I start my trip to Ft. Worth in Roswell, my home town, leaving Eastern New Mexico, driving on a two lane highway to Tatum. This is high plateau country, flat and barren, but with areas of straw grass which turns green in the occasional wet years. There are few houses or trees along the way, only black Angus cattle grazing in the fields, well beyond the fences which line both sides of a highway which runs to the Texas border with few curves.   The land is dry after years of drought, and is mainly bramble and tumble weeds, and short, thistle trees we called Russian Olives when I was a kid.  The overall impression is of a tan landscape below endless light blue cloudless skies.  There is no shade, and the temperature is about 100 degrees, creating a slight haze.  My feelings about the landscape are mixed.  The car’s air conditioner is having difficulty keeping up with the heat, and I have become accustomed to the greens of Virginia and the Pacific Northwest, Montana’s rivers and mountains, and California’s Pacific Ocean and golden hills. But, the prairie still holds emotional appeal.  It is the land of space, of far horizons and freedom, the land I grew up in and idealized, home.

The satellite radio is playing Judy Collins on the 1960s station, as I pass through Tatum, with its abandoned tan brick buildings which used to house a steakhouse and some farm implement companies. I pass an empty lot which used to be a mom and pop hamburger stand, a regular stop on my weekend runs home from Lubbock to Roswell, forty-five years ago.  I pull into the Alsups gas station and convenience store to gas up, and, when leaving town pass a wrought iron sign company, the only going concern around.  On the outskirts, I pass the airport, now closed, with its dirt runway, a few corrugated tin hangars, and torn wind sock, and come to a highway crossroads, a center point in a way, of my life.  My son went to college down the highway to the left, in Portales.  My folks lived at times down the highway to the right, in Lovington, and I lived as a grade schooler for a year that direction, in Hobbs, an oil town where my dad was in sales.  Behind is Roswell of my youth.  Ahead is Lubbock of my college years, and Odessa, where my family migrated.  Eastern New Mexico and West Texas are similar.

Judy Collins has been replaced by Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair” on the car radio, reminding me of station KOMA, which I used to listen to during college on these roads, coming in clear through the night from Oklahoma City.  The landscape changes as we move into Texas, passing a stone monument in the shape of Texas, announcing our arrival, and just before that, a metal billboard painted yellow and rust red, the New Mexico flag colors, with the words “Hasta la Vista.”  Now, we are in farm country.  There is more agricultural activity, more irrigated fields with dark green alfalfa and soy, more grassland in general, more great plains perhaps than prairie.

Entering Plains, Texas, I see there are fewer businesses than before.  Much has been closed, but there is still the Yoakum County courthouse, the Dairy Queen watering hole for locals that Larry McMurtry describes in his novela, the typical spreading, tan brick, High School, and some run down residential neighborhoods.  The highway dips on the way into town, into a gully and back onto a rise, with a gas station on the right as you enter the city limits.  I twice received traffic tickets here.  Once in the gully, looking in my rear view mirror to see the face of a Texas Highway Patrolman (“Department of Public Safety”) right on my bumper, unseen, out of nowhere, his red lights flashing, pointing his finger for me through my mirror to pull over.  It was close up and personal, and I submitted in awe.  I always sped and never thought I could be surprised.  On another occasion, the local sheriff stopped me at midnight in the deserted downtown, on my way back to college from home, pulling rapidly up behind me in his blue unmarked Pontiac with his red lights on in the front grill, his door flying open, jumping out of the car, and striding quickly up to my door angrily, standing there in his cowboy boots, western style suit, and cowboy dress shirt with shiny snap buttons on the pockets and sleeves.  He told me I can’t race through “his” town, then walked back to look at my license plate with his pad in hand, stopping, however, when he saw the red and black Texas Tech “double T” logo on my back window.  He sauntered back to my window, looking at me a few seconds and deciding, then with a small two finger salute to the brim of his felt cowboy hat, said without expression “beat A and M,” meaning Texas A and M, which Tech was playing that weekend.  He closed his pad, strode back to his Pontiac and roared off around me, no ticket.  I think I was still saying “yes, sir,” as he left.  That was Texas in 1967.  Football was king.  And, yes, I love Texas.  I grew up all over the state: Levelland, Pecos, El Paso, Amarillo, Houston (Pasadena), and Lubbock.  Texas is my home, just like Iowa and New Mexico.

