Traces of Texas@TracesofTexas
The Texas Quote of the Day should be enjoyed like a cup of good coffee on a clear, sunny Texas morning ...
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"Going west, through Texas, you leave Fort Worth and come out suddenly onto a rolling, bare-hilled country that stretches away on every side. Without warning you have been set adrift on a billowy ocean of land.

Behind you have been pine forests and tangly river bottoms and blackland farms that crowded the highway. But here the plow has never been. This is ranching country. You notice windmills lonely in the long, sweeping pastures, and cattle, grazing on the far slopes, are like tiny figures set there to give some comprehensive scale to the landscape. There are no houses, no people, few roads, and scarcely any trees. The overwhelming sense is solitude, and you may begin to feel naked and defenseless, moving across so much openness.

But there is beauty here, the beauty of space and of freedom, and the beauty of the wind feeling its way along the brown, grassy swells and ruffling the yellow ridges. It is a strong, stark beauty, having so few ornaments that each plane, each shadow and broken feature of the land, must play an intense part in the composition, subtly forcing the eye out to the horizon and up to the sky.

This stretch is the farthest eastern finger of another, broader, higher place; a place called West Texas. Its barren grandeur, which gives way within a half dozen miles to woods and creeks again, is a suitable preview of what lies west. The way you feel here, released by the openness or oppressed by so much space, is a premonition of the emotion that will overtake you when you reach that larger land.

It seems to me that this bit of West Texas Rolling Prairie (to give it is geological name) is thrown out as a hint or a warning to the traveler that he is approaching another kind of Texas from where he has been, a sub-Texas, unlike the rest of the state in landscape, in people, and in philosophy. It is a land for which the stranger best not be unprepared.

My spirit rises at the site of this isolated prairie, as I know I am going home, even though this very piece of terrain once cost me an intended bride who, taking one bewildered look around her at the endless waves of land, fled back to New Jersey, promptly and forever. It was a test, and she failed, through no fault of hers. But I am thankful that something so detached as a landscape could take an adequate measurement for me of so intimate a situation. People who do not like West Texas frequently do not like West Texas. The land is too powerful in them and it is an excessive land."

----- A.C. Greene, "A Personal Country," 1979

10:17 AM · Jan 27, 2024