Another opening

Oct. 4, 2007 – Amarillo, TX

At Palo Duro Canyon, an old Panhandle cowboy told me his life was perfect.

His place sits on the canyon rim, about ready to tumble in. It's a brace of wooden buildings, ostensibly a town square of the Old West, and a handful of trailers and pickup trucks. There are horse corrals, no grass, and a cat on one of the roofs. Half a dozen dogs play fetch with scraps of milled lumber, since there are no trees large enough to drop twigs. His business is horseback canyon tours, and his shop counter is a stump in the dirt out front.

Palo Duro Canyon, like many of the Panhandle's landmarks, is unexpected. The plain could not be flatter, more featureless, than when it opens dramatically and without warning into the country's most sprawling canyon complex after the Grand Canyon itself. It could not be more surprising if it were ten garishly painted Cadillacs nose-diving into a wheat field. (It's been said that the American West hides more through sheer spaciousness than any dense East Coast metropolis.)

My horse was Caliente. In Spanish, caliente means "hot", although this adjective described neither his temperament nor his inclination toward forward motion. He was gentle and sure-footed, a rich rusty-colored companion, and he carried me through a landscape approaching desert austerity, but with enough shade and flowing water to seem habitable. He showed me another collection of Old Western storefronts, part of a disused attraction called Six Gun City. Amidst this tableau our guides, the cowboy's son and his bride, were building themselves a cabin.

Past wildflowers and junipers, past crisscrossing stream beds that seemed merely part of the network of trails, past campsites empty yet fully equipped, past the old wooden outhouse, Caliente and I traced a path down and back through the canyon. I saw a kind of life there. Not from Nature, not from adventure, but from my horse, my guides, the cats, the outhouse, the river. From a sense that there was nothing more to know than what you could see with your eyes. From the imperative abruptness of the canyon. From the old cowboy.


In his ageless Texan monotone, with a voice that seemed more mustache than man, the cowboy had said to me, "I love my children, my wife, my horses and my job. I've got nothing to be sorry about."