Essays

Moseying: Locations of Interest

The road from Midland to Patricia
October 2, 2002

I took the long way to Andrews the other day – through Patricia. The morning school visit to Sibley had been canceled due to teacher illness, so I left in mid-morning, driving only 50 miles per hour (and, on less traveled roads, only 35) to a mid-afternoon appointment at the place that “is between the land of enchantment and a whole other country.” I carried along my Maps of Texas so I could mark every prairie dog town I saw. (More about that later!) On the tape deck was didgeridoo world jazz, which is more apropos than it may seem, given the similarity of landscapes in west Texas and Australia.

The previous Sunday on a three hour morning excursion (at 5 miles an hour on gravel county roads) in southeast Midland County I had identified 75 species of wild plants blooming. Heading north it was different – almost no blooms at all. I only stopped three times between Midland and the overpass 24 miles north of town. I drive slow so I can stop – and I stop for flowers, roadkill, weird trash on the side of the road, to read lease signs to identify landowners if I need to, to watch a bird or reptile or mammal, and if I am near human habitation I stop to look at yard ornamentation, house construction, home landscaping, and cemeteries.

I stopped at three playas to “binocle” for evidence of prairie dogs. I only found evidence of one town, and I did not see any running about there, so the bubonic plague (or the rancher with some poison grain) had visited. Around Midland their numbers have been increasing, even in the drought. I started monitoring prairie dogs after a conversation with a Texas Nature Conservancy employee who challenged my observation about the increase. There has been talk about putting “the little varmints” on the Endangered Species list. I agree that there is less than one percent of their population is left – Vernon Bailey estimated five hundred million prairie dogs from San Angelo to Amarillo in the late 1890’s.

North of the overpass, I first paused at the rest stop next to the big water storage tanks of the Paul Davis waterfield. A band of vegetated sanddunes stretch across the southern Llano Estacado from north of Grady all the way to the area southeast of Seminole. In 1872 Colonel William Shafter reported that buffalo were stopped by the dunes, and were rarely found to the southwest. Sandy areas are often on the north side of the draws of west Texas, so I checked the map, and sure enough, Mustang Draw supposedly crosses the road right north of the storage tanks. I say supposedly, for the draw is not like it is east of Stanton, or west of Patricia -- with a narrow channel with at least one steep side.

The sandy area is the dividing line between ranch and farm country. As soon as a vehicle comes up out of the draw the next few miles of landscape are mostly Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) fields. Until the early 1980’s many Midlanders cursed this stretch of road, for if the wind was blowing, visibility dropped to near zero. Commuting Texas Tech students from Midland in those days came up with some colorful names for the phenomenon -- “dust fog,” “sand blizzard,” for example. I remember one apocryphal story about the sand covering the road causing a driver to lose her sense of direction and drive out into the neighboring field, getting thoroughly stuck up to the bumper.

This is a good place to notice fencerow sanddunes. A barbed wire fence collects tumbleweeds even on an average day of fifteen miles an hour winds. When the wind picks up to fifty miles an hour and more and the sand starts the skittering of saltation (look that up in a geology text!) the sand is caught by the tumbleweeds. I have heard old-timers say that in the 1950’s drought a four-foot tall fence would turn into a sanddune in one storm. Up until a few years ago the top half of an old house just south of Lamesa stuck out of a dune. I wish it had been preserved, as witness to the power of wind and drought. The first fencerow sanddune visible past Mustang Draw is covered with shinoak. How did the acorns get there? It is several miles to the shinnery in the draw.

Looking across the fields around Patricia one can see old home places with dying clumps of Siberian Elms surrounding tumbled down wooden houses, interspersed with newer brick houses surrounded by the Afghan Pines, Eastern Red Cedar, and Arizona Cypress windbreaks sold by the local Soil and Water Conservation District. The barns are now all metal sheds on concrete, housing costly tractors instead of farm animals. The older houses are down low in the swales, but the new ones are up on the ridges. In fields around Patricia that have not been converted in the CRP program, as much (if not more) sorghum is being grown as cotton this year. The roadsides were brilliant yellow with head-tall sunflowers.

The town of Patricia is not big – if you blink at seventy miles an hour, you miss it. The 1990 census claims sixty folks live there, but they must have counted the residents of nearby farms. I stopped in the heart of town where I thought I could see it all. I saw no church, no post office, and no active commercial establishment other than the gin. I saw no cemetery, either. There is an abandoned gas station north of town that I remember being open once in a while back in the early 1970’s. On the northwest corner of the intersection of the only cross street were two men with their heads under the hood of a pick-up in front of a structure that could have been a mechanic’s garage, but no sign declared it so.

One yard had two of the tall cut out metal art leaning cowboys. You have seen this popular image of our regional art form – over at Stanton, and on Midkiff Road here in Midland between the railroad tracks and the Interstate. These were decked out with bandanas and ropes, looking like they were looking for their horses. Another house had a iron fence with the metal rims of automobile tires attached to it, and a short row of bird houses for ornamentation. I liked the placement of the tire rims – like notes on a bar of music. A scarecrow leaned against the fence, as if interrupted in placing the ornamentation.

On FM 115, just a half-mile or so west of the gin is a house that I want to know more about – another Barstow rock house. Who were the masons here on the southern Llano Estacado that possessed so much creativity? When did they build the houses? Just about every town within a hundred miles of Midland has at least one house by these now long-forgotten artisans. The house at Patricia has a thigh-tall rock fence with an arched gate over the entry to the yard. Set into either side of the arch were two big slabs of petrified wood. The top of the 75 foot long fence is covered with the clear or white crystals of what looks to be halite or gypsum. Attached to the rear of the old rock house is a frame house, and a satellite dish reveals the modernity of its present owners.