Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2023 i Texas Highways Magazine

The stories in this Panhandle special issue invalidate the stereotype of the region as a place you drive through on your way to somewhere else. While the Panhandle’s most well-known features—its wind, flatness, and wide-open spaces—may be understated, they are central to its charm. Author George Saunders, who was born in Amarillo, puts it most poetically when he describes the area in this issue’s Speaking of Texas interview as “a geomorphic embodiment of minimalism.” Musician and fellow Amarilloan Hayden Pedigo, pictured above and on the cover, says he finds inspiration at the edges of town. “I appreciate the silence of Amarillo and the Panhandle. It really forces you to think and to come up with new ideas,” he says. “Some people think Amarillo is ugly; I just think you have…

Dallas-based photographer Sean Fitzgerald was exploring the Rita Blanca National Grasslands near Texline on an October afternoon when the winds picked up and storm clouds formed to the west. “As I watched, the clouds swirled into the kind of shapes and forms that make photographers delirious,” he says. Fitzgerald hopped into his truck and drove until he found a vista free of telephone lines and other barriers. “I finally found a small rise where I could show the sky along with a bit of the prairie,” he says. “As I set up, a thin band of rain in the far distance briefly flared, backlit by the late afternoon sun. I gleefully took this image, and then the rains stopped and the clouds shifted again into something else.”…

Thelma Bray had lived in Pampa for almost 60 years when she first heard that America’s greatest folk singer, Woody Guthrie, was a resident of the former oil boom town from 1929 to 1937. Pampa is where he learned to play guitar, wrote his first songs, married a local woman, and experienced the “Great Dust Storm” of 1935. Guthrie was born in Oklahoma in 1912 but became a man in Texas. How could Bray, a civic leader who embodies Pampa pride and promotion, not know until 1991 that a musical icon—Bob Dylan’s hero, author of singalong anthem “This Land Is Your Land”—once walked the same downtown streets she was trying to revitalize? She found out why Guthrie’s history in the community was overlooked when she proposed that the city officially…

Driving to Amarillo from any direction is a lesson in the coexistence of old and new. Rusty oil wells dot the flat plains to the north and east while pristine wind turbines stand at elegant attention all around. Lovingly referred to as Bomb City for its proximity to Pantex (a leading manufacturer of, well, bombs), the town has survived the Dust Bowl, biblical floods, and devastating tornadoes, forcing it to take stock of what it was and ponder what it ought to become. The resulting city honors its history while embracing its artistic side. “It’s rich with heritage, with history that encourages a lot of the work that’s come out of there,” says Terry Allen, a renowned visual artist and singer-songwriter who credits Amarillo as inspiration. “Whether it’s music or art…

At Marhaba Eritrean and Ethiopian Cuisine and Market, each order of coffee sparks a ritual. Surrounded by shelves of African spices, Zaid Kiflemariam first roasts the beans in a small pan. Next, she grinds them in a mortar and brews them in a clay flask called a jebena. Then, she expertly fills each guest’s coffee cup to the brim. In Eritrea, her East African home country, coffee drinking verges on sacred, Kiflemariam explains. “If you don’t fill the cup all the way up,” she says, “some older people will say, ‘No. I can’t drink this.’” Marhaba is part of a wave of Amarillo restaurants founded by refugees and asylum seekers from across the world. In making the Panhandle city their home, the newcomers are also quietly reshaping the city’s tastes.…

Texas has always attracted its share of odd people, and Bill Brown was no exception. Brown, shown here with his team of “sled dogs” in Tulia on July 22, 1913, told reporters he was a noted sled-dog driver who had bet a group of wealthy miners in Nome, Alaska, $10,000 that he could drive his dog sled from Nome to all 48 state capitals within six years. Newspaper accounts of Brown span from Pennsylvania through Kansas and New Mexico and into Texas, where his route took him from the Panhandle to San Marcos. Brown walked alongside the sled while the dogs pulled. He supported himself by selling souvenir photos like this one, taken by an unknown photographer, and by speaking about the places he’d been. Whether or not his tale…

Writer Jennifer Stewart has traveled to Amarillo since the 1980s, when she’d sit in the back seat on family visits to her uncle’s house. “I first drove myself there as a student at Texas Tech, in near-whiteout conditions in an ice storm,” says the New York-based writer. “I survived!” She revisited Amarillo to write “Amarillo’s Where We'll Be” (Page 30), and noted vast cultural changes, from less beef-centric food options to an emphasis on the arts, since her earliest visits. But the core of what makes the area stand out remains the same. “The skies are absolutely stunning,” Stewart says. “Though I’m a Houston native, I just felt like I was finally home in that beautiful, overwhelming, crisp blue expanse.” S. Kirk Walsh The Austin-based writer and editor interviewed author…

Designing the thousands of miles of trails that weave through our state’s parks and preserves is both an art and a science. When Texas Parks and Wildlife Department staff develop a new trail, they begin by identifying the landscape’s distinctive features: a spring, an Indigenous rock shelter, a panoramic overlook. Biologists and archeologists help them decide whether trails should showcase these features or avoid them for their protection. Once these “anchor points” have been identified, designers plot a path that links them together. “If we do our job right, the trail will look like it was always there and not constructed,” says Trey Cooksey, TPWD’s Recreational Trails program manager. “It will feel like you’re just walking through the woods.” Trail builders predict the “desire path,” the route users are most…

