Day 10 - San Angelo, TX to the Palo Duro Canyon of TX

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

I awoke to a pleasant morning in San Angelo. Having entered San Angelo under darkness the evening prior, I drove back out of town a few miles and doubled back to see some of the countryside I had missed the evening before...

Proceeding north from San Angelo...

Sterling...

Proceeding on... north, across the Llano Estacado...

Entering Lubbock and proceeding to the Buddy Holly Center...

Inside the Buddy Holly Center...

The Fender Stratocaster and Gibson J-200 that Buddy played...

To Buddy Holly Plaza in downtown Lubbock...

Buddy Holly Plaza...

My Gibson Dove. In the movie Open Range, "Boss" Spearman (Robert Duvall) says to Charlie Postlewait (Kevin Costner) "I like a pistol with some heft." Me to. I also like acoustic guitars with heft, like the Gibson J-200 that Buddy played and the Gibson Dove that I'm now so proud of. My fondness for hefty acoustics, especially those with a little color, was formed by cowboy guitars, Hummingbirds, and the look and sound of Buddy Holly's J-200. I played "Well All Right" and "Words of Love" at this fine place...

Reflecting upon Buddy Holly over a cup of coffee...

Leaving Lubbock... continuing north on the Llano Estacado toward the Palo Duro...

Advertisement for the Big Texan, in Amarillo (where I planned to enjoy a luncheon the following day)...

The Palo Duro Canyon - another place that I dreamed of visiting for a long time...

In Dead Man's Walk, the earliest action in the Lonesome Dove series, Gus, Call, Bigfoot Wallace and the rest of the troop with Colonel Caleb Cobb leading were on an expedition to capture Santa Fe that took them onto the Llano Estacado and to the Palo Duro Canyon:

"Once they passed through the Narrows the great plain spread west before them. Though they had been on the prairie for weeks, none of them were prepared for the way the sky and the earth seemed to widen, once they rose onto the Llano Estacado. After a day or two on the llano the meaning of distance seemed changed. The great plain, silent and endless, became the world. In relation to the plain, they felt like ants...

On their third day on the plain, they saw that there was a difference in the horizon ahead. None of them, though, could puzzle the difference out. The clouds seemed closer to the surface of the ground. Gus was the first to note something strange: not far ahead, a hawk had dived at a rabbit or a quail, and yet the hawk didn't swoop on its prey and lift it. The hawk kept going, as if it had dived into a hole.

Ten minutes later they came to the lip of the Palo Duro Canyon, and the mystery was explained. The hawk hadn't dived into a hole; it had dived into the canyon, which looked to be several miles across, and so many miles long that they couldn't see the western end of it. Hundreds of feet below them buffalo were feeding in long grass."

As I approached the lip of the Palo Duro Canyon, the above passage from Dead Man's Walk was in my mind...

My camp, near the lip of the Palo Duro. I've made some good camps in my travels, but this was surely one of the best...

Walking around the edge of the canyon near my camp...

Sundown at Camp Palo Duro...

In the evening I sat outside Bigfoot in the darkness with what looked like a million stars above. I could hear coyotes in the distance, but other than that it was silent. I had re-read Lonesome Dove nine months earlier back in Charlotte, at Strawberry Hill, and there I also read Dead Man's Walk, quoted above. The memory of sitting on the couch reading about the rangers and the Palo Duro while Mother sat reading in her recliner came to me. I recalled describing bits and pieces of the action in those books to Mother, and I remembered knowing then that I would someday - probably pretty soon - pass through the Palo Duro. On this evening, sitting outside at the Palo Duro Canyon, what I wouldn't have given to have been able to tell Mother about it...