day 9 -- lamesa to big bend NP

I wasn't up for the hoedown after the rodeo, though I'm sure there was square dancing. and kid rock. so an early start instead for big bend NP...not exactly on the way, but the sort of place that's so far out of the way that it's hard to imagine heading back there again. so. back onto the cotton plains, which started to sprout pumpjacks and derricks in the permian basin pretty much at the same time that cultivated fields gave way to low texas scrub. the stench of oil was already in the air as far north as post (one town up from lamesa, founded by the cereal magnate cw post in a cloud-seeding and grain-growing scheme...), but this was now full-on oil country. I wanted to spin through midland, the boom capital of texas oil, and it didn't disappoint. blue glass and concrete and local conglomerate drilling headquarters and banks and health centers, the sort of exurban sprawl that I hadn't seen since cincinnati. the only tinted glass I'd seen was the 'dark glass' car-pimping outfit in pampa...partly because I've avoided cities, but there was nothing like this affluence in similar-sized towns. a truly towering downtown that dwarfed the town itself, so oil-fueled commerce linked into much more than midland. but then onto odessa, midland's much-more-texas twin...that is, where the people who work(ed) on the rigs -- not the bankers and executives -- live. this is all chronicled in bissinger's 'friday night lights,' (the book, not the tv show), and I wanted to see if this is overdrawn. obviously I didn't see enough (that is, see a football game) to confirm it, but it looked about right. I can say that all the down-home breakfast spots I passed up in midland were replaced by a sea of crappy chains in odessa. so I missed breakfast and settled for some greasy fried burritos at a burger joint in the ghost town of ft stockton, a place that bragged of burgers made since 1959 but in a not-so-recently converted subway -- the booths were still yellow, and the stock nyc transit maps were still on the wall.

from odessa started down US 385 to the park. a remarkably shiny new road that didn't lead much of anywhere but the park...even though there's another road that parallels it not far to the west, SR118 out of alpine. signs along it marked US385 as part of a mexican-american freight corridor, but that really wasn't clear given that there are no crossings from the park. it does intersect I-10 and US90, both of which lead east and west to border crossings, so I guess that's it...but odessa/midland are an odd inland destination. in any case, the country was big-sky stunning, especially since I had to calculate some more storm avoiding. I'll skip that one since I've already told that story, but once again that was high excitement...was sore proud that I split two systems this time and outran a third with only five minutes of rain-riding (and no hail, crucially). pretended this was some nifty maneuvering, but with the twists in the road I had no real idea how it would turn out...one moment it looked like I was safely clear, then one turn and I was headed straight for the middle. in anycase it worked out since there was zero cover. this was severely treeless country, the bottom of the immense staircase I descended from pampa downward (or at least that's what I figured). that's one of the grandest aspects of the plains, that there are always swells and rises that afford sweeping panoramas once in a while before you drop back to the flat horizon. the sweet sweet grass of oklahoma and upper texas was replaced by the just plain arid smell of the south, with the first cactus-like plants showing somewhere south of ft stockton. only occasional cows on the ranches now, and infrequently roadrunners. geology galore (pointed out by informative texas historical markers), from appalachian-age ground-down and scarred hills running SW-NE to newer hills folded out of the limestone that had covered the older formation (running perpendiculat from SE-NW) to the most recent volcanic intrusions. in some sense it's surprising that any texas kid would want to be anything but a geologist, meteorologist, or cattleman. the sky is right there, you can see clouds and rain developing constantly...as is witnessed by my enduring fascination with texas rainstorms here. and the broken and upturned rocks of the mountains are right there too, never invisible and impossible to ignore.