Monster of a Land

There are trips you plan your whole life and never take. You look at maps and you look at pictures so your daydreams have images. You say, Next summer, I’ll go to Europe. One long weekend, we’ll drive down to Austin. One day I’ll drive all the way to California. Christmas break, when I come home, I’ll take you to the beach. But you keep putting it off. You don’t have the money, or you don’t have the time, or your car won’t make it.

You leave for the Air Force and your friend goes to college in Oklahoma. You write her letters from South Carolina. You come home to visit and she comes by to show you her new old car. She says the speakers work in this one. She says this one will make it to Carolina. She wants to drive around the block but you don’t get in. Years later, you’ll rack your brain, but you cannot remember why. She wanted to tell you something. You write her letters from a base in Carolina and then from a desert an ocean away, and you make a plan. She’ll start driving when you start flying back to your base in South Carolina. You’ll drive to the beach and show her the ocean she’s never seen.

You call home one night, a few weeks before your tour of duty in Saudi ends. Your brother answers. When he says your name, his voice breaks. He says she’s gone. Your friend has died only a few months before she turned twenty-one. She never saw the ocean. And all you can think is why didn’t you get in the car. She was going to tell you something.

It’s the kind of thing that’ll haunt you twenty years later. You’d think I’d have learned one thing—take the trip. Get in the goddamn car. Sometimes Christmas doesn’t come. But I got out of the Air Force and had to get a job, and another. I didn’t have money or vacation days. Life just keeps on happening while you’re trying to keep your head above water.

When I moved back to Austin in August 2021, I didn’t have a dog, or a job. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a writer anymore. Even if I had been, I didn’t know what I wanted to write about—certainly not myself. I’d just spent several years writing a book of essays about my life. It had been released in April. I’d had about enough of me. Then an editor at Texas Highways magazine, Mike Hoinski, threw me something of a lifeline, or rather, wouldn’t stop emailing me until I came up with something like a story idea.

The story I sold the editor was something my grandpa told me about from when he was a kid in Shamrock, Texas, during the Dust Bowl. He was in his nineties and suffering from Alzheimer’s when he told me the story. I’d been over at my dad’s, watching my grandfather so my dad could run errands. We were sitting on the porch and my grandpa tried once again to persuade me to rob a bank with him. The robbing-a-bank thing had become something between a recurring joke and an obsession. We never settled on who’d be the getaway driver. That he was legally blind somehow didn’t help my argument. But I was never entirely sure he was kidding about the robbing-a-bank thing.

He had good reason to hold a grudge against banks. When he was a kid, the bank had taken the ranch, and his horse. He always teared up when he talked about the horse. But this one afternoon, sipping the beer I’d smuggled him because he was in his nineties and I thought he deserved a beer on occasion, my grandpa dropped a story I’d never heard. How Bonnie and Clyde had hidden in his family’s barn. I told my editor I didn’t know if the story was true or my grandpa was pulling my leg. And, like a good editor, Mike said, “So go to Shamrock and find out. That’ll be the story.”

Shamrock is a blip of a town up in the Panhandle of Texas, just across the line from Oklahoma on Interstate 40. I’d probably driven past it fifty times, never once stopped, not even for gas. Shamrock sits between Oklahoma City, where we lived for a while when I was a kid, and Amarillo, where my grandma, my other grandma, lived. On that four-hour drive, you fill up before you leave town, and you don’t need gas until you get to Oklahoma City or Amarillo. If we stopped, it was Elk City, the halfway point, and only if someone needed to pee. My parents weren’t the type to be swayed by requests for a Happy Meal when we were two hours from home or grandma’s house.

If you’re coming up from Austin, there’s no interstate to Shamrock. You have to take the state highways through towns like Anson and Guthrie and Paducah as the landscape flattens out from the Hill Country. The towns are deserted, the main streets just empty windows painted with “Go Tigers” or whatever the local football team is named. Then a courthouse. Some more boarded-up stores, those flat prairie buildings with wide, flat awnings. You can still imagine horses tied out front. Maybe a Model T. Then, at the edge of town, a Dollar General. Past the town, ranches, and farms. A wind farm. Slow down for giant combine harvesters on the two-lane highway.

I got to Shamrock late in the evening and drove to the center, where the old Route 66 bisects the town. Then for no real reason but curiosity, I got on Interstate 40 and drove across the Oklahoma state line, where I took an exit to nowhere, or it’s nowhere now. It’s called Texola, one of those towns that used to be a filling station and a café. Both of those are closed. The one-room jail survived while most of the buildings collapsed. I wanted to drive a little of the old Route 66, and here it runs parallel to the interstate that made it obsolete.