I WAS A HIGH SCHOOL SENIOR in Amarillo when Mad About You—a TV show that was never very funny, but Helen Hunt was on it and the dog was cute—aired an episode about wind. In this episode, Yoko Ono guest starred as Yoko Ono. Why not? She was there to challenge Paul Reiser’s character, a documentary film-maker appropriately named Paul, to capture the essence of wind. Paul spent the episode repeating the word “wind” and brain-storming ways to film the wind. He could not do it. Eventually, he and Yoko agreed it was a bad idea. You can’t film the wind. I remember-watching that episode and thinking, just come to Amarillo, dummy. In my well-earned, I-grew-up-in-Amarillo hubris, I have decided it’s time to show up that fictional character—and Yoko Ono, too.…

After many years working as a chef on luxury yachts around the world, Jon Walter moved back to his hometown of Lubbock in 2019. He was out of work in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and his bank account was quickly dwindling. He begged his grandmother for her tamales recipe, thinking he could use it to open a small restaurant in Wolf-forth, a town about 15 minutes southwest of Lubbock. “I rented this little space and started running a restaurant, barely making it day by day, working as hard as I could,” he says. After the tamales restaurant took off, he returned to his Le Cordon Bleu culinary training. He cooked French cuisine in his pop-up restaurant in 2021, then opened Chez Sami in 2022. This year, he received…

Consider the cowboy and his quintessential accessories. There’s the hat, of course. And the boots. Perhaps a hankie for droving in dusty conditions. But if you see someone wearing spurs—the only cowboy accoutrement that goes jingle-jangle when you walk—that’s a sign they’re the real deal. Since 1978, the National Golden Spur Award has recognized cowboys and cowgirls for their devotion to the land and the livestock industry. Past winners include horse breeder and rancher Anne W. Marion; actor, musician, and poet Red Steagall; and American Quarter Horse Hall of Famer Buster Welch. “It’s important that we tell real stories of real ranches,” says Jim Bret Campbell, executive director of the National Ranching Heritage Center at Texas Tech University, one of the award’s sponsors. This year’s recipient is Craig Haythorn of…

This shines a light on so many of my Texas outlaw sheroes. I hope to be a part of this rising class of women artists who smash through walls leaving a wide-open path. Van Plating, Lakeland, Florida Ball and Chain My mom got dressed for her wedding in the Milam County Jail [“Locked Up,” September]. Her best friend’s dad was the sheriff at the time, and they lived there. Sarah Tumlinson Page Baby Outlaw I was at Willie’s Picnic in Austin in 1984 when I was pregnant with my youngest son [“Free Willie,” September]. He’s 39 now. Dana Porter Johnson Van Horn Hoteling We have stayed at the El Capitan numerous times and love it [“My Hometown: Van Horn,” September]. The restaurant never lets us down. Can’t wait till our…

Located 47 miles north of Lubbock on Interstate 27’s path to Amarillo, Plainview is where West Texas meets the Panhandle. But this ranchringed town of roughly 20,000 is also where progress saddles up with tradition. Founded on a cattle trail in 1887, Plainview appreciates its history while maintaining a pioneer’s embrace of new things. That’s evident in Broadway Brew, a coffee shop downtown that kept the booths and stools from the building’s original 1950s diner, which appears in the 1992 Steve Martin film Leap of Faith. Follow the red brick road up Seventh Street to the gates of Wayland Baptist University, Plainview’s community hub since 1909. This small university is the unlikely home of the winningest women’s college basketball program of all time. Plainview is also the birthplace of Jimmy…

American avocets take flight as the sun rises in the Texas Panhandle, cutting through storm clouds that have haunted the High Plains this July. The birds wheel through the sky above a 60-acre lake 4 miles east of Nazareth, making their characteristic reedy wheep-wheep-wheep calls before landing in the shallow water. This time of year, avocets take on a striking coloration, the feathers on their heads and necks changing from a drab gray to an eye-catching peach-rust. Standing on stilt-like legs, they use their long, curved bills to skim just under the water’s surface, looking for seeds, bugs, and crustaceans to eat. Soon, the avocets are joined by killdeer, mallards, and teal, and the sounds of quacking, flapping, and sloshing fill the air. For a moment, this washed-out stretch of…

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In the contemporary world of literature, George Saunders is known for many things. There are his five books of wildly inventive short fiction, including the new Liberation Day, which features nine stories echoing current society’s existential despair and political dystopia. He illuminates his love for Russian literature in his brilliant 2022 collection of essays, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. His lone novel, a haunting meditation on death and life titled Lincoln in the Bardo, was awarded the Man Booker Prize in 2017. And, perhaps most importantly, there’s his mentorship of talented writers, from Cheryl Strayed to Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, in the MFA program at Syracuse University. As a practicing Buddhist, Saunders radiates rarified humility, equanimity, and deference. What is likely less known about Saunders: He was born…