Introduction

When American explorers crossed the Texas Panhandle, they dubbed it part of the "Great American Desert." A "sea of grass," the llano appeared empty, flat, and barely habitable. Contemporary developments--cell phone towers, oil rigs, and wind turbines--have only added to this stereotype.

Yet, as Armitage walks the thirty meandering miles from her family farm to the Canadian River, the llano's wonders persist: dynamic mesas and canyons, vast flora and fauna, rich histories, Armitage discovers the voices of ancient, Native, and Hispano peoples, their stories interwoven with her own: her father's legacy, her mother's decline, a brother's love. The llano holds not only the beauty of ecological surprises but a renewed realization of kinship in a world ever changing.

Reminiscent of the work of memoirists Terry Tempest Williams and John McPhee, Walking the Llano is both a celebration of an overlooked region and a soaring testimony to the power of landscape to draw us into greater understanding of ourselves and others by experiencing a deeper connection with the places we inhabit.

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Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE: DRAWS

Ed could as well have been whittling away on a spare twig as running the snake down the hole at the side of my house: the gesture was the same. His daddy, slim pocket knife in hand, had shaped an after lunch tooth pick from a tree limb along with stories in front of Swanson’s grocery—a regular. His son shucks the black line into the sewer. He says:

“Yeah. Your mom is a wonderful woman. She was my Sunday school teacher, you know.”

I knew. This was an Ed-repeat, an old story, one he cherished telling and retelling. Probably no one knew exactly what it meant but for Ed, motherless and gay in the conservative Texas panhandle, it meant he was loved. And he loved my mother.

My dad had recommended Ed even though he was the only plumber in town. He had warned me too.

“Don’t let him come in the house, particularly if some of those guys are with him.”

“But dad. Most plumbers have to work inside your house.”

“Well, what I mean is don’t let those guys he drags along in.”

Dad was referring to Ed’s habit of bailing out attractive young men from the Amarillo jail and putting them to work for him.

Ed was round as an apple, dressed in a red jump suit, and about half the height of the two gaunt young men who fetched tools for him from his truck.

We had managed to be mostly outside, Ed sitting on my back deck, legs dangling above the ground, lacing orders in between reminiscences.

“She helped me with the newspaper too.” He was turning earnest now, no humor intended, though most folks familiar with the long-gone Oldham County Sentinel might laugh if it were compared to a real newspaper. Small town newspapers covered births, deaths, Saturday afternoon Little League, and garage sales. This one sported a front page “The Sheriff’s Report,” detailing what thugs had been apprehended and how along Route 66. “Sheriff and deputies pursued the suspect along the service road at high speeds until an arrest could be made”. . .etc.

I could feel safe about Route 66, now Interstate 40, which, after all, bordered my property on the south. The supposed meth labs, rumored to be ignored by the local law in Vega, worried me more.

“You remember Cleve Pattengail?” Maybe now Ed was warming to some gossip or time-worn story.

“Yes, Daddy said he used to come in the bank.”

“Yep. He carried a tow sack full of money and once a month walked to town to deposit it in the bank. He had a baby grand piano in that old country shack he lived in, and he let the animals on his place come and go. Last time I was there, the chickens were roosting on the piano.”

I tried to image the old bachelor hunched into the wind, sack over his shoulder, walking the two miles from out in the country, plopping the bag down on my dad’s desk at the bank to make a deposit. Cleve was dead now and only a derelict broken- bladed windmill stood by the collapsing wood shotgun house.

“What about Dutch Ruhl. Seems like he was an interesting old guy too?”

“Oh Dutch. If he didn’t like you he would bray like a donkey. If he did like you he did the same thing. He would just open his mouth as wide as he could and let out a holler. But that newspaper. Now there were some stories. . . .”

I saw the first stages of the tearing down of Ed’s old press office years later when I was back in town for the summer vacation from university teaching. James was at it—my former high school boyfriend who refused to help cut down the basketball net when his high school team, Adrian, beat Vega in district, all because we were dating. He’s straddled loyalties ever since, working in both towns, but today it’s part of Vega he’s taking down, forcing a tractor blade into one leaning wall. Though small—with barely enough room for the stout hand press—the building resists. This had been the Oldham County Sentinel, the one Ed talked about.

A few months later, I drive past the now vacant and weed- choked lot. Already an imitation “barn” building, made of pressed wood with faux carriage house appointments, sits for sale, fronting Ed’s dilapidated barn out back. Ed’s press ended up at the hardware store, where owner Randy Roark collects Oldham County antiques. Ed’s estate was as enigmatic as his habits. A stranger from out of town, said to be his partner, was named in his will to inherit everything.

Maybe that’s what happened to his tombstone. A few years ago I saw it—a large decorative gray stone with his name big enough to be seen from the street—in front of an antique store in Amarillo. For sale. The fact is Ed had two headstones. One is at the Vega cemetery where he is buried. The other was out in the country north of town on a piece of farm land he owned. You could see it from the highway. He wanted to be buried out there, but state law prohibited it. Had he bought two gravestones to be sure? Had his lover hocked the country stone, which originally faced toward the Canadian River breaks north of town, to sell to a dealer on tourized Route 66 in Amarillo? It seemed oddly appropriate to round the corner onto that street of the old Mother Road and see Ed’s name among the antiques, memorabilia, the lapsed stories.

Ed was right about the newspaper business and stories. One summer when I was fourteen, I got a job at the Vega Enterprise for the summer, working with another college intern, Gretchen Pollard. Gretchen came the 400 miles from Austin in her orange Opal Cadette. When my parents and I welcomed her the night of her arrival, she remarked she was thrilled that Vega was large enough to have a high- rise building. We looked at each other, then couldn’t contain our laughter. “Gretchen,” my dad said sobering, “that’s a grain elevator.” From then on my dad’s nickname for Gretchen was “Dizzy Blond.” Gretchen, a petite, but well-endowed, outspoken, dusky voiced bleached blond (she was a smoker), lived up to her name all summer, like the time we invited her to New Mexico with us. She waved from her Opal and pulled off the road. My dad turned around and went back where Gretchen stood with the car hood up.

