Blue Highways: A Journey Into America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  “I have these thirty-five cents,” he said and showed the coins to prove it. “That’s all. The cop buy me a doughnut and coffee, and so I eat. I walk one mile before another ride. When I wait, I kill a big rotlah.”

  “A big what?”

  “Rotlah.” He trilled his tongue and moved his hand in a serpentine.

  “A rattlesnake?”

  He nodded and said yes in a high, trailing voice. “Very big rotlah.” He rolled his hands into a circle to show its thickness. “Big.”

  With a rock the size of a cantaloupe, he had crushed the snake. The kill pleased him, and he talked about it for some time. It was good to destroy rattlers that came to live near men. He said cowboys used to pull the fangs from rattlesnakes and wear them around their necks to ward off fever.

  “My father was a vaquero. Real cowboy. His hands made many things. He like best horsehair for things. Weave tail horsehair to make things. My mother she was Apache. I’m a redskin.” He smiled at that.

  “What’s your name?” I thought he said “Perfidio,” but no one would name a child that. “Perfidio?” I asked, and he nodded, and I repeated and spelled it. He nodded and I shook my head. He took out his billfold, a fat thing full of slips of paper folded small, and held up his Social Security card: Porfirio Sanchez.

  “Oh, Porfirio. Not Perfidio.”

  “Yes.” He fished among the bits of paper for a school photograph of a girl. “Grandbaby. I have seven boys and nine girls from five wives. Now grandkids. But for marriage, I say good to be out.”

  At Grit, we turned west onto route 29, a road that struck a bold, narrow course straight into the heart of the Texas desert. “Pretty good country here,” he said. Over the miles, he repeated that several times, and the way he said it—softly—sounded as if he knew, as if he’d seen many kinds of country.

  The land was fenceposts and scrubby plants and not many of those. Mostly the acres were for the goats that produced the big crop here: mohair. It was the country of the San Saba River, a route of deserted stone cavalry forts built six generations ago to control the “Indian trouble.” In 1861, the post at Mason was under the direction of a lieutenant-colonel suddenly called to Washington by President Lincoln and offered field command of forces being readied for a civil war. The officer declined, and Fort Mason became his last U.S. Army duty. Robert E. Lee never forgot the isolated place.

  To Sanchez I said, “Are you a cowboy?”

  “I work ranches. Work many jobs. Drive trucks in Dallas. Dump trucks. But now I’m sixty-seven and don’t have no employment. I have a government check each month, but I give most money to my babies, to my grandkids.” He suddenly thrust an arm toward the desert. “Ears!” Just above the bush, a pair of long, erect ears, pinkly translucent in the afternoon light, gave away the position of a jackrabbit. “If you hunt big rabbits, look for big ears,” he said. “Mr. Rabbit hide everything but ears. Those he can’t hide unless he go deaf.”

  10. Porfirio Sanchez near Eldorado, Texas

  “The jackrabbit gets its name from the jackass because of the ears.”

  “Yes.” Sanchez tapped my knee. I had wandered into the left lane. It didn’t matter—we hadn’t seen a car in twenty minutes or passed a ranch gate for miles.

  “Not many people out here,” I said.

  “Not many people, but pretty good country.”

  “Would you like to live here?”

  “No country for a poor man. It take much land to live. Animals need hundred acres to eat. I like Dallas. Do you like to live here?”

  “Yes.” It struck me odd. Here was a man some of whose ancestors earned a name as the most intractable and savage of Southwestern Indians, a people who had lived in the hard land for ten thousand years; he wanted the city. And here was another man some of whose forebears built cities, who wanted the desert.

  “Maybe you tell me different when you live here,” Sanchez said.

  Perhaps, but the names on the ranch gates were Wilson and Martin and Howard.

  “I’m having a beer,” I said. “How about you?” He opened the bottles and we drank, talking little. When the silence got noticeably long, he said, “Pretty good country.” The land rose and brush was higher. Then a few trees, some with mistletoe in them. I pointed them out, but he didn’t know what I meant.

