The nebulous plain

Sept. 29, 2007 – Amarillo, TX

The clouds in Amarillo do really strange things. Here's what they do:

Sometimes the sky will be peppered with your Average Cumulus Cloud. But due to some kind of high-altitude prevailing wind, they'll all be uniformly skewed in one direction, like Hershey's Kisses that have melted slightly. They unfailingly point away, in every direction but here.

Sometimes they're layered, and the late afternoon sun will brightly illuminate the lower layer, casting a shadow on the upper so that there appears to be a storm brewing high above while we're sheltered in a buffer of fair weather at the surface. And on some days, columned palisades rise in vapor overhead, as they do in rock from the canyon floor.

Thunderstorms can be seen for miles across the high plains, and in an otherwise clear evening sky there will be a brooding patch of rust lofting ominously into the telltale anvil-top of a thunderhead. After nightfall, the unbroken horizon shows lightning supporting the very sky on crooked stilts.

Once it was overcast, and below the shroud of nimbostratus the setting sun hazed through a yellowed curtain of distant rain that immured the entire plain. Yet only a few degrees above the margin of clouds, a window of pure crystal blue opened, through which one might imagine launching oneself in flight along the one certain path toward freedom.

A fair sky promises calm, but without a cloud it gives no direction.

66 Degrees of Separation

Sept. 23, 2007 – Amarillo, TX

It kind of surprises me that so much is made of Amarillo's pedigree as a Route 66 town.

Route 66 was, in its day, one of the better-known components of the US highway system, the web of numbered two-lane intercity roads conceived in 1926 and still used today. The Mother Road was by no means unique in the way it spawned a new breed of traveler-based businesses and attractions—motels, diners, truck stops, giant balls of twine—that today have become icons of nostalgia. But well before it was officially taken off the books in 1985, Route 66 became known as the trunk line of on-the-road Americana, and its decertification coincided with a regression in the American mindset to the glory days of automobile travel in the United States. A fascination with roadside America was born.

Amarillo, the only large Texas city along the line of Route 66, certainly has its share of waysides. In 1974, some guys buried ten Cadillacs in a field west of town. And about ten years before that, a restaurateur on the other end of the city began offering free 72-ounce steaks to anybody who could consume one within an hour. These were destinations along Route 66 as they are still along Interstate 40. They are enlightening places to visit, but they are just quirks.

In Amarillo, as in much of the American West, roadside America is more than quirks: it is an entire fabric. Roads and addresses are carefully portioned into impersonal cadastral grids; freeway interchanges are methodically numbered according to a scale of miles from the state line. Frontage roads allow the Interstate itself to be an address (72-ounce steaks: exit 75; half-buried Cadillacs: between exits 60 and 62). The majority of the city seems to be a wash of internally lit brand names and franchise logos, no different than the days of Burma Shave and Phillips 66.

Souvenir shoppers visit the Route 66 Historic District and the offbeat destinations to revisit a forgotten piece of roadside America in Amarillo. But what they're remembering has never gone away. They need only look around: Amarillo is roadside America.

A city overrun with Panhandlers

Sept. 9, 2007 – Amarillo, TX

It's as if they built the city by spilling out a box of dominoes onto a coffee table and calling it a day. The town is scattered loosely about the plain, without regard to zoning or the need to cluster into anything resembling a community. Dropped casually upon the gridiron of roads is a repetitive array of convenience stores, weather-beaten homes, light industrial concerns, and taco stands. Downtown is two pairs of one-way, high-speed arterial streets sprinkled with commercial buildings—some attaining high-rise stature—at an average density of one per city block. (The remainder of each block is an expanse of asphalt or gravel or general uncategorized vacancy.) The resulting rarefaction is heralded as "Center City" along its approaches. Indeed.

Elsewhere, the city stretches out along Interstate 40, with the usual clutch of motels and fast food restaurants at each milepost-numbered interchange. Whatever nostalgic charm was brought by Old Route 66 is tough to spot here today. Or maybe it shows as plainly as the rain on the plain, how the Mother Road helped build this part of America.

Amarillo, the Spanish word, is pronounced "ah-ma-REE-joe" (more or less, according to dialect) and means "yellow". But the name of this northern Texas city is pronounced more closely to "armadillo" and so, I assume, transliterates more accurately in the Panhandle idiom to "yaller".

Welcome to Texas, the space bar on the keyboard of America.


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