Early morning in Clarendon, Texas, ten days after spring equinox. I’m up hours before dawn and thirty minutes later I’m riding US Highway 287 south and east off the Llano Estacado, one of the largest mesas in North America, 38,000 square miles of empty High Plains sky and flat-earth sprawl. The early morning darkness is quiet and soothing, the highway almost deserted. A mug of hot black tea and music made for driving, the rhythms of Portico Quartet keeping time with my cruise control drift: Art in the Age of Automation, Monument, Terrain—electronic instrumentals, jazz-tinged and ambient, alto sax dissolving in the great black void. I’m relaxed and happy but alert for animal eyeshine—a “bright tapestry” that could appear as a deer rises out of the roadside shadow to meet my headlights in an unwelcome way. I keep my speed down. On through those magical, numinous hours that bracket this High Plains sunrise, on through west Texas towns fading into ruin: Memphis and Quanah, both down more than 30% in population since 1980. An occasional flashing yellow traffic light along with ramshackle homes, boarded-up storefronts, quick stop-gas stations, and churches—the latter either newer prefab metal or older, worn brick. But the darkness hides the worst of the human ruin, while cell phone towers flash red and lonely in the last sweet touch of night. The road remains quiet, the tea hot, the music lovely. I’m cradled in solitude, but I’m not lonely. To the east, the horizon breaks into something other than stars. The deep dark transitions to a faint whisper of light, and then to color: black to charcoal gray, on through indigo, purple, and gunmetal blue, the strata flaring orange and red as the sun climbs through civil twilight. The morning blossoms, shards of light cutting through broken clouds. The sky trends azure. Swallows arc and slice into the day, above creek beds running dry. The Llano Estacado was Dust Bowl country and ninety years later another deep drought is only partly disguised by the first green flush of spring. Giant wind farms stalk across the land, and huge blades spin their morning of praise: all the irony of renewable energy in MAGA-country, while scattered heads of pumpjack oil rigs still bow to our Carboniferous dreams. A friend once defined “boring” as “I-80 through western Nebraska,” but I’m drawn to those High Plains spatials, all horizon and distance and sky, fractals of space and desire. I’ll never grow tired of this aching country’s endless dream-vectors, so perfect for long, solo drives—spooling off mile after mile after mile, tires riding smooth and steady over new asphalt, or maybe a rhythmic slap against older concrete seams, as something intoxicating opens up inside me. And after all my decades of cross-country drives (thirty-plus transits and counting) I’m still up for those fourteen- and even sixteen-hour days, movement punctuated only by stops for gas and bathroom breaks, plus (perhaps) a mid-day run and short sleep. And it occurs to me that for whatever reason I’m most often drawn to predawn drives while crossing the High Plains, within a few longitudinal degrees of the 100th meridian, although this calling might also work its way into my heart in the Midwest. O this highway, this movement, this desire—even if there’s almost no shortgrass prairie left in west Texas, even if there are too many agricultural fields in places where they shouldn’t be, center-pivot fantasies draining the Ogallala Aquifer dry. And south and east of the Llano Estacado, great stands of mesquite rise into the light. They serve as both metaphor and witness for what humans have recently done to this part of the world: the bison and prairie dogs almost gone, and wildfires, too. And on the Llano Estacado the Comanches now are mostly a memory. I try to maintain some separation from all that’s gone wrong here, to keep my High Plains roll mostly happy. And yet for all the quiet ecstasy of the morning drive, the wonderful intersection of movement and horizon and space and light, of music and hot tea tannins, I still squirm a bit in my comfortable driver’s seat, which is no easy chair. For although I keep my speed down and try to nurse 33 miles per gallon out of my Subaru Forester, I know that I am part of our hydrocarbon-fueled nightmare, the same one that fuels my drive. It’s easy to channel Greta Thunberg (“The bigger your carbon footprint, the bigger your moral duty.”) and the latest IPCC Climate Change Report, with its conclusion that a human-induced global warming of 1.1°Celsius has propelled “changes to the Earth’s climate that are unprecedented in recent human history.” And then there are those CO2 data from Mauna Loa in Hawaii: atmospheric concentrations up from 316 ppm in 1958 to 420 ppm in 2022. I understand these things, and yet I still drive much more than I should. I don’t have a gas-guzzling pickup or monster motor home, I give to environmental organizations, I try to keep the heat down and the air conditioning up, I recycle plastic, blah, blah, blah— but I love where the driving takes me (to the West, to friends and family, and if I’m fortunate, to the edge of ecstasy). And for me it’s just not practical to go the electric vehicle route, given their reduced range and general inability to get around on rough roads. Thus, my personal contribution to hypocrisy and the human condition: the gap between what I know should be done and what I actually do. I plead guilty, as self-charged.
So many conflicting emotions and ideas swirl round and through me as I drive on. By 8:30 or so, about an hour after sunrise, the most magical part of the new day has passed. The roads are busier, the sky turned dull and dirty-white and laced with high cirrus. Shortly after the morning trends mundane I stop and refuel, then press on toward Dallas-Fort Worth and whatever future Mississippi holds for me. The world is in flames and off I go, feeding the fire.
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AuthorI am a professor emeritus of Environmental Science and Ecology at SUNY Brockport. What began in 2017 as a sabbatical blog continues in a haphazard way, as the spirt moves me and time allows. The focus, though, remains the same - the natural world, in all of its complexity and beauty, and our relation to it. Archives
November 2023
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