From Plains, I continue south towards Denver City, site of one of the first major oil strikes in Texas, in the 1920s, still an oil and gas capital, with wells scattered on both sides of the highway and a refinery on the left.  Denver City is small, consisting of a few manufactured buildings and converted Quonset huts from World War II housing small oil companies and oil field service companies, with a few 1940s style small white wooden house scattered around.  There is, of course the Alsups 7-11 and gas station, with heated up burritos and chimichangas. Dad and I used to get them on the road.  Cattle are scattered in the fields amid an undulating countryside of arroyos and buttes.  Rust-red Haliburton oil field trucks and oil tankers enter the highway from dirt roads.  As I approach the outskirts of the next town, Seminole, I run into a bit more traffic.  Seminole is the typical West Texas small town, about 20,000 population, a county courthouse, rows of stores around a central square, and two main streets intersecting each other, one running east and west, the other north and south.  The buildings are a mixture of brick and masonry.  The streets are lined with gas stations, drive ins, and family style Mexican restaurants, their parking lots full of cars and pick ups.  We are in Permian Basin oil country; the smell of oil is in the air.  The clouds above are white and billowy.  These often turn into thunderstorms in the evening.

Finally, I reach Odessa.  Cezanne would offer up broad impressions, as would Hemingway, of oil rigs and pick up trucks, ranch style houses, broad streets, shopping centers, and fast food Mexican restaurants like Burrito Express, which was my Dad’s favorite, Taco Villa, which has great soft flour tortillas for its bean burritos that my nephew likes, and Rosa’s, which is informal but not fast food. Rosa’s for me means Taco Tuesdays.  And, Odessa is Fina Gas stations and franchise restaurants: Logan’s, Outback, South of the Border, Macaroni Grill, Red Lobster, etc.  Odessa is flat horizons and the setting sun and warm nights still bright at 10 p.m., and the good feeling that comes with the bright, warm evenings.  It is the restfulness of the desert landscape, the radiance of neon lights in the distance, and the feeling of space, of not being closed in by vegetation, tall buildings, or topography such as hills.  Cezanne would evoke the sandy tan colors which pervade everything.  And, unlike the East, there is the relative newness of everything, houses, shopping centers, bank buildings, schools, and streets.  It is a southwestern image: the lights of baseball and football stadiums in the bright nights, Southwest, Delta, and United jets gliding down from cloudless skies to the local airport, shadows and sun alternating in the daylight, tinted car windows,  Hispanics and cowboys, Carhart clothes, pickups, western boots, and western drawls.

It is a land of friendly people, who say “howdy” to strangers and smile, and of ladies who run the dry cleaners and say in their high-pitched voice, “you come back,” and mean it.  It is the Taco Villa drive through window attendant, a young Hispanic, who compliments your car, proud of his own shiny new black pickup sitting at the end of the parking lot, alone.  It is the helpful lifeguard at the country club pool who tells you how to order the best food from the snack bar to avoid the rush.  It is the businessmen at the minor league baseball game sitting behind you, John Connolly and James Baker look-alikes, who say hello and joke with you at the end of the game as you file out.  It is the ladies at the ballpark concession stand who are anxious for business and enjoy serving people.  It is respect for others’ property, and people who are positive and polite and who see the good in others.  The faces are squinty-eyed and lined and sometimes leathery under influence of the intense sun.  Odessa is adobe, too, and Spanish spoken everywhere, and hard-working Hispanics and blue-collar whites, and the wonderful parting everyone uses, “Adios.”  The lasting impression is of light and shadow.

