A bucolic
country landscape. A road meandering no where in particular. Potholes. Cemeteries. Churches.
Cows. Farms. To some observers Texas
may not seem scenic
. But steer your car off the freeway, away
from all that is urban to a
rural back country mostly unchanged from the
Frontier Days of the early settlers and you will find the real
Texas of Myth
and Lore, the Texas of the past that is the source of much that makes Texans
proud and can make non-Texans sometimes cringe. The wanton disregard for
aesthetics. Interesting edibles.
The
use of the open spaces as an all purpose litter
bag. The open brandishing of
firearms and the sometimes indecipherable twang and drawl of a True Texas
accent. The cultural remnants of any of the at least Six
Flags which have flown over Texas.
It was to this unknown
unbeforeseen seemingly godforsaken backwoods section of Texas that Durango moved late in
the last century, decades after the reported arrival of civilization,
generations past the open wounds caused by the War of Northern Aggression as a
Northerner quickly learns to call the Civil War if he dares to speak of that
unpleasantness to a Deep Country
Texan. A tract of worn out looking land that
no sane person would decide to settle on, much less to build a house on, leave
alone an entire town.....this was the new Land
of Durango , a worn frontier
needing to be tamed. A Land filled with descendants of early settlers who
got as far West as these flat badlands of Texas and who did not have the vision or
the energy to continue on to greener pastures further West, even though some
Texan outposts boast delusional mottoes claiming to be "Where the West
Begins". Any person who has
been further West suspects the West begins somewhere else, maybe further north,
maybe even further east, St. Louis perhaps. It seems pure hubris to say the 'West Begins' in Texas. To Western eyes looking across the country
from any of the states bordering either side of the Rockies or touching the
Pacific, Texas seems too far South, and too far East to stake a claim to be
where the West Begins, at least the physical West. Even so, it seems
possible a case could be made that the metaphoric Wild West of Myth may have ended
in Texas, with the
visits to Hell's Half Acre in Fort Worth by Butch and Sundance.
And so,
even though this Land which is Texas does not easily reveal its charms, it is
once more being invaded by settlers, drawn by something uniquely Texan,
that pathological braggadocio, the
raw capitalism, the sheer energy of a place where so
many people make so much money and so many dreams come true while living
on a land that was once described by a Texan as put here special by God on
His last day of building the Earth, when He was tired and didn't have the
energy to make any more mountains, He left the land flat and barren and
void of scenic
beauty, and when He saw what He had done He saw that it was
not good. And so He decided that He must make a type of Man who liked it
this way. And now there are over 20 million of them. Old
Texans, Native
Texans, New Texans.
This is the
story of one new Texan named Durango, reverse migrated via modern covered
wagon from the fabled
God's Country of the Pacific
Northwest. This is
Durango's attempt to come to terms with Texas, to discover
the Charms of Texas, to find the beauty
of Texas, to try to understand
Texas, to clearly focus Durango's . .....
Dusty Trails
