I know I promised to talk about why Plainview, Texas is like Paris compared to Dimmitt, but my heart’s not in it. Yours wouldn’t be either, if you’d been to Dimmitt.
Suffice it to say that farming (corn, cotton, sorghum, wheat) and feedlots operate on a massive industrial scale in the Panhandle. If you like heavy machinery, chemicals, and miles and miles of Texas, you’re all set. I doubt there’s a natural acre of ground anywhere in those parts, though. The way it comes across to me is societal earth rape: they run so many fertilizers and herbicides through that soil, it doesn’t look like dirt any more. The little towns you go by seem just as impermanent. Maybe that’s why so many people have big trucks!
Be that as it may, I did have a fine time after Dimmitt. From Hereford on west into New Mexico, the land slowly lifted up to meet the sky, and there was green grass everywhere: less farming, more cattle. I had no trouble continuing with my backroads adventure, because if anything, there were even fewer people in New Mexico. Harding County, for example, where I passed through several hours later, has a population density of three persons per square mile. No wonder people there call it the “Big Empty.”
It was beautiful, of course. And I was determined to take NM Rt. 161 from Interstate 25 (which I was on only briefly) on to Rt. 518 and Mora. This was important, as I was running out of gas but figured I could make it that far. First, however, I ended up here after eight miles on what turned out to be a dead-end road:
The truth is, there are TWO consecutive exits for Rt. 161, two miles apart, on I-25! The first one leads to Fort Union National Monument (that’s the old post hospital above), and the second goes to Mora. Don’t ever take it, by the way: there are heaps of broken pavement lying around in big chunks, huge holes, and unannounced sections with nothing but rocks. (You can drive it, but you’ll hate yourself.) At any rate, I’m so glad I made this “mistake,” because how else would I ever have visited the ruins of the largest fort in the Southwest?
The Army built Fort Union in 1851 to protect travelers on the Santa Fe Trail and generally make life difficult for the Comanches, Apaches and the Utes. By the time the railroad came through in 1891, the area was considered “pacified” and the fort abandoned, but what history it must have witnessed. You can still see the ruts from the Santa Fe Trail, of course, since the trail predates the fort by 30 years at least. It’s good to get the landscape in your brain for places like this, to understand the past. If you visit the fort, you’ll understand why the wagons went that way.
(And yes, I did make it to Mora, running on tension and fumes…)
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speaking of “societal earth rape”……
an old buddy of mine (also a bay area native) has gone back to school to get a civil engineering degree (“…to make sure whichever shantytown i end up in after The Collapse will be reasonably well-appointed.”) from sacramento state. one of his main complaints about living in the california central valley is that “…it’s as if they carved out a giant swath of kansas and slapped it down in the middle of the state.” and i had to remind him that in fact that’s pretty much exactly what happened: a thousand years ago the central valley of california was a SINGLE MASSIVE REDWOOD FOREST (think about that for a second or two – the entire valley, a single gigantic arboreal organism), but of course over the last couple centuries ALL of it was razed to the ground to create the swath of industrialized agribusiness it is today.
That’s pretty gruesome, all right. Wow…what I wouldn’t give to be able to see something like that today.