I have mixed feelings about: The immensity of flat

No Man's Land

In The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Stories of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, Timothy Egan uses a variety of phrases that began to resonate with me after I started living in West Texas. He spends a great deal of time describing "No Man's Land," the central area most severely affected by the Dust Bowl, comprising mainly the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, southeastern Colorado, and southwestern Kansas. He truly communicates the unique and harsh landscape with expressions like, "immensity of grass," "engulfed by dust," "naked, exposed," "wilderness of flat." I have chosen to combine a few of these terms to talk about the "immensity of flat" that characterizes West Texas.


When I first moved to Indiana in 2005, one of the things I missed most of all was terrain. (The second was open water, but I will come back to that in a later post.) Growing up in Ticonderoga and going to college in Plattsburgh, you tend to orient yourself based on where the mountains and lakes are in relation to you. The mountains are always to the west and the lake is always to the east. In the Midwest, I was disoriented by the lack of any natural markers in any direction. I remember Katie Elaine and I saw a beautiful block of purple clouds on the horizon one night that looked like a mountain range and we just stared in home sick amazement. I missed the Adirondacks so much.

Preparing to land at LBB

Welp, I didn't know flat until I moved to Lubbock. Indiana is positively topographic in comparison to West Texas. There is nothing, just absolutely nothing, for hundreds of miles, in all four directions. On the way to Lubbock in my U-Haul, my mom and I were on the road between Amarillo and Lubbock, on the final home stretch, and my mom turned to me, completely serious, and said, "Honey, are you sure about this?" It was too late at that point, but she was right to be concerned. I didn't like the flat. I didn't like having no towns and no houses and, even, no lights for miles in the distance. It was too much. Too big, too immense, too far.

But the other night I was driving to a friend's graduation party north of town and I had to go on I-27 and then down a couple of country roads. As I was driving, I found myself grinning like a fool as a looked out across the distant sunset and miles of fields. I had my arm out the window and my hair blowing in the breeze. I kept taking big deep breathes and soaking in the wide open space. And I could not wipe the huge smile off my face. When I got to my friend's house, I just stood at the edge of their fields looking across the landscape. There is something simultaneously hideous and beautiful about the immensity of flat in West Texas. It is intimidating and inspiring. Sometimes it makes me feel like I'm standing still, even when I'm driving 90mph, and other times I feel like I could take flight anywhere in any direction. My beloved Great Aunt Irene used to say in her thick Hungarian accent that she loved her house in rural Marseilles, Illinois because should could "see them coming for her." Who exactly was "coming for her" remains unclear, but I definitely understand her sentiment. The space can be comforting.

My favorite natural aesthetic is green and blue. Round, lush green mountains, covered in evergreens, oaks, and maples, veined with narrow white water rivers, sitting beside big, clear blue lakes. Welcome to my world. I am spoiled by the Adirondack Park. I briefly dated a guy in Lafayette who laughed at me when I said, rivers are blue. Apparently the Wabash had infected his sad, boring soul. He thought rivers were supposed to be brown. Maybe that it true in some places, but I preferred the Upper Hudson River, Bouquet River, Schroon River, Ausable River, etc. etc. This is all to say, brown and gray are NOT my preferred aesthetic. Lubbock is defined by brown. Land, sky, water - generally brown. I did not warm to the natural beauty of West Texas immediately.

Over time, though, I have come to enjoy it. I look forward to the trees and hills and mountains of the northeast, but I will miss the immensity of flat in Lubbock, just a little.