Westerly

The view across the scrubby hills of West Texas is indescribably endless. I look down on the crackled spider's web of dirt roads scratched into the Earth and the vast expanse of nothingness, a never ending canvass of dusty browns and muddled greens. Occasionally, the bright tin roof of an isolated home glints up at me and I wonder who is down there and what are they doing in this empty wasteland?





I see a patchwork of oil wells below, so I suppose that is part of an answer, but just how much work is involved in maintaining the working joints and slow, lazy, trundling bob of an oil pump? Surely there must be more to this spartan place.

But maybe there isn't. Maybe they are just there, subsisting in an unforgivable and little changing place with no eye for a larger life. Simple. Simplistic living that honors a long observed value system of family, religion and being one with the land. Maybe the Indians had it right in their singular reverence for the bounty of nourishment harvested from Mother Earth. They had it right and modern man, some modern men, have forgotten that.

Those survivors below have no concept of a man seven miles above them, who is thinking about them, who is admiring them as he travels to a much different place, an obverse of what is below. A place of fast-paced consumption and decadence where every whimsy and whim can be fulfilled. When I think of that, I realize that they below are the blessed ones. They are the true lifeblood, pure and untouched, and I envy them.





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