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1: Early Spring on the High Plains
- Texas A&M University Press
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High Plains 1 E ARLY SPRING ON THE HIGH PLAINS in the Texas Panhandle is gray and brown. Dull clouds press down on the unrelenting span of plowed cotton fields. Gusts of wind blow yellow dust clouds that dissipate on the iron-gray horizon. Occasional farmhouses disrupt the monotony with brief flashes of trees, fences, yards, and the accumulated detritus of life scattered and revealed in the open. There is no place to hide. I feel particularly small in this great expanse, the tail end of the Great Plains. Even though I am barreling along at ridiculously high speeds, this breadth of space gives me the hallucinatory effect of being stationary. I am in search of a river. The first Spanish explorers named this area the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains; early Anglo explorers called it the Great American Desert or the Sahara of North America. In the midst of this arid terrain, I hope to find the headwaters of the Colorado River, more than 850 miles of whollyTexas waterway. Reportedly, it begins in the hidden canyons and seeps on the edge of the Llano Estacado just below the Caprock Escarpment.1 This is not the river that carved the Grand Canyon; it is another Colorado River.TheTexas Colorado runs southeast across the state from the High Plains, across the Rolling Plains, and into the Llano Uplift’s granite heart where it is 1: Early Spring on the High Plains H EA DWAT ERS 2 Chapter 1 slowed by the dams of the Lower Colorado River Authority’s Highland Lakes. The lakes extend through the city of Austin, and then the river, unencumbered by dams or reservoirs, pours across the Blackland Prairies and into the Gulf Prairies and Marshes to mix its fresh waters into the saltwater of Matagorda Bay and, eventually, the Gulf of Mexico. Trace the river’s course upstream from Matagorda Bay, and you follow the history of Anglo settlement. Settlers gradually penetrated the wilderness and established towns in the region stretching from Stephen F. Austin’s original colony between the banks of the Colorado and the Brazos Rivers and upstream to the town of Waterloo—which became the city of Austin and the state capital. Moving through the Hill Country, across the Rolling Plains, and into the High Plains, the landscape gets drier and, as the river narrows, farms and ranches huddle in the river valleys to tap into the river’s life-giving waters. HeadwatersbasintoheadofLakeL.B.Thomas [34.229.50.161] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:33 GMT) High Plains 3 Sixty miles from Lubbock and south of the town of Lamesa, I turn east onto gridded section roads to look for the edge of the Caprock Escarpment. The landscape is so vast that ranches are described in square miles, called sections , not acres. The roads surrounding Lamesa form such perfect right angles and parallel lines that a map of the area looks like graph paper. Driving the dirt and gravel section roads is easy (though no one has wasted money on road signs), but my truck erases all behind me in an enormous plume of dust. When I stop to check the map, the cloud envelopes me so that I am blind and blanketed with a layer of fine grit. With my finger firmly planted on the map at my presumed location, I creep across the county map along the rulerstraight roads. Every inch of land is plowed except the road base, bar ditches, and oil pump sites. Bales of harvested cotton squat at the edge of roads. Dirty fluff is drifting like old snow in the ditches and catches in the weeds straggling at the verges. The late afternoon light breaks through the flannel of the clouds to lie long and bright against the fingerprint whorls of plowing. At a slower pace, the area becomes surprisingly beautiful. The hypnotic rhythm of the contour plowing becomes a fugue—graceful sweeps of converging lines dissolving and reappearing as I move over the subtly rolling swells. The patterns merge and repeat in variation until I feel like I am in the midst of a giant tapestry of dark wools and silks, a subtle but infinitely varied design in umber, sepia, and gold. With no more warning than a barely perceptible curve in the road, I am at the top of the Caprock Escarpment. I feel like I have discovered the quintessential Texas landscape: hidden in plain sight, a...