An Excerpt From Llano Estacado: An Island in the Sky
"Readings," by Sandra Scofield with Jessica Scofield.
A photograph says: Look at this.
It evokes in me an immediate response (I know this place; I like this photograph) and then something ephemeral and idiosyncratic. Call it meaning.
I tell stories, and I look for them everywhere.
My family moved from Wichita Falls to Odessa, Texas, in 1954, when I was in seventh grade.
My aunt and uncle had lived in various West Texas towns since their marriage in the late forties, and my little sister and I had spent many summer months with them and my cousins. My uncle was a second-generation Halliburton man, moved from town to town until he was based in Monahans in 1959, where they bought a nice brick house on the last eastside street. Not far on the other side of the back fence was the million-barrel site, a huge failed crude oil reservoir.
In Wichita Falls, we had lived with my grandmother in an old northside neighborhood that felt like a small town. I rode the bus to parochial school. Most weekends we went to Devol, Oklahoma, to the dry-land wheat farm of my grandmother’s parents. My landscape was a trio of dusty yards: school, North Lamar Street, farm.
West Texas scared me. It was vast and windy and dry. Going west out of Odessa, we passed through a cloud of soot from a carbon-black plant. Once I saw a long scarf of tarantulas scurrying across the highway. We lived in a series of rentals on arid lots on streets with no trees. In Hadicol Camp with my aunt’s family over a summer, we kids watched for rattlers and we bathed, sequentially by age, in a washtub. We never went outside the circle of trailers, like children in a wagon train. Out there was blinding sun and scorching sand, but my aunt liked to drive out in the evenings to look for jackrabbits.
Once my aunt’s family settled down in Monahans, she made a passel of friends. She is the kind of person who makes a good time out of any reason for together. She liked me to visit and kept me close. She hauled me around to the fabric store (she was teaching me to sew), the beauty parlor (set up on a woman’s screened-in porch), the five-and-dime, the gas station. She knew someone everymothers, their children, their pastors. We went to tent revivals, and later the preachers came by to eat cold meat and pie. We dropped by houses where we drank iced tea or Dr. Pepper, and I listened to the women talk about recipes and who was sick or well or off in Dallas for spurious reasons. Sometimes there was a Halliburton party and the men danced with me and said I was getting awful pretty. I listened hard, I remembered.
My mother didn’t do any of these things. She was never well enough for friendship.
In high school, I had a bicycle and I experienced my first taste of freedom, speeding along County Road with my mouth closed tight against gnats and dust. I went to early morning Mass, I went to the library, I rode through the green grassy neighborhoods across town. My mother was sick, I was on my own. The city was on a grid, like a checkerboard. I could ride right to the edge; I turned around when the buildings stopped and the last lots were littered with broken-down cars, equipment, barrels, and trash. Once I headed out day my mother died, a fierce dust storm dirtied the sky, and later that day it rained mud. I left in 1961.
Then my aunt moved to Lubbock, and for nearly forty years I have been flying in to see her, usually in the spring when the skies are wild. We start down into Lubbock and part of me feels as if I’m coming home, though I know I am a visitor. Home is my aunt and cousins and the huge sky and the ache of my losses, but it Home is what feels familiar even if I am out of place. I’ve spent three decades and more in Oregon and Montana, and if you ask me I’ll still say I’m from West Texas. I used to think I would grow up and move away and belong somewhere else, but instead I learned that I am who I was when I used to be there, even if I a good look when I could.
Fields, Shacks
Peter Brown’s “Railroad Shack Home, Fairview, Texas”
A cockeyed shack in a long plowed field sits on a pad of spring green like a placemat. It’s easier to plow around it than to tear it down. There is a real house far across the field on the horizon, and a few mature trees. All the homesteads in these photos are far away, appearing miniscule and tangential to the fields, but aren’t they the reward for the immense labor of the farms? Just above the field, a wisp of cloud seems to have carried the last of something away, whatever was left when the people who lived herecouldn’t take it anymore.
There’s a similar tiny oasis, sans house, in Rick Dingus’s “Old Home Place in a Plowed Field, Posey, Texas.” Straggly trees stick up incongruously in a huge dry field. The patch of green is like a docking station; the manipulated curvature of the horizon suggests a drop into space. It feels as if you’re viewing the landscape through a bubble window.
In Andrew John Liccardo’s “Rangeland, Near Friona, Texas” an old shack leans precipitously, echoing the foreground remnants of fence. There’s a sign on a post, but wecan’t read it and you get the feeling it is probably old news. This field is desolate, because we distant horizon.
Getting By
Peter Brown’s “ David’s Garage, Olton, Texas.”
The sun is glaring, but the man in the photograph—is it picture. Metal blinds on the windows are shut tight. The trees in the background are bare, so it must be winter, but the man uniform darker than the sky.
I notice the glare and the contrast between the whitewashed concrete garage, the black cross, and the darkly-clothed figure. Two cracks run like rivulets down the walls behind the man; the old driveway is cracked and broken. This looks like a hard place to feel at ease. The man agreed to pose for the photograph, but there’s no sign of vanity. The building has his name on it, but he knows his stature is nothing next to the Lord. The cross is a promise: A good man works here, you’ll get an honest deal; and it’s a prayer, too, because some times are hard. Our view of the building, flat face front, might suggest there’s nothing behind it, but the cross is a pledge of faith.
A stranger comes: Can I take your picture? Maybe a man feels some pride, pulls his shoulders back, or maybe he is wary. What’s the picture for?
He wasn’t busy anyway.
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