“Uncle Bob” (that’s what she called him) “there’s smoke coming out I guess from under here.” She took a drag from her cigarette and laughed a kind of embarrassed deep utterance.

“Have you checked the oil?”

“What’s that?”

Sure enough, there was almost no oil left when he checked it. Gretchen confessed that this was the first time she had ever checked her oil—or even looked under the hood.

But Gretchen and I thought we were crack reporters. I had my own column, “The Teenage View,” green banner head and all. We scoured the roadways of Oldham County for story possibilities, such exciting things as interviews with ministers, old timers, and almost anyone who would talk to us. The weekly was run by a capable but alcoholic editor and his equally inebriated ad man, so that the copy was left to us with a little help from Dolly Stone, an older woman who mainly manned the front desk and telephone. If Gretchen was a dizzy blond, Dolly was the proverbial battle axe. We feared her and took our morning tea breaks at Ollie’s café across the street responsibly. Dolly came from a big family so she knew how to manage things. “Mighty, Dolly, Madge, and May, Marguerite, and Lula Clay,” her father intoned, in order to remember the birth order of his six sizeable daughters.

One day when Bob, the editor, had actually come in to pick up copy, we had some questions and ask where he went. Dolly huffed: “How would I know. He left out of here liked a ruptured duck.”

Ruptured duck? We never figured out what that meant. And Bob never showed up again that day.

But with Ed and his paper gone and the current Vega Enterprise moved down the street—managed by a woman who serves as owner, operator, reporter and ad person-- who remembers such stories? Or tells them? Where are they grounded?

Leslie Silko, the Native American writer, says “we are nothing without the stories.” I think she means literally that if we don’t know our cultural stories, we don’t exist. But more: if we don’t know where we fit into our cultural stories, then we have no identity, or “place.” We are ungrounded. The southwestern writer, Mary Austin, famously created in her autobiography the “I-Mary,” an identity realized when as a girl she understood her nature separate from her mother, yet related intimately to her surrounding environment. Perhaps identity is founded upon our awareness of the “I” as we perceive it not solely within, but outside of ourselves: seeing ourselves in a larger story.

When I drive the three miles northwest of Vega to the family farm—well, it’s farmed land but also native grassland—I sometimes catch the stoned looks of passersby, setting their cruise controls for top speed. The long horizon, 360 degrees of earth and sky, mostly grass, offends, disgusts, or just simply bores many people. Once when I was living in Albuquerque, a visiting friend from back east surveyed the then largely undeveloped northeast heights area and remarked: “Shelley, we’ve got to fill this in.”

I rock along in the l987 Jeep Comanche pickup aware that the perceived flatness is really, at 4,000 feet, one of the largest plateaus in North America. Spanning some 32,000 square miles from the New Mexico/Texas state line east to Oklahoma, from the Canadian River north to almost the Edwards Plateau south, the caprock as it is called for the caliche like Ogallala formation, was laid down in the Pleistocene. It’s going to be quite a challenge to fill all this in. Within it, Oldham County, one of the largest in Texas, encompasses 1500 square miles.

It’s not some low-lying flatness, but a mountain of sorts, this plateau. Just to the north and farther west, the land slopes into draws, then shallow canyons, and finally deep cuts through time—inverted mountains. The sublime western landscape of mountainous New Mexico, Arizona, and especially California—possibly the destinations of these escaping tourists—is simply plunged into the earth here. What was substance, rising above, is space slicing, yawning below. So locals know a thing or two the exasperated I-40 travelers don’t: there’s something out there. Space, yes, but it’s not “empty,” rather it is filled with the mysteries of mountains turned upside down. Mainly, we know it’s not flat.

But if the landscape is boring to those just passing through wouldn’t the local stories be boring too? Are our stories at most understories?

Most passers-through- stories are about the weather. “Oh yeah, Vega. I was caught there in the most god-awful blizzard.” “Yeah, my car broke down there. The one garage was closed on Saturday and Sunday. Wind blowing like hell.” “OMG, that’s the place we spent two days in somebody’s home, put up with the other travelers when the two motels filled up.”

I usually respond with an apologetic yes, then my house is the one along the highway with the red roofed barn—built in l920, one of the few wooden barns left in the county, but break off, losing my nerve. Located on Interstate 40 or old route 66 and the intersecting state highway 385, which goes to Colorado, Vega is the last stop between Amarillo and Tucumcari, New Mexico, almost at the mid-point of Route 66. A Spanish name meaning meadow or pasture, Vega suggests why snowstorms can be dangerous here. Drifts and blinding snow frighten most visitors away. Old timers and travelers agree on the well-worn tome: “There’s nothing between here and the North Pole but a barbed wire fence.” Or if they’ve been here a really long time, they like to brag about walking to school from out in the country, the snow so high they walked over fence posts without knowing it.

I lived through two massive blizzards myself in the l950s. Stranded travelers filled schools and homes. One girl was air-lifted out of a local home by helicopter due to complications with her polio. For kids like me a blizzard meant staying at home from school and making lots of snow ice cream since all my brother and I had to do was open his bedroom window and scoop up the snow. The house was buried in snow all the way up to the window sills.

Donnie Allred, the county judge, likes to tell about his grandfather who lived south of Wildorado, a town of about 30 people east of Vega. One of his stories recalls a storm when his grandfather’s young wife was pregnant with their first child. He took the train to Amarillo to get some supplies. He planned to stay overnight. But a severe snow storm hit while he was gone. This is characteristic of an area where it’s not uncommon to see daily fifty degree swings in the temperature. When he tried to get back home, the train was not running. He tried renting a horse from a livery stable but no one would let a horse in that kind of weather.