I had a great visit with my sister and brother-in-law and nieces and nephews and their families, my cousin and his wife, and my sister’s golden retriever, “Lady,” who has the warmest brown eyes that look up at everyone adoringly, and who saunters over and sits down next to everyone, greeting everyone, calm and gentle, loving to perhaps play ball, carrying the tennis ball around in her mouth  and dropping it in your hands, and with her yellow retriever face smiling, black gums showing, her mouth hanging open, loving your pats on her head.  She could sit there all day enjoying those pats, occasionally raising her right paw and placing it on your knee for “shake,” her nails a bit firm, but friendly, the tail wagging occasionally, the black nose at the end of the pretty yellow snout.  You  stroke the side of her face gently around the eyes and side of the nose, then move down the nose to the skin of her turkey neck, loose, and brush the back of your hand along it.  Her eyes are still looking affectionately, gratefully at you for your kind attention.  How I love dogs.  Thank you also to “Dixie” and “Prince,” my childhood companions, border collie and English collie respectively.  I realize the importance of family above all else.

Leaving Odessa, I drive to Ft. Worth, three hundred miles on I-20, getting into Ft. Worth late.  The next morning, I was off to the Cultural Center, downtown, an array of museums, parks, and former fair grounds, built in the 1930s in the Texas Art Modern Style’s massive tan stone decorated with the lone star motif and engraved prairie murals of ranch life and cattle drives.  That massive architecture with the Lone Star always takes me immediately back to my Texas of the 1950s as a kid, of the pride you felt when you heard “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “The Eyes of Texas are Upon You,” with the verse, “your father is from Dallas and your mother from Ft. Worth,” or visa versa, which we sang at school, and the cattle yards, and Petroleum Buildings, and old black and white license plates, and Air Force Bases with B-47s in the air, and orange and white Texas football uniforms with the longhorn logo on the white helmet, and learning Texas history and Spanish in first grade at Davy Crockett Elementary in El Paso, and the Lone Star flag, and everything named “Texan”, from hamburgers to cars, and wearing Easter clothes and snap down cowboy shirts of my own, and great movies about Texas like “Giant” which captured the flavor of the state better than anything, and later “Hud,” and “The Last Picture Show.”

I started in Ft. Worth with the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, which has the best Frederick Remington’s anywhere.  They were part of the museum centerpiece, creating, along with Charlie Russell paintings, the main entrance foyer, with one large room on each side for each artist.  Five Remingtons stood out for me: two beautiful yellow canvasses, one “His First Lesson,” 1903, of a cowboy breaking a bucking horse in front of a territorial or adobe building.  The horse is braying at the man who has just put a lasso on him.  The yellow landscape is divided from the pale blue sky by a violet line; another “Ridden Down,” portrayed from somewhere above a high butte, a Native American warrior with green chest paint walks a wet pony amid the pale blue sky and yellow mesas; “The Grass Fire” is one of Remington’s nocturnals, a style he experimented in the 1908 period, in green and Prussian cobalt, of native braves putting out a fire near a creek at night, with the fire illuminating part of the scene; “The Fall of the Cowboy,”1895, is a winter scene of the snow-covered prairie, two riders closing a gate, their horses patient, a beautiful blue-gray sky and white ground; and an unusual Remington, “Drum Corps,” of Mexican troops marching through an adobe village, 1889, with white and yellow chipped walls of pueblo houses in the background, the uniforms dusty and villagers watching. Remington’s nocturnes are my favorites.  The paint seems luminous.  I love the large yellow canvasses, of dry bleached out earth, and the almost oppressive sunlight, almost monotone.  But my favorite was the blue-gray and white snow scene, “The Fall of the Cowboy,” a post card copy of which now sits on my study bookcase.

