Day 33: Muleshoe, TX to Hereford, TX

March 27, 2013

I wake up still trying to make sense of the wide open area I'm riding through. So on my way out of town I stop into the office of the town's newspaper, the Muleshoe Journal. I ask a bunch of questions to Larry, the editor. He's a heavyset guy in his 50s with a mustache who wears a gray, untucked polo shirt with a ruffled collar, paired with blue jeans, cowboy boots, and the measured Texas/Oklahoma drawl that every older guy out here seems to have. Before I walked in the door I had a vision in my head of what a small town Texas newspaperman looks like, and Larry matches it almost exactly.

He tells me how, back in the early 1880s, the Texas legislature exchanged three million acres of land in the state's Panhandle for $3 million used to build a new Capitol building in Austin. That huge amount of land became known as the XIT Ranch. It lasted for more than 25 years before it was broken up into a few smaller but still massive ranches. The towns out here came even later.

"So ya gotta remember," Larry says, "These counties and towns have only been around 70 or 80 years."

He also tries to explain the dead and dying towns I saw yesterday.

"There's a lotta agriculture and ranching up here around Muleshoe," he tells me. "And farther north you'll start to see a lotta dairies. But down south by Morton, where ya were yesterday, it's all dry-land farmin' because they don't have an aquifer down there. So there never were a lotta people to begin with. And then the people who lived there, after their kids were gone, a lotta them left too. When the parents leave there's no reason for the kids to ever come back. And not many new people move out here. So the towns just keep gettin' smaller."

What I saw yesterday makes more sense now. I figured that the towns in this part of the country were like a lot of smaller communities in America, which have been around since some time in the 1800s and have a lot of history and tradition tied up in them. But that often isn't the case. With just a generation or two having lived there, combined with changes in farming technology that require fewer people to do the same amount of work, it's not surprising at all to see a lot of the small towns of the Texas Panhandle waste away like they have.

"Anyway, where ya headed today?"

"North up to Friona, then probably east to Hereford."

"Her-ford. They don't pronounce the second E up there. Well, lotta cattle up near Friona. Means a lotta methane. Sometimes ya can drive up there in the evenin', and if it's not windy as ya get near town there's a green cloud just kinda hangin' over everythin'."

He pauses for a moment.

"Yeah, gets real flat after that, too, out toward Amarilla. So flat they say if ya dog runs away ya can watch him go for a week."

On the lookout for a giant green fart cloud, I leave Muleshoe headed due north. The huge tailwind of yesterday is gone, but a west-southwest wind that's still strong helps out.

Just like Larry said they would, things turn agricultural. It's a world of tractors, combines, harvesters, sprayers, and huge irrigation devices. The success of each operation seems to show itself in the size and quality of the owner's home, which sits a few hundred feet back from the highway. On the 30 miles to Friona I'm passed by a hundred semi-trucks hauling steers or feed or milk, each with tall exhaust stacks that curve out at the top in a way that makes them look like the horns of the cattle I see on the ranches that line the road. The ones going my way give me a push and make the back of my shirt billow up toward my head. On the other side, trucks bound for Muleshoe all hit me over the head with a short blast of wind and dirt and dried turd chunks.

I'll always remember Friona as the run-down place with the surly librarians ("I'm sorry, you can't use your own computer here." / "Um, why not?" / "Because you're stealing our Internet!") and the air that smelled of cow shit. But that seems appropriate for the kind of D-plus town that has the nerve to call itself the Cheeseburger Capitol of Texas when two of the four places to get a cheeseburger in town are Sonic and Dairy Queen.

The wind howls again when I stand over the bike at the edge of town. I almost never go for a busy, four-lane highway when there's any other option, but tailwinds and Texas have a way of changing things. It's not that there aren't interesting things to see out here; this part of the country has its own subtle beauty. But it's still a landscape best experienced at 12 to 20 miles per hour instead of a headwinded seven or eight. So rather than jog left and right on side roads all the way into the evening, I jump on Highway 60 and fly to the northeast going 18, with the grain elevators and freight trains and the feed lot packed with at least a thousand pooping, farting cows all passing in a blur. And just like that I'm 20-something miles down the road in Hereford, the self-proclaimed Beef Capitol of the World.

I grab dinner at a barbecue place with a check-cashing company inside and a drive-through liquor store next door. High school English teachers call this foreshadowing.

When I'm done eating I ride north through the town of 15,000 people to the free RV area attached to one of the city parks. Just about every town and city in this part of Texas has one, as a way to get travelers to stick around and spend their money. I start up Main Street, which unlike in a lot of rural cities is still about three-quarters full of businesses. But they don't seem like they're long for this world, because each one sells clothes or cosmetics or knick-knacks that no one who isn't an old white lady would ever buy. I can almost hear the countdown clock ticking. Then it's on to residential neighborhoods. It's one-story houses — never two — mixed with the occasional mobile home. Four out of every five houses are in some form of disrepair, whether it's a sagging porch, garbage in the front yard, peeling paint, a cracked window or two, a broken down car, or a giant patch of dirt where the lawn should be. Kids run around and ride bikes in the streets, but the adults are all indoors.

The park sits at the far north end of town. It's not bad, with a couple of ponds, a play area for kids, and a pool and water slide that haven't yet opened for the season. The RV area, shoved in a far corner, is a bleaker scene. It's no more than a gravel parking strip — no grassy areas, no power hookups, no bathrooms. It's backed by an empty lot, sits right across from some houses, and as far as I can tell there aren't any lights. Mosquitoes swarm because of the ponds. There are also a lot of people hanging around, and about a quarter of them look like they have a criminal record or will soon. It takes four seconds to decide there's no way I'm setting up the tent here. I probably wouldn't even do it in an RV.

So I head south, back through a dozen more blocks of dumpy houses. Along the way I pass by an 80-year-old white woman with hunched shoulders and thin white hair who stands at the edge of her driveway. She talks over something — I can't hear what — with her neighbor, who's a young Hispanic guy in a dark blue tank top, baggy shorts, and who has tattoos all over his arms and legs and a few on his head and face. If ever there was an extreme example of how the population of Hereford has changed over the last 20 or 30 years, there it is.

Then it's back down the fading Main Street and on to the highway again. The two off-brand motels both look like the kind of places that could give me crabs, hantavirus, or both. And I can't keep going, because in the last hour the tailwind that pushed me into town has flipped 180 degrees and blows strong from the east. That leads me to drop way too much money at an overpriced Best Western. I hate to do it, but wild camping's very tough in this wide open but locked down part of the country, and the motel is the only place in this sad, shit-scented West Texas town that I feel safe, secure, and sure of a good night's sleep.

I wanted to travel off the beaten path on this trip, to go places that touring bikers don't normally go, to experience parts of America that people from the coasts don't often see. In that I have succeeded.

From the cocoon of the motel room I check my email and find a bunch of new pictures of my wife and my dog. They make me smile and they make me laugh, both of which I really need. They also remind me that I live a happy, healthy, wonderful life far from the stink, the winds, the passing trains, and the general harshness that is Hereford, Texas. It's a blessing to pass through a town like this with a visitor's badge.

I also get ready for an early start. I've played the wind to my advantage the last two days, but tomorrow it comes from the north and the east, the two directions from which I can't run. The winds aren't supposed to blow strong, but I have a feeling Texas will do whatever the hell it feels like.

Today's ride: 59 miles (95 km)
Total: 1,597 miles (2,570 km)

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