Finally, in order to get back to his wife, he decided to walk from Amarillo, some twenty miles today by the Interstate. By that time, the storm was really a blizzard, snow accumulating, low visibility. To keep from getting lost, he counted the steps between the first two telephone poles, which ran along the railroad. He then counted his steps between each successive pole. If he reached the end of his steps and there was no pole, he knew he was lost. He would then retrace his steps and try again.

When he got home, he was snow-blind for three days. “Some Indian who worked out at Gray’s ranch north of Wildorado, got wind of his ailment,” Donnie added. ‘He came in and made a poultice and granddad got his vision back.”

Donnie made a good point that day as I sat in his judge’s office, with local brands displayed and spurs hanging on the wall. The people of Oldham County and Vega are only one generation removed from the “Old West.” My dad’s generation was the glue between the earliest settlers and the living generation—ours, people in their 60s and younger. For at least these two generations the local stories still make sense. They create a common ground.

One reason might be the compression of time here. Unlike the history of New England or other areas of the southwest, the settlement pattern here is recent. Until the l880s, there was no incorporated town nor county seat in Oldham County. Vega was incorporated as a town in l904; Tascosa previously in l880 as the original county seat. The end of the so-called Old West and the burgeoning wind energy generation are separated by a little more than 100 years.

Turns out my dad knew the second non-Native American settler in the area—Ysabel Gurule who came from Anton Chico, New Mexico (then the Territory of New Mexico) as part of the first pastores, sheepmen who discovered the Canadian River Valley north of Vega about 20 miles. Born in l863, Ysabel came when he was sixteen traveling with his cousin and family from the Pecos River Valley. When he built his dugout on the south Canadian banks, America had hardly survived the Civil War. The last holdouts from the reservation in Oklahoma—a small band of Comanches, some Kiowa—still threatened settlers though the tribes had been broken by Reynald MacKensie’s surprise attack of the then 3000 remaining Comanche and Kiowa in nearby Palo Duro Canyon. Ysabel’s cousin was killed by Indians near the Canadian and his wife returned to Anton Chico, but Ysabel stayed. In the free unfenced grasslands of that time, the pastores sought out the rich grasses in the valleys along the Canadian, establishing their plazas near springs.

Dad also came to the panhandle when he was 16. Forced from their farm near the confluence of the White and the Buffalo Rivers in the Arkansas Delta in the flood of l926, the Armitages resettled in Vega, coming for the promise of the rich wheat harvests in the recently broken out prairie in the western panhandle. Ysabel must have been around sixty- three years old when the Armitages moved to Vega, still a cowhand at the LS ranch. He died in l936. By that time, Dad was a teller at First State Bank. What transpired between them I’ll never know.

What I do know is Dad talked a lot about Ysabel and maybe he identified his own new start with Ysabel’s. Dad had begun buying farm and grassland—land that went for $3 an acre then—bit by bit beginning in l929. Ysabel witnessed the conversion of the vast free grasslands, still shared by buffalo, into large fenced ranches and smaller farms. The conversion of the open plains to private ownership meant the end of the pastores, who mostly returned to New Mexico. Ysabel stayed and became a crack cowboy. I think Dad saw in Ysabel the embodiment of the spirit of adventure and also his knack for adapting to the changes.

He might have had a bit of the old-time West in him too, my dad. At age 21, then a new teller at the First State Bank in Vega, he was to be married in a week to eighteen-year-old Dorothy Mae Dunn from Amarillo, Texas. At noon, on November 15th, he was kidnapped during a bank robbery. Most of the employees had gone to lunch and Dad was locking up to join them. Two armed masked (yes!) men came in, took the cash available at the teller’s cages, locked two employees in the bank vault, blindfolded him, bound his hands behind his back with rope, and threw him into the back of their automobile. The get-away ensued, the robbers finally stopping the car about nine miles southeast of Amarillo. There was mumbling in the front seat, then a slamming of doors. Dad heard another car start up and drive away.

In some Houdini way, he contorted his six-foot-two-inch frame until he managed to open the door. Realizing the robbers had ditched the car off the road, he assumed there was a fence nearby. There was: a barbed-wire fence. He rubbed the rope against the barbs until he was free, then set about hot-wiring the car, started it up, drove into Amarillo, and reported to the Sheriff’s department that the bank had been robbed and he had been kidnapped.

The Sheriff’s deputy on the desk looked more than a little surprised. They had just received word that two armed and dangerous kidnappers had robbed the bank in Vega. And here was the young hostage standing before their eyes. The next day, the newspaper report carried the story with a goofy-looking photograph of my dad who looked as though it had all been great fun. As I look at the picture now, I see a resemblance to my jokester brother. Jibes made the rounds in Vega, the best one from one of Dad’s good friends. “Bob,” he said, “Surely to goodness if you didn’t want to get married, there was an easier way.”

I talk to the cowboys around here. One of them is my neighbor, James Henry, known as “Frog.” I can hear him switching out trailers, moving cattle and horses, early mornings and in the evening. He’s still a strapping six feet, fit, checkered work shirt, levis, and piss-stained boots. We hang out in his driveway when I pass and talk.

“Got knocked off my horse, struck by lightning,” he says as casual as ordering a local hamburger.

“What?? The lightning struck you?”

“Nope. The saddle horn. That’s what saved me and the horse. The bolt knocked my horse to the ground. Me too. It was pure luck. Burned the saddle. I really liked that old saddle.”

Talk about being grounded.

I run into the guy who runs cattle on our place, Sam Brown, about a week later.

“What’s the news,” I ask, hoping for a cougar sighting or antelope herd report.

“Got bucked off last week,” he drawls, rubbing a weathered jaw. I notice his raw-looking hands settled on the pickup door, bunged up and chapped.

“Broke a rib,” he continues.

“My gosh. Sam, you and Frog need to stay away from those horses.”

“Hard to do when you have spent your life on one.”

