“A Habit of Landscape: The Draws”

Excerpt: Part II

This explained the cracked concrete one-lane overpass near that highway. Parallel to what is now the interstate was a one-lane road called the Ozark Trail, starting in St. Louis and running to California, a precursor of Route 66. The overpass must have served as a water crossing. Earlier it had been an Indian trail, the Indians originating the best overland routes. I occasionally found flint from the Alibates Flint Quarry, northeast of Amarillo, suggesting this was a trade route—the red, white, and purple-streaked dolomite highly valued for its strength and beauty. The Ozark Trail was built and used primarily in the l920s. The prehistoric and historic Indians traded from as early as the Clovis period (1500 B.C.E.) to the l880s. Likely the Armitages traveled the Ozark Highway when it was the only roadway from Arkansas west into Vega. On one walk there I leaned over the pipe barrier on top and checked the swallows’ nests underneath. After rains cattle liked to stomp around in the shaded pooling underneath; tracks of antelope and skunk suggested other visitors. I liked to imagine what went on here at night when no one was looking.

Downstream, now that I could imagine it as one, the creek widened and a Civilian Conservation Corps dam, concrete and native stone, hung perilously over eroded banks. Some corpsman had scratched “l936” into the concrete on top. I liked to swab up the Triops that slew in the muddy areas below. Their date of origin: circa 300 million years ago to the present, Jurassic survivors. Dinosaur shrimp some people call them. A living fossil, they hardly have changed since the Jurassic period. Their eggs remain dormant for years, hatching only when there is sufficient water and proper temperature. Pentimento, you remind us that something always lives below, contemporary life a remnant in your twirling tentacles.

Catching and keeping: that’s what folks tried to do with the water. My dad built yet another dam more recently behind the aging CCC one. Part of the reason was conservation for watering cattle, but he also stocked the pond with catfish, building a feeder he could send into the waters, like Moses’s basket into the bulrushes. After my dad’s death, the rusting of the feeder, and droughts that dried the pond for years, I had forgotten the catfish. But after a rain, Triops-like, I saw them flopping over the check dam, resurfacing in a wet season. I tried to catch them with an old fishnet rummaged out of the garage to return them to the now-full pond. When most of them got away, I realized you can’t stop the flow.

And yet the settlers had tried. Dams and fences and corrals and railroads and country roads. I, too, wanted to save something of my father, the emblem of his love of this place, by keeping the catfish from escaping with the water downstream. Tom Green, on the ranch just north, had a one-room camp where he used to escape to nap and read Paris Match. He had cookouts there and sometimes invited us out. The iron cook stove was a beauty and so heavy it took three men to wrestle it into its place. During one of the high rises—Tom’s retreat is on the Middle Alamosa—the iron stove was washed away, later discovered mired in the muddy banks of the Canadian. Water will have its way.

When my father died our family’s relationship to the land shifted. I still ran the roads but touched ground like a worry stone. My mother and I looked at each other and wondered how we would run the farm. My brother was in Omaha and later Houston, far away, and already removed from the necessary knowledge of farm programs, grazing leases, and grain prices. I had only indirect experience. Mother had driven a grain truck during the first harvests in the l930s, grinding the gears in such a way that Dad said she took two inches off the roadway.

Hers was a mostly rosy view of the particulars—sun-baked skin, cow piss, and broken machinery—of running a small farm. When a PBS film crew came to record interviews with local survivors of the Dust Bowl, my mom’s story was not the expected page out of The Grapes of Wrath. Rather than remember dust pneumonia, jack rabbit roundups, and Black Sundays, she told love stories. Her favorite (and mine): to get the farm work done Dad had to plow by the tractor lights late at night, after he had gotten off work from the bank. She lovingly wound herself around his feet on the tractor platform, behind the pedals, to keep him company, sleeping as he wheeled through the dust into the night.

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“A Habit of Landscape: The Draws” is an excerpt of Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place, by Shelley Armitage (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). It is reprinted by permission of the author and press.