Dalhart

I just finished reading The Worst Hard Time. I'll never look at Dalhart, Texas the same way again.

I was first introduced to Dalhart years ago when I was working for Texas Parks & Wildlife. We were studying the black-tailed prairie dog and I got to spend a few weeks roaming the dry plains around Dalhart looking for dogs. Dalhart isn't much to look at. It's small, run-down, and in the middle of the great nowhere that is the Texas Panhandle. There's not an organic or locally grown anything to be found in town and it's about as redneck and unlovable as a remote Texas town in a sea of flat can get. But for some reason, on some level, I bonded with the place. I've eaten at the handful of restaurants, slept in the fanciest hotel (Holliday Inn), talked to locals, shopped the grocery store, driven all the roads in and around it, shopped one of the two antique shops (it's closed now) and even hiked Lake Rita Blanca State Park, the only thing to do in town besides eat and gas up. In fact my fondest memory of Dalhart was hiking Rita Blanca. It was me and three others from TPWD: a gal named Rain who was up from Austin with me, and two cowboys who lived in the Dalhart area (towns within 100 miles.) I will never forget them. The cowboys were youngish: one in his late 20's, the other in his 30's. They were never without their boots and hats or that good 'ol Texas drawl. They were lean and lanky and mustached. They were on permanent dog huntin' duty while Rain and I were just up for a few weeks to help out with the field work, since we had already done all the preliminary analysis and mapping back at the lab in Austin. After a long, hot day of driving the dusty back roads counting dogs, noting ground cover conditions and the presence of interdependent species such as burrowing owls and ferruginous hawks, we met back up in Dalhart for a steak dinner. Over dinner the subject of food came up (hard to believe, I know.) Rain and I were talking about the virtues of various newfangled urban hippie foods we liked. The cowboys listened intently but quietly. When the subject of turkey bacon came up, one of them very politely broke in with, "What about reg'lar 'ol pork bacon? Don't anyone eat that no more?"

Funny the things we remember, but I'll never forget the inquisitive, slightly pained look on his face when he asked that. Turkey bacon? What's the point? Why replace bacon when the original is so good? And turkey ain't bacon nohow. I think he'd be happy to know that my bacon these days is 100% pork. Locally raised on a small farm, of course. I bet he'd like that too.

We finished off the evening with a hike through the state park just as the sun was setting. The cowboys actually suggested it, and they more or less lead the trip. Turned out they were both avid bird watchers, something I didn't expect. It also turned out that the lake, actually just a small reservoir, has become a major rest stop for migrating water fowl in that arid landscape. As we walked around, the cowboys would raise their binoculars, study a distant point for a moment, and then announce the name of the creature they were viewing. Then they'd pass the binoculars to me or Rain and lean over our shoulders trying to help us locate the bird.

You can see two short blog entries from 1995 (before I actually had a blog - I retyped them from my handwritten field diary) by clicking here and here and there are a few photos here.

I've been back through Dalhart each time I've driven home to Texas, and I always stop for fuel, stretch my legs a bit and visit a few old haunts.

So my point - the book I just finished is about the Dust Bowl, the epicenter of which was Dalhart. The book traces the life and times of numerous families and individuals, the evolution of the Dust Bowl, and how they all came together. It's really cool - and a little frightening - to read such a tragic book that focuses on places you actually know pretty well. Amazing to realize how much has happened in a place most people dismiss as nothing more than a fuel stop on a road trip. It has been easy to poke fun at Dalhart over the years - the rednecks, the feedlots, the hilarity of finding oneself in such a backward place. But I can't do that anymore. I know the history. And one of the main characters in the book still lives in that town. He was a boy, the son of a real-life cowboy who grew up during that nightmarish decade in that hellish prairie town and lived to tell the tale. I know where he was born. I know what he and his family went through. I know how his father died. I know how his father felt about the land that was destroyed and how the son, now and old man, still feels about what the whites did to that prairie and the devastating consequences to the environment, the economy, and the country.

Again I find myself desperately wanting a release - to express emotions that I just can't put into words, and in so trying just sound like a rambling fool.

"The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear."

- Stephen King (Different Seasons)

Maybe I'll just sleep on it.