Sam’s a college graduate, has written several western novels, won awards. He used to deliver mail on the country route in a beat up Chevy Geo—anything to give him time to write and to cowboy. But his agent began pressing for more books. The fun of it went out for him. He bought a few head of cattle, mostly stopped writing, and kept working for the ranches when they needed day help.

I want Sam to keep writing the stories. He’s got an insider’s view. I realize how much I am on the edge of such things, a single woman who works somewhere else, who now mainly summers here. I want to know what Sam knows but am not about to ask. Call it shyness or the clear knowledge that it’s mostly a man’s world out there. Somebody once said to him: “Sam, there must be so many stories to tell about cowboying and the ranch life.” To which he replied: “Yeah, if you could repeat them.” How could I ever be privy to those stories? More than that, how could I subtly coax them out of him? But I know ranch history, the cowboy era, is not the only story here. And there’s something about sensing the edges of experience that’s a kind of truth in itself.

Edges—a kind of selvage a seamstress might toy with. That’s what it’s like to stop at the north boundary of our land on the cusp of the Canadian breaks—a rough country of deep washes, canyons, cedar breaks stretching all the way to the Canadian River. Here the relatively level farmland gives way to inflections of purple canyons, ochre and ruddy arroyos. To be on the edge of these is the most profound. Nothing is given away and surprises await. Like a good story, there’s the anticipation of the twists and turns, no spoiler alert needed—a kind of growing perception that is itself an experience.

I want to believe this because the middle generation—the glue as Donnie said-- and most of their landmarks are gone. And that fickle twin of truth—memory—is not identical but wayward. I have snippets, like the cassette tape I made of Bea Godwin playing the Vega Methodist Church organ when she was an old lady. I remember Bea’s hands looking a lot like Sam’s—puffed with arthritis, swollen tight against her wedding ring. Bea had been our long-time organist and accompanist for musical events in Vega. She transposed sheet music, like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” so my not quite soprano, not quite alto voice could manage the high notes. Her parlor, where both a piano and a foot-pedal organ sat, was often papered with sheets of road tunes, popular hits, big band numbers. That must be why when I hear the first stanzas of “It Had to Be You” or some other standard before my time, I can sing the lyrics. That, and the fact that my parents owned all those old 78’s. But Bea’s claim to fame, as far as I am concerned, was that at age 13 she was asked to fill-in in her native Chicago at a theater, playing the pit organ for a vaudeville show. Not even five feet tall then, she could barely reach the organ pedals to play. I look at her hands somehow still reaching over an octave despite their stumpy shape and I listen. When at church she played “The Old Rugged Cross,” there was a doodly-do between notes. I smile. Her ragtime days shone through.

No less an accomplished memorist than Patricia Hampl notes that memoir is not about what happened but about the shape of memory. Emotional truth, that keeper, sets our feet--as flat and forgettable as the ground might seem to some--and we write on.

That ground, our land, is memorably shaped. Far from flat, both the North and South places are distinguished by grass- covered draws, though the North place is rougher. On the South place the draw slopes gently after the initial cut in the land which runs from under Interstate 40, widening to maybe two hundred yards across. The bottom—some seventy-five yards from the smooth edges--is carpeted, even in winter, in native prairie gramas and forbs. Plants as tiny as the pink-lipped and shaggy-leafed “frog hair” and the taller, royal purple ironweed cluster in the water-collecting bottomland. According to our family friend, Mildred Hicks, our farm was beautiful because it had two draws on it. Unlike the Hicks’ farm, mostly flat irrigated land, it had natural contours and untilled native grasses. This coming from a woman whose father homesteaded the large lucrative spread she spent her life on, south of Vega. The Hicks had irrigated farmland and it was extremely productive. They drove top of the line Chryslers while my parents owned a Plymouth. Mildred told stories of gathering the mail left by a sort of pony-express mailman who stashed it between two rocks out in the country. She kept her parents’ saddles prominently displayed in her house—and oiled. But she reminded me that our place—dry land farm that it was—was native grass too. And that it had draws.

A draw is a cleavage in the landscape. Mike Harter, an Amarillo high school honors history teacher, is an expert on draws in the West Texas and Eastern New Mexico region. He makes detailed hand-drawn maps locating the major draws and their relationship to tributaries of the Canadian River, the only river in this arid area. I met him at a coffee shop in Amarillo where he unscrolled a couple of maps, pointing.

“Here in West Texas and in Eastern New Mexico people use the term ‘draw’ to describe creek beds that wander through the landscape. Farther west, the proper word might be ‘arroyo’ or ‘wash,’ but ‘draw’ is appropriate here on the High Plains. A draw suggests that the terrain must somehow coax scarce moisture into its course.”

I eyed a tiny section along I-40 where part of a wishbone-shaped figure indicated the two draws on our farm.

“Yeah, we used to get 20 inches average rainfall a year, and now I bet it’s half of that, right?”

He nodded repeating the old panhandle conundrum that if you don’t like the weather here just wait five minutes and it will change. But we both knew the constants were wind and the pervasive absence of water. So draws are those essential collectors and conveyers of water.

The draw on our south place, the one along I-40 on the south, greens in summers with short and hardy buffalo grass, side oats grama, blue grama, and various forbs. It winds from the southwest section of the land to the northeast where it continues over into neighbor Kim Montgomery’s ranch, beginning as a slim cut then widening to a middle expanse of probably a quarter mile across. The entire draw may snake a mile or so from fence to fence. I think of it like the rounded backs of two gigantic dinosaurs, the humps smooth and benign, drawing the eye softly. Vegetarian, like the brontosaurus. The strip of greener grasses at the bottom, dotted with purple iron weed and white Queen Ann’s Lace in summer, reveal the drawing of water too.