The Carter also had a wonderful Ansel Adams photography exhibit, including some of his lesser known photographs dating back to his 1926 Exhibit in New York which was encouraged by Stieglitz, with the personal guidance from a member of Stieglitz’s staff, Paul Strand.  My favorite Adams’ photographs in the exhibit included several from his 1946 Portfolio (there wasn’t much between 1946 and his 1926 Portfolio) and some 1950s shots.  “Big Bend, Santa Elena Canyon, 1957” was shimmering, almost impressionistic, a black and white photograph of white puffy clouds and a mesa in the foreground .  The rock patterns in the mesa blended with the desert gravel in the near foreground.  “Pinnacles, California, 1945” was like a collection of patterns all coming together.  The Carter also had the original “Hernandez New Mexico, 1943, Moonlight.” The inscription said Adams got this by accident when returning from the Chama River.  Looking over his shoulder, he saw the village tombstones reflecting the moonlight, just as the sun was setting.  He told his nephew to get the tripod and camera off the mule as they only had a few minutes to work with.  “Maroon Wells, Colorado, 1951” captured a beautiful mountain pond surrounded by Aspens.

I also loved the American Impressionists section, especially Childe Hassam’s “Flags on the Waldorf,” 1916, one of his “Avenue of the Allies” World War I paintings of flags hanging from buildings in New York.  It looks vague until you step back and the brush strokes all come together.  I also enjoyed, as I always do, William Merritt Chase, whose “Idle Hours,” 1894, was similar to Monet, with women in fluffy dresses and parasols on the beach.  Not the usual Chase interiors.  John Singer Sargent’s “Portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson,” 1885, shows the great author tall but consumptive, pulling on his mustache while standing in front of a doorway.  Sargent’s “Alice Vanderbilt Shepard,” 1888, shows the young Mrs. Shepard wearing a black and white dress.  Her flesh is a marvelous color, and her introspection comes through.  There was the signature Georgia O’Keefe, “Ranchos of Taos Church, 1930,” with the well-known back view of the church she so loved, on the plan of a cross, with rounded buttresses, and the light tan walls blending with the white caliche of the soil.  I loved the nautical paintings of Fitz Henry Lane, who is somewhat new to me, and his “Boston Harbor,” 1856, of a flat gray sea and sleek, almost streamlined Clipper ship on the canvas and masted ships and a paddle wheeler on the left portion.  This gave me insight into the Clippers, with their sleeker bow and lower lines than their predecessors, built for speed.  It also showed what the U.S. was about between 1800 and the Civil War.  I also liked George Innes’ “Approaching Storm,” 1885, a moody piece with greens predominating; and Martin Johnson Heade, a new discovery for me, whose “Salt Marshes and Hay Rolls” and “Thunderstorms over Narragansett,” 1866, were great mood pieces.  Another new discovery was William McCloskey’s sill life “Wrapped Oranges,” 1899, showing oranges wrapped in tissue paper, sitting on a lacquered redwood base, and with a cobalt background.  It was a tromp l’oeil, fooling the eye, appearing three-dimensional. There were two wonderful Auguste St. Gaudens bronze sculptures, “Diana of the Tower,” 1899, a smaller version of the same piece which stood atop Madison Square Gardens until it was torn down for the Empire State Building. And, a bronze relief in oak frame, of Robert Louis Stevenson, 1900, with one of his poems inscribed on the base.  What a great period for art, the end of the 19th Century and beginning of the 20th: St. Gaudens, Remington, Sargent, Chase, Whistler, O’Keefe, etc.

