This first day of the Lower Panhandle trip started out with a sense of reassuring familiarity. The first stop was to be Menard, after a couple of hours running through parts of the Hill Country that I’m familiar with from my boyhood.
Here’s the itinerary du jour:
So I get to Menard, another of the goat/sheep centers of this part of Texas, find the courthouse, and do my whole time-consuming photo shoot of the courthouse, wondering why there’s so little room in front of it. After it’s all done and I’m packed back up, I discover that the main functioning entrance of the courthouse is at the BACK, and I’ve done my thing on the wrong side of the courthouse. So I run the bike (back on the BMW) around front and re-shoot the whole thing. It turns out that the Menard courthouse recently got approved for a renovation, so I guess next trip back the front entrance will be open again, and the gnarly plant life will have been replaced with something equally gnarly, but prettier.
Menard is a picturesque little place, in a post-apocalyptic way…
Next photo is of the Burnham Brothers shop – they specialize in making calls that lure predators in to the hunter. When I was a kid, there was a big Burnham Brothers outdoor shop in Marble Falls, and a trip to BB’s was always a great adventure because the entire front window was a live rattlesnake exhibit. I never knew that Burnham Brothers was actually HQ’d in Menard. Tip of the hat for many fond memories, including the pair of bobcats my uncle called up in the night on his father’s ranch near Burton.
Unbeknownst to me, with the single exception of Odessa later in the afternoon, I had begun today’s trip from the high water mark of West Texas culture. Heading west, then north, it just got starker and starker…
Next stop, the optimistically named Eldorado, seat of Schleicher County.
It turns out that Eldorado was in fact named for the mythical city of gold for which the Spaniards were searching. More disappointment…
The Eldorado Woolen Mill apparently made blankets for the military during WWII.
One claim to fame for Eldorado – it’s close to the Yearning for Zion ranch, where sex offender Warren Jeffs set up HQ for his offshoot LDS outfit. Federal authorities removed 400 children from that place in 2008. The state of Texas took possession of the 1700 acre ranch in 2014. Making history in the outback…
From Eldorado, northwest to Mertzon, seat of the sparsely-populated Irion County. Mertzon was not the original seat of Irion County, but became so in the 1930’s because it was benefiting from being a stop on the amazingly-named “Kansas City, Mexico, and Orient Railway”.
The courthouse is situated at a high elevation, from which you get great views of the rolling plains around:
From Mertzon, deeper into the weird, next stop Big Lake, of which I had never heard before. The reason for that might be that the only thing that would bring you to Big Lake would be oil and gas.
Big Lake had its share of service stations jammed up with oil tankers and oilfield trucks, but not much else – it’s a pretty desolate place.
Westbound to Rankin, seat of Upton county, and source of very amusing wall art, but first, the courthouse…
Greeting committee of one: The ubiquitous chaparral:
Scenes from Rankin:
One more westbound leg, to Crane, Crane County.
From Crane, the road headed north to skirt the border with New Mexico. These were wide open spaces, and the descending sun and high travel speeds reduced the number of photo ops. But what a surreal landscape!
But the first stop is also the last semi-urban settlement on today’s adventure: Odessa, seat of Ector County. Odessa is named after the Ukrainian city of the same name because the prairie is reputed to bear a resemblance to the steppes of the Ukrainian Odessa.
Odessa has some of the best street murals and art that I’ve yet seen:
The famous Texas Longhorn breed of cattle, with horn spans up to 7 feet, were a blend of Spanish Criollo cattle and English Longhorns. Most of them got herded up the cattle trails in the 1800’s to ignominious ends in the stockyards of Kansas.
Two folksy Permian Basin murals in Odessa…
Many Texas towns have adopted a “mascot”, and then the town is sprinkled with hand-painted representations of that mascot (Wimberley’s is a cowboy boot). The jack-rabbit is the mascot of Odessa.
As the shadows lengthened, I grew more mindful of the lengthening shadows, and uncertain of what I’d find along the road north. So I scurried out of Odessa toward Andrews, seat of Andrews County:
From Andrews, barreling north to Gaines County, Seminole as the seat – Tanya Tucker was born here.
Running the Beemer at autobahn speeds, north to the aptly-named Plains, seat of Yoakum County.
I think – stupidly, I did not photograph it – that it was on the stretch of road between Seminole and Plains that warning signs began to appear beside the ribbon-straight highway cautioning against going off the road because deep sand. And indeed, the landscape looked more and more like the northern Sahelian region where I lived in Mali. Hell with “Odessa”, one of these towns should be named Timbuktu!
There was some place to stay in Plains, but I unwisely thought, based on the size of the town dot on the map of Texas, that there’d be better prospects in the final town of the day, Morton, seat of Cochran County.
In fact, Morton was a tiny speck of a town – the only people I saw were a few cholos and cholitas parked on the other side of the courthouse, standing around looking at their cars the exact same way we used to do at Price’s and the Whataburger. I did have a little time to pick up some scenes from the square:
Morton – The New York StoreI’ve seen stores in New York that looked about like this, and could therefore be called “The Morton Store”.
Luckily, a member of the Morton PD passed by and told me that for a place to stay, I had to go all the way to Levelland, about 25 miles east. It was now almost dark, so I flogged the BMW off to the east. Here’s what I saw on the way:
I drug in to Levelland after having done 569 miles. I guess I don’t have to explain why this town is named “Levelland”.
I was beat, and after checking in to a budget motel, went to the only place I could find to eat that was still open – they forgot to put in my order, so just before closing time they brought me a salad, which I ate while the 14-year old staff bussed the tables and mopped the floor. Adding insult to injury, when I went outside, the BMW had a flat rear tire. Luckily I was close to the motel, and was able to push/cajole it back to the motel, where I did an in-the-dark diagnosis, found the nail, made the repair…and then incinerated my little portable air compressor without getting the tire re-inflated. Having had enough fun for one day, I discovered on Google that there was a tire repair place ACROSS THE STREET from the motel (!), and a Walmart (new compressor) within a mile. I was elated, and, exhausted, turned in for the evening, ignoring the fact that in 1957 Levelland had been ground zero for much-publicized UFO sightings by multiple people.