At the north place, about two and a half miles north—the two draws divided by two other small farms—the draw runs similarly from southwest to northeast, but I think of it more as a carnivore. The banks are ruddy in eroded soil and clay and the cut more severe, more intent in its pull toward the river. Rather than meander it devours the less stable soils, a jagged mouth waiting to consume anything that passes along the drop in elevation. Here are native grasses, but also broom weed, from drought cycles, overgrazing, bear grass, yucca, and what I like to call my cactus forest. It’s on fairly level ground before the first pitch of the draw—a cluster of six foot tall cholla, a lingering reminder of the biota of this ranchland before it was cleared for farming. Farther south of here in the irrigated country people burn and poison the chollas. If there’s a grass fire some folks rejoice that at least it’s burned down the cholla. I smile when I see the small rounded heads emerge from the blackened ground again. A water catcher, it’s home to the cactus wren and the yucca moth. In the bad old days of drought, cattlemen burned only the thorns so the cattle could eat the arms for moisture. This draw is the wilder of the two, a precursor to the badlands beyond.

The two draws connect, the crux of the wishbone on Mike’s map, beyond Armitage Farms over on Green’s ranch as they join other tributaries on the run north.

I never thought about this connection of our place to the next when I was a girl. Fences tend to do that. The illusion of ownership. Besides, I was too busy doing things like learning to drive.

I learned to drive on the humpback of the old south draw. Kids get their licenses in Oldham County at age 14, but they learn to drive “in the country” and at much younger ages. I was seven years old when I first got behind the wheel.

We were in the l947 International pickup. I liked it because that was year of my birth. I thought of it as a friend until I tried to drive it. The excuse was feeding cattle cake, the molasses and pressed grains in elongated pellet form, to the winter herd. Helping my daddy at the farm; out of his good graces he said so. I was always eager to help my dad so learning to drive was important. I can still see myself in the dark green pickup, head barely level with the black steering wheel. The long-necked shift fronts the bench seat. I liked the feel of the soft plastic knob, as if malleable, a guide, a tool, to be cupped in my sweaty hands.

My dad chose to teach me to drive on the smooth cusp of the draw, south side. I might as well have been looking out of the space shuttle; a whole unknown world seems poised in the air below. The pickup points slightly down the slope, ready to buck and pitch at any slip of the clutch.

“Now put your foot on the brake,” he instructs, matter-of-factly in what I thought was a life-and-death situation. “Keep the clutch down, and ease off the brake. Here, I’ll put it in neutral first and you can just ease it down the hill. I’ll be in the back tossing out cake.”

What kind of a crazy daddy was this? In the back. Tossing out cake. Me in the cab. Alone. The cattle bunched around the truck, slobbering on my window, bawling so loud I could barely hear. We both knew I would have to master the clutch. I sweated beneath my Peter Pan bangs. I heard a suction sound from my wet armpits.

“You just ease off the brake and steer straight downhill until I yell stop.”

By now the cattle had completely surrounded the truck. They bellowed and begged and blocked my way.

“But won’t I run over the cattle?. . . “

Dad persisted in his instructions. There are too many of them and all at once. I’ve got the brake on. See if you can reach the brake pedal. No, that’s the clutch. Here’s let’s try first gear and you just gradually let the clutch out. You’ve got to keep your other foot on the brake until you do.

My stomach clutched like it did at night when you think you hear something scratching at the window and even if you know there’s a bush out there, you gulp at the shadow.

I tried several times. I eased the clutch out. The pickup died. It lurched forward. It died. My dad was a large man, 6’ 3” with long arms and legs, a kind of John Wayne or James Arnez figure in my mind. He seemed larger than life, like a western movie star. When he reached over the wheel to correct me or straddled the gear shift knob to hit the brakes when I popped the clutch—all this in our practice sessions—he made me nervous. I didn’t want to make mistakes or disappoint. I wanted to help my daddy. I wanted to keep coming to the farm with him.

Finally, we got to the point where he left me alone, the truck in gear, the toes of one foot pointed like an earnest dancer, depressing the clutch pedal, the other flat on the foot brake. He climbed back into the truck bed where the feed sacks were—oh trust, oh terror, oh dangerously living daddy. He said he would yell when it was time for me to stop. I managed to look up from the dizzying mantra of “how-to’s” and glimpse him in the rear-view mirror saying something back. But I couldn’t hear him. How would I know when to stop?

Memory is a strange thing. How much is the lingering sense of things, a kind of felt thought? There was a piercing whistle at one point. I stopped. I was right on the edge where the draw pitched to its more rugged bottom. To this day, if anyone whistles, I snap my head, I brake, I stop.

There were other edges too. My brother learned to drive up and down the draw but he also got to drive the tractor—by himself. Early on I got the idea of what boys get to do and girls don’t. But why couldn’t you inhabit both worlds, I wondered and besides the man’s world seemed so much more interesting than cooking up a recipe in a hot kitchen. It wasn’t that Dad thought I couldn’t do the work; he knew how hard it was. He was liberal for his time, taking me out to play golf when I was thirteen, dragging out an old wooden tennis racket to exchange strokes back and forth across the tennis net. We both knew in small town Texas you could run for Miss Oldham County one night and play basketball the next. Yes, he put that basketball goal up in the yard. Still my brother drove the tractor, a boring and sleep-inducing job before air conditioners and radios in the cabs. When our cousin, Jimmy, visited it was too much for them and dad found them one day running down the planting rows by the tractor, chasing each other around it, trying to see how long it would stay straight in the row without a driver.

I got to drive the tractor. I plowed one summer when Roy was off working as a smoke- jumper in Idaho. The boys had set a tone for goof-offs and sometimes goof-ups, but no matter how hard I tried to get it right, at days end there was always an uneven place in the field, where the plow had not be set right. One day a rain storm came up and by the time I could get the tractor back to the gate to get off, I was soaked and the plow balled up in the mud. Now the field was really uneven! Lightning rocketed near, I made a dash for the truck. I had on cut-offs and the rain and mud splashed and stuck to my legs and tennis shoes. In town, only three miles away, it had not rained. I went to my parents’ house to report the situation. Rather than go in in my muddy state, I rang the doorbell. My dad opened the door, expecting to see a visitor rather than a daughter who looked like she’d just come from a mud wrestling contest. “What the hell. . .” he trailed off.