  The entire time he had kept his right leg straight. I asked about it, and he pulled up a pantleg to show several vicious surgical scars on his knee. First I understood him to say he had hurt it in the war, but later I thought he said he’d hurt it working. “Did you hurt the leg in the war or at work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you in World War Two?”

  “The Navy.” He pointed to a scar on his hand and another running from his ear down the cheek. “Scars don’t kill you.” He smiled. “Men should have scars. Women should have wounds but no infection.” He laughed. It was an obscenity. Suddenly he shouted out, “Paisano!” and pointed ahead to a long-legged bird, feathers akimbo, doing a clownish, stiff-knee number down the roadside.

  “A roadrunner.”

  As we came up to the bird, he yelled out the window, “Andale, paisano! Aquí viene el coyote!” The roadrunner wheeled into the chaparral and disappeared. Sanchez laughed. “Pretty good country here.”

  And it was good country, made even better by having along a man who was at the age when others take to crossword puzzles and shopping-center cafeterias, a man who couldn’t bend one leg and was hitching five hundred miles across the Texas desert and carrying his clothes in a grocery bag. He was the only Apache, mestizo or otherwise, I’d ever talked to. Forgive my romanticism, but I thought the old blood still showed.

  He got out at Eldorado on the Del Rio–San Angelo highway. The last I saw of him, he was in his funny little stiff walk, waving his odd gesture at cars rushing past. A year earlier, had I been where he was, I would have believed I’d accomplished nothing. Now, I didn’t see it that way. Not at all.

  8

  STRAIGHT as a chief’s countenance, the road lay ahead, curves so long and gradual as to be imperceptible except on the map. For nearly a hundred miles due west of Eldorado, not a single town. It was the Texas some people see as barren waste when they cross it, the part they later describe at the motel bar as “nothing.” They say, “There’s nothing out there.”

  Driving through the miles of nothing, I decided to test the hypothesis and stopped somewhere in western Crockett County on the top of a broad mesa, just off Texas 29. At a distance, the land looked so rocky and dry, a religious man could believe that the First Hand never got around to the creation in here. Still, somebody had decided to string barbed wire around it.

  No plant grew higher than my head. For a while, I heard only miles of wind against the Ghost; but after the ringing in my ears stopped, I heard myself breathing, then a bird note, an answering call, another kind of birdsong, and another: mockingbird, mourning dove, an enigma. I heard the high zizz of flies the color of gray flannel and the deep buzz of a blue bumblebee. I made a list of nothing in particular:

  mockingbird

  mourning dove

  enigma bird (heard not saw)

  gray flies

  blue bumblebee

  two circling buzzards (not yet, boys)

  orange ants

  black ants

  orange-black ants (what’s been going on?)

  three species of spiders

  opossum skull

  jackrabbit (chewed on cactus)

  deer (left scat)

  coyote (left tracks)

  small rodent (den full of seed hulls under rock)

  snake (skin hooked on cactus spine)

  prickly pear cactus (yellow blossoms)

  hedgehog cactus (orange blossoms)

  barrel cactus (red blossoms)

  devil’s pincushion (no blossoms)

  catclaw (no better name)

  two species of grass (neither green, both alive)

  yellow flowers (blossoms smaller than peppercorns
)

  sage (indicates alkali-free soil)

  mesquite (three-foot plants with eighty-foot roots to reach water that fell as rain two thousand years ago)

  greasewood (oh, yes)

  joint fir (steeped stems make Brigham Young tea)

  earth

  sky

  wind (always)

  That was all the nothing I could identify then, but had I waited until dark when the desert really comes to life, I could have done better. To say nothing is out here is incorrect; to say the desert is stingy with everything except space and light, stone and earth is closer to the truth.

  I drove on. The low sun turned the mesa rimrock to silhouettes, angular and weird and unearthly; had someone said the far side of Saturn looked just like this, I would have believed him. The road dropped to the Pecos River, now dammed to such docility I couldn’t imagine it formerly demarking the western edge of a rudimentary white civilization. Even the old wagonmen felt the unease of isolation when they crossed the Pecos, a small but once serious river that has had many names: Rio de las Vacas (River of Cows—perhaps a reference to bison), Rio Salado (Salty River), Rio Puerco (Dirty River).

