I've swept pass it at 70 mile per hour at least a dozen times, maybe a score. I have a good mind for collecting the features along the roads I travel, but this place is a bit more salient in my mind. Though it is about 280 miles west by northwest of my home, I know it is there, like I would know the feature of a wart behind my right knee - nothing of real significance, but a known feature set apart from the rest of the surrounding flesh or in this case, terrain.
Set on a broad curve of US Highway 287 between Estelline and Memphis, Texas, it has always captured my imagination. I have an affinity for the November-esque spots in the landscape and stark images. So, I am drawn to the desolation and loneliness of the dead snag of a cottonwood tree beside the hollowed out weathered wood frame of a once prairie home. I have been interested in this old home surround by dead wood and placed on land so blatantly orange. I know of blackland prairie here in Garland, and I've heard of the fabled red clay of Georgia, but up here at the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Canadian River, the land is so orange it seems alien. I have always driven by this site, my heart says stop and take an investigative look around, my mind says, many miles to go this night before you rest - keep pushing on the accelerator, so I listen to my mind and drive for home when east bound or points west when headed the other way. This was a heart-inspired stop on our way to Denver and then onto the folks in Montana.
I tell my wife dozing in the passenger's seat, "There is a place coming up in about 80 miles, it is an old house with a dead snag in front and it is built on a landscape that is incredibly orange. I've always driven by, but almost always I've regretted not stopping for some photos. This time I am going to stop." She again tells me of my remarkable gift of landscape memories and for inconsequential roadstops from years back. I just think, why isn't everyone interested in topography, landscape and mentally cataloging useful gas, food and viewing spots on their travels? In a bygone era I would have found work as a scout for wagon parties moving west or picking and positioning troops for battle.
The highway is a divided 4-lane road, and I recall that there is a median crossing at the spot where this old home site sits. I find the cross-over as expected, but the angles and composition of the house the tree and the cultivated orange soil do not line up as a beautifully as I had expected. Still, I put the 4Runner in park and hop across the highway, camera in hand to satisfy my long desire to record this fore-lorn former farm residence.
I see the remains of green paint on the window trim, someone wanted to make the place look pretty and once had given it some care. They selected green; was it because it was between green and white - and white shows the dirt too easily? Or, was green her favorite color, the color of lush vegetation, the color of a healthy crop, the color of money? Maybe green was merely the complementary color to the orange in the cultivated fields out the window.
The fields are still plowed in soil conservation contours, so the land is still worked. Descendants of those who built this simple home under the old cottonwood tree, or another family that came by this land by means stranger than my imagination's fiction?
To my mind, and mostly to my heart and my landscape-lover's eye, it was worth a stop for a few minutes. I don't think I have the stunning photos that I was hoping for, but I have an opportunity to be briefly in a place of contrast and stark beauty. But the story of this place is all left to the imagination.
The Road goes onto to Denver from here.
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| The stark and fore lorn old prairie home |
I tell my wife dozing in the passenger's seat, "There is a place coming up in about 80 miles, it is an old house with a dead snag in front and it is built on a landscape that is incredibly orange. I've always driven by, but almost always I've regretted not stopping for some photos. This time I am going to stop." She again tells me of my remarkable gift of landscape memories and for inconsequential roadstops from years back. I just think, why isn't everyone interested in topography, landscape and mentally cataloging useful gas, food and viewing spots on their travels? In a bygone era I would have found work as a scout for wagon parties moving west or picking and positioning troops for battle.
The highway is a divided 4-lane road, and I recall that there is a median crossing at the spot where this old home site sits. I find the cross-over as expected, but the angles and composition of the house the tree and the cultivated orange soil do not line up as a beautifully as I had expected. Still, I put the 4Runner in park and hop across the highway, camera in hand to satisfy my long desire to record this fore-lorn former farm residence.
As I move around the old home, I wonder about what has happened here. Did those who once called this home make good by growing tall cotton in Texas, and with their good fortune just move into a better and more modern house? Or, did did the farm wife suddenly become widowed and had to sell the land and move on in with her sister in Missouri? How old are the clapboards, 50, 60 or even 80 years old? Did they get to farming only to have their plantings coincide with the Dust Bowl? What stories swirl under these forgotten eaves along with the orange dust from the other side of this window?
I see the remains of green paint on the window trim, someone wanted to make the place look pretty and once had given it some care. They selected green; was it because it was between green and white - and white shows the dirt too easily? Or, was green her favorite color, the color of lush vegetation, the color of a healthy crop, the color of money? Maybe green was merely the complementary color to the orange in the cultivated fields out the window.
The fields are still plowed in soil conservation contours, so the land is still worked. Descendants of those who built this simple home under the old cottonwood tree, or another family that came by this land by means stranger than my imagination's fiction?
To my mind, and mostly to my heart and my landscape-lover's eye, it was worth a stop for a few minutes. I don't think I have the stunning photos that I was hoping for, but I have an opportunity to be briefly in a place of contrast and stark beauty. But the story of this place is all left to the imagination.
The Road goes onto to Denver from here.
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