When you’re a kid you don’t think you have a story. You spend your time trying to find yourself in someone else’s. So I loved our farm, but coveted the ranches out north, the beguiling canyons and seemingly infinite horizons from the north place. What would it be like to grow up like the Mansfield daughters on their ranch, all thirty sections of it? There are 640 acres in a section; dad owned not quite two sections, and part of that was leased.

Tom Green’s ranch, joining our place on the north, was a fairyland to me. Some kids believed in fairies. I had visions of discovering dinosaur bones, an Indian mano and metate, or glimpsing a shifty bobcat on the prowl. When we visited the Green’s everything seemed exotic compared to town. Tom fed wild turkeys out back, quail scattered when you drove up, there were ranch dogs and horses to ride. Tom Henry, the Greens’ son, had some sort of mechanical horse, which we kids took turns riding. In town, my favorite “toy” as a child was a wooden horse, handmade, suspended on springs which let you rock away like crazy. Even the yard to the Green’s was an adventure: there were all sorts of native plants, “horny toads,” rattlesnakes possibly lurking to keep us properly scared.

And at Margaret and Marilyn’s home, the original headquarters for one of the oldest ranches in the area (now on the Historic Registry), they had haylofts for hide and seek and an elegant historical house built of imposing Canadian River stone. We kids would hang out in the hay nibbling cattle cake like it was a candy bar. The Mansfield’s had a maid and on a hot summer day you could come in, go barefoot on the cooling stone floors, and be served lemonade. To me, Margaret and Marilyn were the luckiest girls in the world: they were raising orphaned antelope twins on a bottle in the back corral.

Later both girls went to private schools in Dallas, marrying investment bankers, and eventually selling their parts of the ranch, which included the historic ranch house. I left too, but to a state university a two hour drive away, returning for holidays and summers. They had the Canadian Breaks, cactus and mesquite studded grasslands, creeks, a river. We had draws.

One day after my dad picked me up at school with that refrain I loved—“Let’s go to the farm.” He said we were going out to take down an old barbed wire fence that couldn’t be repaired. It was old rusty wire, slack in places, broken, so he was replacing sections of it when he had time. His “day job” was as vice president of First State Bank, but throughout his working life he rose early, put on a blue work shirt, and went to the farm. He came back in, changed to a starched white one with tie, and put in a day at the bank. After hours, he again changed to the work shirt and headed for the farm.

That day he told me the story of the wire and the XIT ranch. Once the largest ranch in Texas (XIT standing for the top ten counties of the Texas panhandle), the XIT also had the largest pasture when the land was first fenced. Our fence was part of this pasture, one that stretched some twenty miles to the Canadian River. The wire was thick, about a half inch wide, with formidable barbs. We wound the wire up and later stored some of it in my barn where a stray cat decided to hide her new litter of kittens. As we took the fence down, I finally realized: the land is bounded by memories, even mine.

But when I started trying to tell stories by writing them, they still weren’t my stories. I thought you had to imagine something more exotic. My grade school friend, Cynthia, and I, both lovers of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, decided to write our own mystery novel one summer. We dutifully recorded our tale in penciled hand on the yellowed pages of a large wooden-bound book her mother had. There were no ranches, no draws. To aid our imaginations, which at that time were wrapped in ruin and mystery (we were both lovers of Poe), we set the novel in an abandoned, but once mansion-like house of Colonel Owens, an early settler and booster of Oldham County. We sneaked out of Cynthia’s house at night, under the pretenses of my spending the night, and with trepidations that made us whisper and giggle, made our way to Colonel Owens’ dilapidated house. What we hoped—or feared—we’d find there, I don’t know. We peered in the broken windows, eyeing the still perilously hanging chandelier. Once we climbed in the window and tried the rickety stairs to the upper story, where I am sure we thought we’d find a skeleton or two. Our novel’s villain, sad to say, was Tony, a mentally challenged man in Vega who often materialized at the drug store or grocery store. We all loved Tony, really, but he scared us too; in real life, he jumped out from corners or from around buildings, saying “Boo” in a deep voice. In our novel, he was about the nicest villain you could think of.

In elementary school, I kept writing about the other Wests, as if more important than my own. I started two “novels,” one about a cowboy and his kid sister, the other about a Chinese boy’s life with his laundry-owning parents. Where did these stereotypes come from? I think the Chinese reference came from questions about a brass box on my dad’s desk said to be Chinese and for the “lucky cricket.” We had lots of crickets in those days in our house built in the early l920s, remodeled but keeping true to its wood frame, uneven baseboards, and slightly akimbo door facings. The crickets always slipped in, showing up along baseboards, surprising us in the chest-of-drawers—deadly omnivorous pests to be whacked by my fly-swatter-toting mother. The invasion of the crickets signaled possible all-out war in the summers. To be saved in the lucky box meant the cricket was lucky indeed.

Likely “Li-Yung and His Lucky Kite” as well as Cowboy Drew and Sis Sherry came to me courtesy of the early black and white westerns on television where stereotypes abounded.

The glassed-in porch, my dad’s study on the front of the house, was supposedly off-limits to my Mother’s hodge-podge of clipped coupons, address books, saved newspaper articles (but I later found all these stashed in a bottom drawer of the filing cabinet). But Dad let me write at his desk. I took hope that I would be inspired by my great aunt’s published poetry books, his sets of colored pens, and the small pink portable typewriter.