  West of the Pecos, a strangely truncated cone rose from the valley. In the oblique evening light, its silhouette looked like a Mayan temple, so perfect was its symmetry. I stopped again, started climbing, stirring a panic of lizards on the way up. From the top, the rubbled land below—veined with the highway and arroyos, topographical relief absorbed in the dusk—looked like a roadmap.

  The desert, more than any other terrain, shows its age, shows time because so little vegetation covers the ancient erosions of wind and storm. What appears is tawny grit once stone and stone crumbling to grit. Everywhere rock, earth’s oldest thing. Even desert creatures come from a time older than the woodland animals, and they, in answer to the arduousness, have retained prehistoric coverings of chitin and lapped scale and primitive defenses of spine and stinger, fang and poison, shell and claw.

  The night, taking up the shadows and details, wiped the face of the desert into a simple, uncluttered blackness until there were only three things: land, wind, stars. I was there too, but my presence I felt more than saw. It was as if I had been reduced to mind, to an edge of consciousness. Men, ascetics, in all eras have gone into deserts to lose themselves—Jesus, Saint Anthony, Saint Basil, and numberless medicine men—maybe because such a losing happens almost as a matter of course here if you avail yourself. The Sioux once chanted, “All over the sky a sacred voice is calling.”

  Back to the highway, on with the headlamps, down Six Shooter Draw. In the darkness, deer, just shadows in the lights, began moving toward the desert willows in the wet bottoms. Stephen Vincent Benét:

  When Daniel Boone goes by, at night,

  The phantom deer arise

  And all lost, wild America

  Is burning in their eyes.

  From the top of another high mesa: twelve miles west in the flat valley floor, the lights of Fort Stockton blinked white, blue, red, and yellow in the heat like a mirage. How is it that desert towns look so fine and big at night? It must be that little is hidden. The glistering ahead could have been a golden city of Cibola. But the reality of Fort Stockton was plywood and concrete block and the plastic signs of Holiday Inn and Mobil Oil.

  The desert had given me an appetite that would have made carrion crow stuffed with saltbush taste good. I found a Mexican cafe of adobe, with a whitewashed log ceiling, creekstone fireplace, and jukebox pumping out mariachi music. It was like a bunkhouse. I ate burritos, chile rellenos, and pinto beans, all ladled over with a fine, incendiary sauce the color of sludge from an old steel drum. At the next table sat three big, round men: an Indian wearing a silver headband, a Chicano in a droopy Pancho Villa mustache, and a Negro in faded overalls. I thought what a litany of grievances that table could recite. But the more I looked, the more I believed they were someone’s vision of the West, maybe someone making ads for Levy’s bread, the ads that used to begin “You don’t have to be Jewish.”

  9

  WAY out here they have a name for wind, the wind they call Maria. They could, more sensibly, call it a son-of-a-bitch. The desert windflaws eased with darkness, only to settle into a steady blowing, rocking my rig all night, carrying in the sounds of men and the yip and whoop of the desert, then blowing them out into the expanse, always coming and going, sliding around and over and off things, picking up anything not held down: tumbleweed, grit, the moist exhalation of life.

  With dawn, the wind came strong again from the north, blasting the dusty mesa tops into the irrigated valley, pushing my little coach from shoulder to centerline until my arms tired from holding a course against it. Far to the south, long purple stretches of the Glass Mountains slowed the rush of wind into the Chihuahua desert, but nothing was big enough to shut it down altogether. The radio warned gusts would hit fifty miles an hour by afternoon.

  The land rose steadily, then at Balmorhea the highland mesas became the eastern ridges of the Rocky Mountains. Interstate 10, the only way west, differed here from a two-lane simply by extra strips of concrete—there were almost no towns to bypass. And so, like the locomotive, Ghost Dancing lapped the miles across the Apache Mountains and Devil Ridge and onward. Bugs popping the windshield left only clear fluid instead of a yellow and green pollen-laden goo of woodland insects; it was as if they extracted their colorless essence from the desert wind itself.

