Texas Trouble

The minute we were finally able to get off the ridge again, we did what any sensible folks would do: we pointed the car west and declared it a road trip. Texas, no less. Land of cowboy legends, rolling hills of bluebonnets, and cattle with horns so wide they require their own zip codes. Neither of us had been through Texas in years, and we were primed for cinematic grandeur—dusty sunsets, grazing herds, maybe a Marlboro-man silhouette or two.

Yeah … not so much.

Now, in fairness, we were barreling along the Interstate, which is not exactly the scenic back gate to sprawling ranch country. Still, you’d think a cow might wander into view out of professional obligation. But no. Not a single longhorn. Not even a shorthorn. No horns of any kind. And apparently, we were nowhere near bluebonnet territory either, because the only flora on display for mile after mile were stubby, sand-colored shrubs that looked like tumbleweeds in the larval stage. It wasn’t desert, exactly. There were no majestic dunes or sweeping sandscapes. More like the earth had broken out in a persistent case of scrub-brush acne.

You know what was plentiful? Warehouses. Endless, hulking, rectangular warehouses. And hundreds—no, thousands—of massive oil tanks. Parking lots filled with crane trucks. And then more parking lots filled with white F-150/250/350s. All white. Not beige. Not navy. Not even rebellious red. White. Row upon identical row, like some massive dystopian dealership where individuality had been outlawed and replaced with fleet pricing.

We did see a few oil rigs, though nowhere near the fever-dream numbers I’d imagined. Every so often, one would be flaring. It would shoot up a plume of fire and smoke that looked like the land itself had lit a match. I’m told that’s a safety measure, but when you’re driving past what appears to be a permanent ground-level volcano, “safety” is not the word that springs to mind.

Then came the windmills. And here Texas truly leaned into irony. There were the classic old Western ones: wooden, skeletal, creaky-looking things straight out of every cowboy movie ever made. They stood beside and beneath their modern descendants: gargantuan, sleek, white turbines turning with slow authority over the oil fields. Fossil fuel kingdom, meet renewable energy overlord. It felt like watching a historical reenactment staged by the future.

And then, an unexpected sensory revelation: oil smells bad. Really bad. I suppose folks who live and work around it grow accustomed, the way we do to sawdust and chain-saw exhaust back on the ridge. But by the time we rolled into Big Spring, Texas, I was fantasizing about my old Covid N-95 masks like they were luxury spa accessories. The air had texture. Weight. Personality. None of it pleasant.

Eventually—gloriously—the scent and the structures thinned. The warehouses faded. The tanks disappeared. Civilization itself seemed to loosen its grip. The land stretched wider, emptier, quieter, until there was nothing left but distance and sky and that peculiar Western loneliness that hums just under the horizon.

Out there, with nothing but scrub and wind and miles of nobody, you could absolutely feel the plaintive cowboy lyric rise up: I’m so lonesome, I could die.