas Tech students make the drive a hundred times in their college career. Other folks go semi-regularly, to shop, to attend concerts, or to visit the Ranching Heritage Center and the Lubbock Lake Archaeological site. Most folks drive as fast as they can, gambling that DPS troopers are not waiting. "It is a boring drive," I have heard said over and over and over. It is what you make of it, and it is more fun not to be bored. It is healthier not to be derisive -- and not say "the land is flat and ugly, with dried-up towns."
Admittedly, a good part of the drive is through landscape that has been simplified by modern agriculture. In many places it is hard to see a wildflower, bird, or even a grazing cow. One sees only miles upon miles of rows and rows of cotton, with crop dusters buzzing low, leaving behind the bitter whang of Malathion drifting across the highway, as the war against boll weevils is waged. Green stripes of crops over red dirt and blue sky: what a perfect flag, as mentioned in Dan Flores' Horizontal Yellow! I like the idea of having flags that symbolize a region.
Like most folks, I often just highball it down the highway. The other day, however, Deborah and I meandered back, taking county roads, driving the neighborhood streets of each little town, looking for the county historical museums, picking up the local newspapers, and stopping along the roads when something grabbed our attention.
In Tahoka and O'Donnell we found murals on the outside walls of some of the stores. What artist wandered through and when? Or were they created by members of local civic groups? Tahoka also had a sculpture of flying cranes. South of Slide we found a purveyor of folk art selling huge metal palm trees to place at the entry gates of country estates. I am headed back to find out the stories behind the art.
The historical museum at O'Donnell had display rooms depicting turn-of-the-20th-century churches, schools, barbers, telephone exchanges, and more, besides a display about hometown hero, Dan Blocker. Some creative soul had made up little stories to interpret the static scenes. Modern museums should learn from the idea -- what potential! Across the street, where buildings once stood in more economically vibrant times, the vacant lot had been turned into a park. What a marvelous idea – replacing boarded up buildings with parks!
Late in the afternoon, with the Good Friday thunderstorms turning the skies purple, we stopped south of Lamesa on the way to Stanton. A line of vegetated sand hills angled across the Llano. To the north the farmland begins, but the sand hills are ranch country. Three abandoned houses, once home to farm workers, faced the road. Deborah and I dodged scattered raindrops, hurrying to the structures, shivering from the strong inflow winds whipping out of the east into the storm.
While she scouted through the rooms, stepping over upturned chairs and in between 1960's stereos and sofas with stuffing pulled free by mice, I hunkered, examining a group of unusual wooden frames with no discernible function. The thunder grew louder as lightening bolts danced a few miles further west, and the wind gusted stronger and stronger. One of the slats on the side of the house started to slap, only one nail keeping it attached to the building.
Deborah moved to another house, and I went out back, behind an outbuilding. An old yellow Gremlin, like the one I drove twenty-plus years ago, listed to the side, with tumbleweeds piled between it and the shed. The sight of the car turned my thoughts melancholy. I shivered, not from the wind, but from the voices of ghosts it carried.
The Llano Estacado is a place of boom and bust. The 1880s to 1900 was an era of big ranching empires. Thousands of tiny towns were formed for the next 17 years or so when sodbusters farmed the Llano until the big drought of 1917-1921 hit. Then, in the late 1920s, along came the first oil boom. The oil industry enjoyed boom periods after World War II, and during the 1960s and the late 1970s, while enduring intervening periods of consolidation and downsizing. Daytripping across the West Texas countryside reveals this cycle in bold relief – for example, downtown Big Spring has a number of empty buildings with beautiful 1930s architecture worthy of preservation. Bebopping about in our homeland begs the question – what will be here twenty years from now?