  Somewhere near Eagle Flat, before a rider-against-the-sky horizon, I stopped to rest from the buck of sidewinds. Annual rainfall here averaged less than seven inches, and the Rio Grande to the south often ran dry before it crossed the desert. Spindly ocotillo stalks, some twenty-five feet high and just coming into orange blossom, bent under the north wind. Creosote bushes had cleared dead zones by secreting a toxic substance from their roots to insure whatever moisture fell they would get. As for creosote leaves, only one animal was known to eat them: a camel. Texans had learned that during unsuccessful experiments by the cavalry at Fort Bliss to use the beasts for desert patrols in the Civil War.

  Between the creosote and stony knobs streamlined by gritty winds grew grasses in self-contained clumps and cactuses compacted like fists. Everything as spare and lean as a coyote’s leg. Under that sprawl of sky and space, the minimal land somehow reduced whatever came into it, laying itself austerely open as if barren of everything except simplicity. But it was a simplicity of form—not content.

  The Ghost ran the easy road in a way old wagoners must have dreamed of. To the south lay the slender green strip of the Middle Valley of the Rio Grande, a place of seventeenth-century Spanish missions; near one, Ysleta, men had cultivated the same plot every year since 1681. Across the river was Mexico, full of the sharp apexes of the Sierra Madres. The mountains opened at El Paso, where the sun had failed to shine only thirty days in the last fifteen years, and let the Rio Grande and highways through. On the Mexican side rose steep, gravelly hills covered with adobe houses, small squalid things painted pink and aquamarine. On the other side, the American equivalents: pink and aquamarine house trailers.

  The Rio Grande lay safely bedded in concrete and bound with a chainlink fence called the “Tortilla Curtain.” Mexicans know the Rio Grande as the Rio Bravo, the “wild river,” but it didn’t look either bravo or grande, sorry thing that it is now. The river has been “rectified” because it used to flood—and thereby nourish—the lowlands; that’s how you farm one patch three hundred years and still get a crop. But, worse than flooding, the Rio Grande, like a wandering burro, would change course without warning, cutting off a slice of Texas and giving it to the Mexicans or handing over a chunk of Chihuahua and its residents to the Americans. What could immigration do about a peón who entered the country in an adobe hovel that had never moved?

  El Paso was a pleasant city, but I felt I’d been in Texas for weeks, so I drove on west through the natural break in the Rockies that gives the town its name—the very pass Indians, conquistador
s, and the Butterfield Stage used—drove around crumbling Comanche Peak, and headed up along the Rio Grande. On the opposite bank now was not Mexico, but New Mexico. I crossed the river. Eastward, the shattered Organ Mountains blocked off the White Sands country. The highway, straight and level, went into a land of tourist trading posts where yellow and black billboards repeated like a stutter: cactus jelly, Mexican black-velvet paintings, Indian dolls, copper bracelets, cherry cider, carved onyx, bullwhips, cactus candy, steer horns, petrified wood, Zuñi silver, Navajo rugs, desert blossom honey.

  On the north, the mountains were worn pillows; but in the other direction, the Floridas (Flo-RYE-duhs) were treacherous jags tearing into the soft bellies of clouds. That barren inheritance of hostility, belonging to something other than man, would have nothing to do with him: no roads, no high-tension powerlines, no parabolic dish antennas, no concrete initials of desert towns. Mountains to put man in his place. By the time I got to Deming, New Mexico, the Floridas were covering themselves with long night shadows, the only thing that can embrace them entirely.

  10

  FLOORS, walls, counter, employees’ uniforms—everything but the faces—were white at the Manhattan Cafe in Deming. From some place I recognized the beauty of the waitress, but I couldn’t recall where. Later I realized she had the severe priestess beauty of high-bridged nose, full lips, and oblique eyes that one might see on a Mayan temple wall at Palenque.

  She served a stack of unheated flour tortillas, butter, and a bowl of green, watery fire that would have put a light in the eyes of Quetzalcoatl. Texans can talk, but nowhere is there an American chile hot sauce, green or red, like the New Mexican versions, with no two recipes the same except for the pyrotechnical display they blow off under the nose. New Mexican salsas are mouth-watering, eye-watering, nose-watering; they clean the pipes, ducts, tracts, tubes; and like spider venom, they can turn innards to liquid.