Driving to Lubbock/Lost in the Desert
Kevin Cummings
It was about a hundred miles north of San Angelo that I lost my way.
The rolling hills of Central Texas had given way to the unrelenting weight of the Western sky, and jutting out in defiance of the rest of the landscape, the plateau of the high plains cut the horizon in two. Out in the distance, the wiry frames of a few trees clinging to the hard-packed clay marked the places where people still sought to scratch a living from their family farm. Though, from the looks of the houses, the land had relinquished the last of its rewards a number of years ago, leaving behind the scars of agriculture and irrigation to tell the stories of the seasons changing from life to loss.
A lone state highway wandered its way across the empty places on the map, connecting the shriveling towns long-forgotten by the interstate. Clapboard buildings crowd around the one artery that runs through the center of town; here and there, houses seem to have vomited their contents onto the yard; while an old courthouse lays in a pile of itself on the square. There are no natives here. Even the tumbleweed - made famous by romanticized ideas of country and cowboys that leave out all the parts about desolation and loneliness - is not originally from here. Like the others, they were carried here on the winds, lo and searching, from somewhere else, caught - some momentarily, some sprouting roots - here in branches or fences or in the tangle of sidewalks and alleyways that seem to tie this whole country down to keep it from being blown away.
I pulled off the road into the parking lot of a Stripes gas station. Not wanting to ask for directions, I bought a road map and a pack of cigarettes. Lighting one with the stolen pack of matches from the dashboard, I exhaled and watched the smoke curl around my hand before being taken away on the wind. In their relentless rush to always somewhere else, cars sped by on the highway bypass at the edge of the town. Serious passengers stare forward into nothing, fleeing everything; pulled by mile markers and county lines. The crackle of dried tobacco leaves behind ash and stained fingers, while I watch them pass.
I wonder: how many of these people have missed their exits? How many stories can be told in cigarette burns in cheap upholstery? How many have lost their way in parking lots just off the highway, while driving to Lubbock, and wondered how they ended up here?
Deciding that I needed help, I made my way back into the store. The clerk - dingy overalls holding together a frame that appeared as if it were fraying at the seam, gray stubble bristled at the edge of a sharp chin, and a stare as if he could see some far off place across the plains that withdrew at every step he took forward - lifted only his eyes from a worn-out catalogue that was spread on the counter. A bell tied to the door handle in a loose knot of twine clattered against the glass pane as it shut behind me.
“W’can I do for ya,” he asked in a voice as course and dry as prairie grass; neither friendly nor unfamiliar.
“Directions,” I said, thumbing the flintlock of a lighter that sat in multicolored rows.
“Depends on where yur headid,” he replied. His eyes had gone back to scanning the pages, though it was clear the words were only to be seen, not read.
“Home.” The word felt like dead-weight in my mouth as the single syllable fell like a sigh from my lips. I forced a laugh, hoping to cover the honest with humor until the lines blurred and it was conveyed as a poor joke.
“A man should know where his home is,” he said without falsity and ended with a sigh that gave his words finality and set the bristles on his chin to gnashing.
And for one of the first times that I can remember, I did not have a response.
I bought the lighter and quickly left. The door bell and the man’s words rattling in my head. I pointed the car toward the place where the escarpment tore the horizon in two and the sun’s slouch set the evening sky on fire.
In a few hours, the lights of Lubbock could be seen swelling up in the distance. The helter-skelter towers along the main drag were in varying states of disrepair as if they were wrenched inch by inch against the dirt that sought to reclaim them, until the men who built them had either given up or were forgotten. And in this way I pulled into the place that longed to be the hometown of everyone who ever got up and left. Into a family of strangers.