Trip 3 – Panhandle – Day 3 – 14 March

Second night spent in Amarillo.  Still very cold at wake-up in the morning, but clear out.  Here was the day’s itinerary:

 

I am always apprehensive when going into an urban area to find and photograph the courthouse with the bike and me in front of it.  Traffic, obstructions for a photo angle, police – all dial up the stress.  Though so far police have been nothing but helpful – more on that later.

One of the issues for a late evening or early morning photo shoot is the direction of the light.  I got really lucky in Amarillo – the courthouse faces west, so with the rising sun the face is in the shadow.  It so happens that opposite the Amarillo courthouse is a very large mirrored building – it reflects the morning sun right back on to the courthouse, producing a beautiful mottled effect:

From Amarillo begins the day’s quest – first stop, Panhandle:

So in front of the Carson county courthouse is a stone monument that features the Biblical ten commandments, and the following inscription:

This thing dates from 2012.  There’s no doubt about the “christian heritage” of the USA, for good and for ill.  However there is also no doubt that there is supposed to be separation of church and state in this republic in which people are free to choose the religious explanation they prefer.  I find it unseemly, and inappropriate, for a monument such as this to be erected on government property, and contradictory to the separation of religious and secular powers that are in theory a cornerstone of “the American way”.  I don’t feel a sense of pride in country seeing a one-sided testament like this on public property.

That said, here’s me in front of the Carson county courthouse:

From Panhandle came a long slog east, through Pampa again, to the town and county of Wheeler.  This stretch of highway gave me a chance to get some visual representation of the intensity of the winds I’d been fighting.  Out of Panhandle is the Cameron County Cotton Gin.  The blowing dust and cotton particles gave the impression of there being a blizzard blowing right across the highway – you just had to hunker down, hang on, and push your way through:

Coming back through Pampa, this time headed east, I came across a HUGE field on the roadside that was filled with rusting hulks of 50’s and 60’s land yachts.  I could not get inside the place, but here are pix of a ’58 Pontiac and several ’59 Chevies:

I learned later in the day that they are all owned by one old curmudgeon, who does not need the money and will not sell any of them.  It would be the end of the rainbow for those people who restore these old yachts…

Beyond Pampa, a vista of the adversary:

So if you are running at, say, 80, and so are the 18-wheelers, I’d reckon that creates a shock wave of 160mph.  Added to that brew are the cross-winds with gusts that must get up to 50mph, and you have a veritable cocktail of possibilities for catastrophe.  Survival is an art.

First glimpse of one part of the big cattle industry – these are milk cows, living out their lives in dirt compounds, fed with processed and fortified foods.  I’m not being judgmental – I drink milk, I eat meat – but it’s hard to see these places without feeling compassion for animals who live this way.

Even more cringeworthy is the sight of these herds of bison, to whom these plains once belonged.  Now they live no better than their cattle counterparts, and are probably destined to be turned into dog food, such as that on which my puppy was whelped.  All choices have collateral consequences…

And at last we are back on the easter side of the Panhandle at Wheeler, barely a stone’s throw from the Oklahoma border.

So from Wheeler I head south again, destination Wellington, when lo and behold I find myself in a curious little town called Shamrock.  It is on I40, which was apparently the old Route 66.  Shamrock has a bunch of little restored architectural relics from the heyday of the Route 66, including these old gas stations:

Now Wellington turns out to be one of those almost ghost-towns, but with the advent of spring down in this southern part of the Panhandle, it is beautiful:

Now west again toward the town of Clarendon.  I expected this to be Nullsville, and then this is what I found:

While I was setting up to do my bike/Sandy photo, with my tripod in the middle of the street, I heard a car quietly sidle up behind me and stop.  “Cop”, I’m thinking.  I was right.  He grinned and said “You need to be careful that you don’t get yourself run over by a car.”  I laughed, and assured him that I was being mindful of that (all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding).  He proudly told me of the renovation that had taken place some years earlier, and he encouraged me to go inside and take a look.  I said:  “Officer, I’d like to do that, but I’m carrying a legally concealed weapon and not all of the courthouses encourage people to come inside when they are so equipped.”  Then HE laughed and said, “yeah, this is one of them – you should probably just enjoy the view from out here!”  Texas!

I got my picture:

So then I’m wandering around Clarendon taking pictures, mostly of this funky place:

The proprietor, and owner of the rat rod and all the other junk, came bursting out and told me to come on in.  I did, and spent a very entertaining half an hour chatting with him and his two unlikely-looking friends.  He said that NOTHING in his place was for sale, and that he had evicted people for trying to buy things, but he was very enthusiastic about my wandering around.  It turns out that he and I share a high opinion for the 1934 Ford, and he had 4 pristine examples of that gorgeous ’34 grille:

He also had all kinds of other stuff:

And here’s the guy and his friends (he’s the one on the right):

I told him about the relatively new Railroad Market out on the east side of Bangkok, near my place, where they have exactly the same kind of vintage stuff – who would have imagined!

With difficulty I remounted the Beemer and headed for the town of Claude:

From Claude I kept heading west to Canyon, where I intended either to spend the night, or spring off from there for the famous Palo Duro Canyon park.  The winds were fierce, and the views interesting:

And then there was Combine City.  Somewhere in the vicinity of Lubbock some quirky wit has buried a bunch of  old Cadillacs snout-first in the dry North Texas dirt.  Not to be outdone, an equally quirky wit has buried a bunch of worn-out harvesting combines…you guessed it…snout-first in the dry North Texas dirt.

That seems to me to have been a pretty labor-intensive way to display one’s sense of humor, but this land seems to bring out the best in off-beat humor (don’t forget that rooster-eating gator from the previous edition).

By the time I got to Canyon, the winds had been so exhausting that I was too wasted to head out to Palo Duro and stomp around in the dirt in my motorcycle boots, and I was not in the mood to deal with the gentrified suburb of Amarillo that is now Canyon.  So I decided to get my photo, and make one more stop in the west at Hereford.  But first, here’s Canyon:

As the shadows lengthened, I made one last push for Hereford, of which I had a somewhat romantic notion because it is named for the Hereford breed of cattle, with which I had extensive experience in my youth.  In fact, the cattle are more illustrious than the little city of Hereford, which has a pervasive aroma of stockyards, fertilizer plants, and je ne sais quoi.  It’s probably better not to know…

The point of the following picture is to illustrate again what the winds are like.  Every flag I saw throughout the day (other than the ones that were shredded to tatters) was flying straight out to the side…

 

I was so frazzled after fighting the wind all day that I splurged and stayed in a Holiday Inn Express – double my usual budget, but with a real breakfast, fine accommodations, and a most welcome respite from the incessant battering of the wind.

Tomorrow – south, west, then all the way across the southern Panhandle to Hardeman county, from which some of my great-grandparents may have come.  To be continued…