The porch took on mystical proportions for me. This particular day on the porch—I think I was in the seventh grade—I remember how sheltering the porch felt, mainly because of the light. A winter light which seemed to hold us all in its breath—cold blue rising—filled the windows. Those days what is now a very busy Highway 385 was mostly empty. I remember the silence, only the scraping of the lilac bushes in their wintry rasp on the side of the house, barely reaching the windowsill. It was a special feel of promise, somehow tied to comfort and home yet with yearning and even loneliness in it. Across the street at the Catholic parsonage where the priest kept peacocks their raucous calls seemed suspended in the winter air—filling space like on a blank page.

One of the things I wrote there—aside from illustrated book reports (the binding a shellacked fish skeleton announcing a review of The Old Man and the Sea; the Ben Hur report unfurled with coffee-stained and dirt smudged paper mimicking papyrus)—was a letter of interest to National Geographic. My letter was an exceedingly naïve gesture but one that showed how much I wanted to write about the natural world, other landscapes, flora and fauna I was not only curious about but felt connected to. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to write about the kinds of things that appeared in National Geographic. The form letter reply noted that its writers were professionals, in other words, you need not apply. My first pink slip.

Would I ever amount to anything I deeply desired? That day all journeys revealed themselves as detours. The blue hovered and held. Yet there was an inner joy that persisted, now tempered by a necessary kernel of defeat, especially when set against the exaggerated hopes of that day. The desk remained sacrosanct, along with the farm, and after my dad died, it was the platform from which my mother, until her own disabilities struck, paid the bills, ran the farm. Another edge—another not quite there.

One of my favorite childhood books was The Edge of Time by Loula Grace Erdman. It had a special place on the porch among my mother’s Reader’s Digest books she ordered monthly. I liked this novel because it was the only one I knew of set in the Texas panhandle and focused on a young married homesteading couple. Hardly the adventure script of the male western, it was a woman’s story, realistic rather than romantic. The title intrigued me even then and now the frayed cover on my bookshelf reminds me of a question May Sarton posed, after spending time in the southwest. “Why is there no poet of the plains?” she asked.

Why indeed. I think of Mike Harter’s maps again and an article he wrote called “The Highways of the Plains.” In it he explained how the llano estacado, the so-called “Staked Plains,” is a vast, flat plain which sheds its water stingily, mostly into playa sinks but also draws which, he says, “are one of the few real drainages to be found here.” Several theories exist about the origin and meaning of the llano, of which the great caprock is a part, but they all agree this “sea of grass” was formidable to travel with miles and miles of seeming featureless prairie and precious few water sources. These great conduits, the draws, were water highways, holding water below the surface, and during cloudbursts, conveying water—instant floods called high rises—downstream. More, they were highways for Native Americans, prehistoric and historic, because they provided shelter, possible water and food, and a route to water as they held spring sites and culminated in the Canadian River. If pursued, a person could disappear into them.

In college I starting jogging for fitness. I jogged five miles a day for thirty years. I sought out softer soils for running, and when home always ran at the farm. It became a local joke. “You still running?” someone would ask at the post office, eyeing my dusty shoes and worn out leggings. This is how I learned the land was lyric. If there was no poet of the plains, then the land itself was poem. I could feel the rhythm of its shape come into my legs, up into my chest and heart, and out my mouth as breath.

Later it came out as writing.

Mostly I ran along the edges of the draws, the more level wheat and milo fields on one side, the draws on the other. The asphalt of urban Honolulu claimed me after years of teaching and running there; arthroscopic surgery and worn out knees reduced me to a walk. To my surprise, the walks were even more sonorous than running. I noticed things I had never seen before. Each walk was different. I felt like Barry Lopez who says after his thirty years of living on the same patch of land in Oregon, he still finds something new. I took to the highway of draws.

This highway, I discovered, had a name. On Mike’s map it was labeled the Middle Alamosa Creek. Further checking of topographic maps and a large land map at the county court house revealed it as an “intermittent creek.” There was one “Alamosa”—cottonwood—on our south place, right in the middle of the widest expanse of the draw. And I knew along the Canadian and its valleys there were plenty of cottonwoods, some purposely planted by the early pastores for shade. Perhaps the Middle Alamosa got its name from the denser stand of trees near the river. Our single cottonwood was in its death throes. The standing water that sometimes surrounded it had no doubt rotted the roots. To finish it off a porcupine could sometimes be seen napping on an upper limb—right above the raw strips where he had gnawed the bark, thus further weakening the hapless tree. Nevertheless, it was a testimony to water.

The Middle Alamosa was the central branch and largest of three Canadian River tributaries that emptied into the Canadian about twenty miles north near the site of Tascosa.

Middle Alamosa. I was amazed. According to the maps it headed on our land, right at what was Interstate 40—in the draw.

This explained the cracked concrete one-lane overpass near that highway. Running parallel to the interstate was a one-lane road called the Ozark Trail, originating in St. Louis and running to California, a precursor of Route 66. It must have been necessitated as a water crossing. Earlier it had been an Indian trail, the First Nations of the Americas originating the best overland routes. I occasionally found flint from the Alibates Flint Quarry, northeast of Amarillo, along the single-lane dirt road, suggesting this was a trade route—the red, white, and purple streaked dolomite highly valued for its strength and beauty. The Ozark Trail was built and used primarily in the l920s. The prehistoric and historic Indians traded from as early as the Clovis period (15,000 B.C. E.) to the l880’s. Likely the Armitages traveled the Ozark Highway when it was the single roadway from Arkansas west into Vega. I leaned over the pipe barrier on top and check the swallow’s nests underneath. Cattle liked to stomp around in the pooling after rains in the shade underneath; tracks of antelope and skunk suggest other visitors. I liked to imagine what goes on here at night when no one is looking.

Downstream, now that I can imagine it as one, the creek widens and a CCC dam, concrete and native stone, hangs perilously over eroded banks. Some cores man scratched l936 into the concrete on top. I like to swab up the triops that slew in the muddy areas below. Their dates: circa 300 million years ago, Jurassic survivors. Dinosaur shrimp some people call them. Their eggs can remain dormant for years hatching only when there is sufficient water and proper temperature. Pentimento, you remind us that something always lives below, contemporary life a remnant in your twirling tentacles.

