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Goodbye to a State (of Being)

25.11.11

Four hundred and seventy years ago, famed Spanish explorer Francisco Vazquez de Coronado and his men got lost in the Texas panhandle. They floundered there for three weeks.

They were confounded by the redundant plains. They were disoriented by what seemed to them a landmark-less sea of grass.

As I recently turned off US Hwy 287 at Claude, Texas and got on County Road 1151, venturing due west towards Canyon, Texas and Palo Duro Canyon, I crossed what used to comprise one of these amazing plains. But instead of indigenous grasslands, most of the area is now farmland. The beginning and end of this quiet 30-mile stretch is dotted with occasional houses, metal churches and closed-down firework stands. The middle features wide expanses of shorn cotton fields and ember-like splashes of maize crops, some fenced, some not. There’s at least two ancient buffalo wallows along the way (if you know what you’re looking for) and now and again you’ll see a disenfranchised coyote sneak across the road in broad daylight; you’ll see three or four times that dead on the side of the road.

Source: Dissident Voice