From the Carter, i walked across the park to the Kimball Museum, a beautiful structure designed by Louis Kahn, of concrete, steel and marble, and a series of Roman arched shaped roofs, and an interior with pine wood floors.  My favorites from the European Section was Edvard Munch’s “Girls on a Pier,” 1904, his expressionistic masterpiece, using slanting pink and aquamarine lines, to depict a full moon, Grand Hotel in the background, and three girls on a bridge in the foreground.  The girl figures have no faces, but you can depict their moods by their petulant postures.  It was similar to another Munch’s I recently saw at the Getty in Los Angeles, “Starry Night.”   The Kimball also had a variety of portraits representing various schools and eras, including Juan Miro’s “Portrait of Herberto Gasony,” 1918, Fauvist, of the sitter in a bright yellow shirt; “Rembrandt Laughing,” 1628, a small oil from the Dutch school; and Cezanne’s “Man in a Blue Smock,” next to his landscape, “Maison Mara,” 1896, of small cubist houses in Provence, with the usual tiled roofs and stuccoed walls, using short parallel brush strokes of the same color throughout the canvas, including in empty spaces.  There was also Manet’s “Portrait of Clemenceau,”1879, almost realist rather than impressionistic, in black and gray; Goya’s portrait of the famous matador, Pedro Romero, 1795, in gray, black, and white, with great facial detail; and Velasquez’s “Portrait of Don Pedro de Barbarena,” 1631, a large black and white work, but with the subject, a member of he court of Philip IV, dressed in a puffy sleeved knight’s costume with red embroidery.  It seemed almost from the Dutch school.  For me, it was the masterpiece of the gallery.

There was a wonderful, but somewhat unusual van Gogh,”Street in Saintes Marias de la Mer,” 1888, without the usual broad brush strokes, and relying instead, Fauvist style, on strong colors to pull it together, depicting yellowish thatched roofs set against chimney smoke.  There were some excellent Northern Renaissance works, including a south German silver sculpture, “Virgin and Child,” 1486, with inlaid sapphires and pale emeralds, and a Louis Cranach the Elder painting, “Young Maidens,” of bathing nudes.  From the Italian Renaissance, there was Fra Angelica’s “Apostle St. James,” 1483, Mantegna’s “Madonna, child, Elizabeth and John the Baptist,” 1500, Bellini’s “Christ Blessing,” 1500, with Christ looking face on, direct at the viewer, and with somewhat  healed scars on the body, quite impressive, and also Bellini’s “Madonna and Child,” more modern in style, with brighter than usual colors, black, reds, and golds, more vivid and humanistic, and with the Venetian blues Bellini is known for appearing also.

There were some fine antiquities throughout the museum, including a Cycladic female figure, translucent, with arms crossed, folded one above the other, dated 2300 BCE, one of the best Cycladic figures I have seen anywhere.  At the bottom of the stairwell leading to the Asian and African sections, were some remarkable Assyrian reliefs of winged deities, kingly figures, dated 860 BCE, carved from gypsum.  There were Japanese block prints and screens and Chinese pale blue pottery works, Mayan ceramic containers, one gallon in capacity, with pink murals painted on the sides showing the violence of the culture, the “blood drainings,”  plus a portion of a Mayan wall fresco, “Presenting the Captives,” dated 785 BCE.  There was also a Mexican Teotihuacan somewhat faded fresco in red of a King dispensing favors.  From the African Section, came a Yoruba (Nigerian) terracotta mask of a King’s head, with grooves and red dyes, and a Congolese Diviner’s Mask, smooth and simple, (Liberian) Dan like in appearance.  Good job, Ft. Worth.

As I come out of the museum and walk to my car, parked by the fair building, I am hit immediately by the intense sun and heat, which seems so pure and clean.  But, lingering in the back of my mind, pushing aside thoughts of art and my drive home, is a story I try not to think about, one my sister told me the day before on this trip, in Odessa, about my mother’s death in 1995 at the Odessa Medical Center, in ICU on life support, and yet able to squeeze my sister’s hand when told I was on my way from Washington.  I turn around to look at the sky in the direction of the Dallas-Ft. Worth International Airport to the northeast, and remember that morning, and the fact that I somehow knew the exact moment she passed, while circling above Dallas before landing and changing planes.  She had told me not to be afraid.  I don’t dwell on this.  I am still in denial.  (2010)