Day Seven, Dallas, TX to Palo Duro Canyon, TX
10.00am
Dee’s place – her Dad’s place really – is addictively calm and quiet, but it’s time to get back on the road. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us, possibly the longest of the trip, and very little reason to stop until we get to tonight’s camp site.
Almost as soon as we’re out to the west of Dallas the scenery changes again. It’s even drier, but not quite arid, and the ground lies flat. It’s so sparsely populated that the air is clear, and we can see almost thirty miles in every direction. I’ve never seen a place like this before.
12.57pm
Just before Electra, I glance out to the left of the car and see a herd of dromedaries, chewing cud and sticking their lower jaws out at the passing traffic.
We’re definitely in the American west now. There’s a constant shimmering pool of heat a hundred metres up the road ahead.
14.35pm
We stop for fuel and lunch in Childress. We’re pleased to see the back of the town and its flyblown Subway. I can’t think what, other than farming, would bring people to settle in a small town so far in the middle of nowhere. Childress seems to be a truck stop community.
15.58pm
Just outside Clarendon on route 287 we spot a coal train that’s at least 120 carriages long.
17.20pm
Finally we come to the outskirts of Amarillo. The flat landscape, the grey factories, the grid of squat bungalows, the occluded sky combine to make me feel very strange indeed. Maybe this is agoraphobia. The wide sky and almost limitless space that I found so thrilling three hours ago are suddenly very oppressive. I’ve spent my whole life tucked into valleys, nestling protected at the feet of hills. I’m not meant to be here exposed on pointless plains. I desperately want to be away from this featureless unwelcoming landscape and this arbitrary settlement.
As we head further out of Amarillo towards Palo Duro, our destination for the evening, the oppressiveness eases up. There is a little more roll to the land which must be almost imperceptible to anyone else; there are farms and ranches, enclosures with horses. The prairie starts to feel more liveable. Thankfully Courtney has found a campsite in the only crease in the land for hundreds of miles around. Palo Duro Canyon is the second largest canyon in the US.
America does holes in the ground very well. This is our fourth so far, if you count the Mammoth Caves, the hot springs of Hot Springs, and Malvern, Arkansas, and we still have the daddy of them all, the Grand Canyon, to come.
18.15pm
Having driven practically non-stop for eight hours I feel ill. The Subway sandwiches we had for lunch are digesting badly. The campsite is buzzing with flies. I hate flies. One of the fabric mantles on our propane lamp has fallen off and broken during the journey; unless we get a new one we’ll have no light tonight. There are bits and pieces of food we need. The camp shop shut over an hour ago. The nearest shops are fourteen miles away, back across the terrifying emptiness. We have to get back in the car. I know Palo Duro Canyon is beautiful, but I’m in no state to take it in. I’m incoherent and feeling very odd indeed. I need a rest.
22.00pm
Lying in the tent typing this evening, I can hear hundreds of bugs, attracted to the light of the laptop screen, crashing into the outside of the tent. It sounds like light rain. An appropriately strange ending to the day.
