Written By: O.C. fotoguy
O.C. fotoguy
To Be Escaped From
Warmer Here
Beefing Up at a Fed Lot
Where the Antelope Play
Family, High School Senior, Wedding Photos on the Beach and more!
I was tired of driving a straight line. Some parts of US 40 are concrete and the “mortar” joints felt like they’d jar my fillings loose. Boring, so I got off and headed north west before I got to Amarillo, Tex., on one of those little grey lines (routes) on the map. It looked like a good secondary road with a center line and paved. I set the cruise to 60mph and sat back to see something new.
The town of Pampa, Tex., is in the distance and the nowherelands of Southern Utah are farther and where I’ll be tomorrow. All I can see for miles are endless brown treeless grassy plains dotted with oil wells and few scraggly cattle. Occasionally there’s a gully where a grove of scrub trees eke out enough moisture to exist. None have leaves or buds and it’s March 12. A creek called Red Mud winds through the bleak landscape. There’s a sand and gravel mine over there. A dry fork of the Red River and some kind of manufacturing plant, maybe natural gas, is along the road. The road bypasses the town of Lefers and heads on to Pampas. I like to look around in General Stores in small towns. It’s like walking through a revolving door and coming out in the 1950s, but I can’t stop at all of them.
I wonder how far I can see, maybe 10-20 miles each way. The sky is blue and the air is clear. Several farms are using old rail road cars for out buildings and I thought I saw an old railroad bridge. There must’ve been rail service here. I’m entering the town of Pampa, population 17,881. A junk yard greets me, then a school, the Lone Star County Club Dance Hall & Saloon is closed (I’ll bet it could tell a story!), the Coyote Trucking Co., but no signs of life, and Sign Shop; everything is dusty drab except the shop’s bright red and yellow sign, but still no people. A few restaurants, businesses, traffic signals but all dominated by dust. Look the wrong way and you’ll miss the reason people call this home. I guess I looked the wrong way!
I’m on the northwest side of town now and there’s numerous oil wells every hundred yards or so in all directions. All this drabness and I’m starting to see piles of snow along the road, a bad sign for a shorts and sandals kinda guy. There are cattle feed lots that stretch so far they defy getting all of them in a photo as I pass through Dalhart and I set my sights on Raton, N.M. Maybe I’ll be there in time to see the ACC basketball tournament on TV. Woops, no MegaMart in Raton where I can park my RV, but there’s my bank that is all over the country with a sign in the parking lot that says “Customers Only.” That’s me! So I’m there for the night. There’re restaurants here in Raton with TVs, but no bar, one with a bar, but no TV, and a bar with a TV, but no food and the TV isn’t on the game, anyhow. Well, so much for showing up in a new place, hoping, but not finding what I want. I doubt if the people here no what the ACC is and maybe not even what a basketball is!
Tomorrow I must decide whether it’s too cold to try to enjoy southern Utah now or wait several weeks and head for Tucson much farther south and warmer. Warmth is what it’s all about in my winter meanderings. The snow scared me. I’ll see if I’m cold tonight sleeping here in the camper. It breaks the wind, but there’s no furnace. The lantern warms it up a lot, but I turn it off when I go to bed. In the morning as I opened my eyes I found it was warmer in the refrigerator than in my camper. There’s no decision to make. Head south!!! As I travel I usually don’t have access to the 24/7 TV Fox/CNN bombardment of news or continual weather forecasts, so I’m a little out of contact, but I did know that the winter was colder everywhere in the U.S. than it should’ve been, so a needed adjustment of my course was no surprise
I turned abruptly south down US 25 towards Albuquerque through miles and miles of rolling hills peppered with herds of prong horn antelopes and past Santa Fe and the Sangre De Cristo Mountains making note that someday when I’m not escaping snow and cold I need to stop. Deming, N.M., with all those TexMex eateries, Aravaca, Ariz. where the hippies went and forgot to come back, and Ajo, Ariz., another place few people go - here I come. I know it’ll be warmer in the cactus forest, hummingbird oasis, and land of the Chiricahua frog. Now after the country endured the coldest longest winter ever we’re having our hottest longest summer, then last Monday night it set a record for cold. Amazing stuff!!!
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