I drove across The Land of Enchantment following big, mighty I-40 withs it's dilapidated winding running mate Route 66 alongside. The pine poked mountains and chapparal encrusted hills diminish mile by mile until the Land of Enchantment gives way to the grasslands and barely registering swells of west Texas. Even though the chilly temperature last night chased me out of the mountains, driving in the flatlands is something else. All day long the temperature has been swaying between 97, 96, 99. Whenever I pull over and climb out of the car, gusts of hot air push me back a little. I have to lean in slightly just to walk forward.
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I'm in the top hat of Texas. I don't think anyone calls it that. I think most people just refer to it as the Oklahoma panhandle, even though the panhandle is really attached to Oklahoma, leaving Texas with a top hat. No Texan in his right mind would ever be caught in a top hat, but I don't care. If congress really had the foresight in the 1800s, they would have put the pan upside down, the handle sticking out, and supply geography students with the perfect depiction of the Texas state hat, the baseball cap instead. I'm just saying.
Anyway, the buttonier of the Texas Top Hat is Amarillo, tied with the ribbons of I-40 and I-27. Late afternoon and a restless dog, I pulled off and down into town and after a few blocks south of the highway drove up to Amarillo College. All mid-century buildings, two or three stories brick with thin ribs of dull steel, steel trussed roofing, high and wide steel and glass windows. A flat, grassy campus, dotted with walnut trees.
I pulled up to a curb on a park and got out with the dog. Hot persistent wind blew all around us, through thte trees into our our faces. Linus shook himself a couple of times. I thought about a bathroom hand drier.
We walked around the park - no one else was around. Maybe because of the heat, maybe because the seemester was over. Though, in the center of the park was a bandstand or covered stage, and sitting under itwere a couple three students, two guys and a girl, dressed in black with tats, hanging out. The breakfast club of the student body.
Surrounding the campus were homes, one story, sometimes two on tiny bare plots of grasss. The dog and I walked down one of the streets. No cars no pedestrians, garage doors closed, windows covered by lacy curtains. We moved into an alley that ran behind the homes and no sooner did we get in there than a ll the dogs left in the backyards to bake smelled us and started barking. Some came running up rickety white fences and pushed their noses through. Linus is usually a cool customer when it comes to barking dogs, but wit
h what seemed like an ambush of watch dogs, he looked one way or the other, ears up, probably wondering who would come out first. We picked up our pace through the gauntlet and came out on a streetthat had no sidewalks. The roadway was hot, so Linus headed to the edge of grass and when we made it to the corner, there was the house that made sense of Amarillo: a onestory, peaked roof house outfitted with a few plastic chairs on a tiny cement front porch. And posted outside on the lawn, a homemade warning sign: He's Either a Madman or a Poet.
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Made my way into downtown Amarillo, because ... well, how many people actually make it to downtown Amarillo. The answer apparently is not many. Two one way streets, flanked by and handful more on either side. Old shuttered shops, their mid-century designs this time looked weary and forlorn. A handful of twenty story stone skyscrapers rose up out of down town, mainly banks capitalized by livestock and agriculture. On the radio, a bulletin pridefully announced that the Amarillo Symphony led by would be performing Beethoven's 7th Symphony this Saturday night. Who knew? They also plan to take on Mahler's Titan Symphony leter in the fall. Here's their website: http://www.amarillosymphony.org/
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