West Texas is a sunrise in the Palo Duro Canyon, a Sunday at Lake Meredith and a sunset in the Chisos Mountains of Big Bend National Park.
It’s St. Patrick’s Day in Shamrock, the Fourth of July at the Texas Cowboy Reunion in Stamford and Christmas stranded in a Panhandle snowstorm.
It’s a monument to a mule at Muleshoe, a jack rabbit statue at Odessa and an 11-foot tall roadrunner named Paisano Pete at Fort Stockton.
West Texas is oil boom and oil bust and thousands of oil pumps nodding like metal insects in a prarie ritual.
It’s an Amarillo blizzard, a Sanderson flood, a Wichita Falls tornado, a South Plains duster, a High Plains hail storm and everywhere a target for killer heat waves and dry spells.
It’s an aversion to governmental handouts and cold shoulder to government interference.
West Texas is a beer bust on the Concho River and a drug bust on the Rio Grande. It’s Longhorns and longnecks, Friday night football and Saturday night fever.
It’s Ace Reid’s cowboy cartoons and Stanley Marsh’s buried Cadillacs and an abandoned shell of a drive-in theater whose crumbling marquee once read: “Gone With the Wind.”
It’s the tree at Notrees and the impact of Impact, the tiny shadow town that brought liquor to Abilene, a city of churches and church schools, the buckle on the Bible Belt.
That is a great article......would you send the rest of it to me?