Catching and keeping: that’s what folks tried to do with the water. My dad built yet another dam more recently behind the aging CCC one. Part of the reason was conservation for watering cattle; but he also stocked the pond with catfish, building a feeder he would send out into the waters, like Moses’ basket into the bulrushes. After my dad’s death, the rusting of the feeder, and droughts that dried the pond for years, I had forgotten the catfish. But after a rain, triops like, I saw them flopping over the check dam, resurfacing in a wet season. I tried to catch them with an old fishnet rummaged out of the garage to return them to the now-full pond. When most of them got away, I realized you can’t stop the flow.

And yet the settlers had tried. Dams and fences and corrals and railroads and country roads. I, too, wanted to save something of my father, the emblem of his love of this place, by keeping the catfish from escaping with the water downstream. Tom Green, on the ranch just north, has a one-room camp where he used to escape for a nap and reading Paris Match. He had cookouts there and sometimes invited us out. The iron cook stove was a beauty and so heavy it took three men to wrestle it into its place. During one of the high rises—and Tom’s retreat is on the Middle Alamosa it turns out—the iron stove was washed away, later discovered in the banks of a mudslide near the Canadian.

Water will have its way.

When my dad died our family’s relationship to the land shifted. I still ran the roads but touched ground like a worry stone. My mother and I looked at each other and wondered how we would run the farm. My brother was in Omaha and later Houston, far away and already removed from the necessary knowledge of farm programs, grazing leases, and grain prices. I had indirect experience. Mother had driven a grain truck during the first harvests in the l930s, grinding the gears in such a way that Dad said she took two inches off the roadway. Hers was a mostly rosy view of what were sunbaked skin, cow piss, and broken machinery in running a small farm. When a PBS film crew came to record interviews with local survivors of the Dust Bowl, my mom’s story was not the expected page out of the Grapes of Wrath. Rather than remember dust pneumonia, jack rabbit roundups, and Black Sundays, she told love stories. Her favorite (and mine): to get the farm work done my dad had to plow late at night by the tractor lights, after he had gotten off work from the bank She lovingly wound herself around his feet on the tractor platform, behind the pedals, to keep him company, sleeping as he wheeled through the dust into the night.

So for a while she manned the desk, running the farm by never going there. I went out with George Ramos, our hired hand, whose knowledge of the place was the only way we made it through the years after Dad died.

“See that soil,” George would say, pointing to the course red soil in the North place fields. George was a barrel-chested man, strong, but his gentle voice comforted me. “It’s different from the highway place, balls up in the plow, harder to get a crop up on. It’s great for grass, though,” he laughed, “and bindweed and every other crawling thing that’s not supposed to be in this field.” We both knew the llano wanted to be grass and still resisted the plowing, spraying, and planting which made nesting night hawks flee. I plowed and George planted, his, the more precise art, and somehow we made it through the first season.

Sitting atop a tractor gave me a new perspective, maybe something like when white western women first sat a horse. It was an equalizer of sorts, but the view also made me think about how the north draw had been the scene of deprivation, kidnapping, and murder. There was pain here, mainly to do with animals. Dad had shot a cow once, with a 30-0-6, a powerful hunting rifle never used and solely on display in a gun cabinet. We had spent the winter keeping her alive after she breach-birthed a large calf, born dead, which paralyzed her. Dad tried everything: cattle prod (small electric shock), ropes to pull her up, feed left a few feet away. Nothing worked and by spring she had lost her will. The sight of him pulling the calf from her, then stuffing the bloody womb back inside, stuck with me, punctuated by the snap of her head at the rifle shot.

Another time we had to trick one of Roy’s Holstein milk cows into the trailer so we could take her to the farm. Her name was Blue because her black spots were faded; she was like a family pet. She trusted us and when the men released her she bawled and ran, chased by the other cattle who smelled a stranger in their midst. I remember sitting between my brother and dad as the pickup pulled away. They looked straight ahead pointed toward their futures; I looked back, silently crying in the cab.

Down in the draw was another scene of pain, also born of love, both intensifying the other. Two days before he died, Dad had been shoring up the eroded banks there with broken concrete and what we called “river rocks.” He went back into town thinking he had heat exhaustion. Two days later he died instantly of a heart attack while taking a shower. The so-called river I now knew to be part of the Middle Alamosa--the putty-colored rocks a remembrance of eruptions that made the Rocky Mountains and sealed off the plains creating the Ogallala Aquifer, the seepages of draws.

I take these rocks to be a shrine, the last work he did on our place.

He was a man of few words, Bob Armitage—quiet, inscrutable. Sometimes he appeared a total mystery. Yet he was a great storyteller and in his own way convivial, certainly well-liked and respected. He could tell a story, straight-faced, and if it was funny or ironic, keep that poker face to the very end—even though tears of laughter welled in his eyes giving him away. I connect my own yearning to communicate with him with that pull I feel beyond the draws to the distant canyons and Canadian, both seemingly out of reach. Now I know my dad and I had a wordless bond—that of looking caringly at the object of our affections, the land before us. The silence and the space that inhabited was our story. And ours, such a modest place—those draws—our own habit of landscape.

The plowing made me see time differently: looking back while moving forward. I checked over my shoulder to see if the rows were straight even as I moved ahead through the unplowed ground. The comings and goings connect like the wishbone of draws joined out north. Memory isn’t about the past, it’s about shaping a continuity. I got off, shimmied down the creek bank where I parted the barbed wire and climbed over. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. How does the book explore the connections between family history, prehistory, flora and fauna and what is the effect of this interweaving?

2. The book is about a little known area of the llano estacado which covers part of New Mexico and Texas. Are the themes and ideas applicable to your life or where you live--that is, to people and environments outside of the book's setting?

3. How may we experience a deeper connection with the places we inhabit as inspired by this book?

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