I’d like to think my Route 66 obsession comes from books, but I think it’s just that I spent my teenage years in Amarillo, where another part of 66 is preserved. I remember asking my mom about the highway. She said it ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, and Route 66 was the road people took to California. Later, she bought me a copy of On the Road. Some of this may be why I was always planning the type of road trip I’d never take. The destinations changed. The dreaming was the point, like buying a lottery ticket. For a couple of days, you have a fun little daydream about not being trapped. But the reality of road trips never matched any sort of dream—not the good kind anyway.

Driving down 66, I thought this might be the closest I’d get. A road trip where I wasn’t in a hurry. I wasn’t in a fight. No one was aggressively sighing in the passenger seat. I’d make enough money from the story that I wasn’t worried about where I’d sleep or if my card would work at the next gas station. I didn’t have to check in with anyone. Didn’t have to race home to sleep a few hours before going back to work. I rolled the windows down and took my time.

The condition of the road changed every few hundred feet, from old concrete to freshly tarred blacktop to the remains of concrete held together by potholes. Still, with semis blowing past me on the interstate just over my shoulder, Route 66 seemed like a more civilized way to travel. I rolled back into Shamrock at sunset, and if I squinted just right, ignored the billboards, I could imagine when the town was alive.

For a few days, I walked around Shamrock, talking to strangers, trying to get quotes for the story. There was no reason I’d have talked to these people otherwise, less reason they’d talk to me. I wondered how long it had been since they’d seen an outsider except to sell a Route 66 coffee mug. The town was a museum of a highway that died when the interstate passed it by. You’ve seen the Pixar movie.

It’s a strange thing, going from Austin to a place like Shamrock. In Austin, you can almost forget you’re in Texas, or you can forget that Texas is more than string lights and outlaw country and taco trucks.

I had a box of masks on my passenger seat, but I left them there, unworn. If I’d mentioned this on Twitter, a few thousand people would’ve spent the day kicking me in the teeth. But I was already a six-foot-tall lesbian with a haircut that had grown out a little from “lesbian going through some shit,” but not enough. The mask eliminated any chance I might be confused for just “a little country.” It had become a symbol that meant I didn’t belong in this town. I was pretty sure if I walked into a place wearing a mask, said, Hey, I’m doing a story . . . I wouldn’t get to finish the sentence. They’d think I was there to mock them. There was plenty of material—a sign in a café warning me I’d be shot for not saying the pledge or standing during the anthem. There was no anthem playing when they handed me a polystyrene bucket of iceberg lettuce and a couple shriveled tomatoes drenched in ranch.

I didn’t make any jokes, not out loud. I needed these people to talk to me. I’d never interviewed a person for a story. I was determined to get this right. With my ninety-nine-cent composition pad, because I’m both cheap and refuse to become one of those writers who talks a lot about notebooks and pens and never writes anything, I thought I looked like a way-too-old college student doing a research paper. I’ve been that person too.

Anytime I walked into a building, I expected some sort of record scratch. But I’d forgotten what makes Texas, specifically the Texas that isn’t a major city, so goddamn confusing. Why the politics are so hard to understand. People are polite and friendly. Always. To a fault. They have terrible opinions and worse beliefs fed to them by preachers and cable news and a political party that decided long ago, correctly, that if you stoke enough prejudice, enough fear, point at an easily recognizable enemy—that brown guy, the drugs, the welfare cheats, the Hollywood liberals, those queers—these farmers, whose farms are kept alive by subsidies, who never once met a queer (that they knew of) and would never get a long-enough vacation to go much farther than Branson, who break their backs to pay off the combine and barely break even, if that: They’ll vote for what’s killing their land, for what’s guaranteeing they’ll die choking on their debt. You can still find one or two who remember that they’ve seen all this before.

My grandfather was one of those who remembered. He remembered how the dust swallowed his family’s ranch before the bank took what was left. How bank robbers were heroes. It’s why I was in Shamrock. These people talked like my grandpa. But I doubted any of them were about to tell me not to take any wooden nickels and never vote for a Republican. You’d never know, except for the bumper stickers and thumbtacked printed-out memes about who they’d like to shoot. But they don’t just walk up to you and tell you they think you’ll burn in hell. Anywhere I went, I was met with a friendly “Howdy. What can I do you for?”

I’d say, “I’m doing a story for Texas Highways,” and they were kind to me, helpful even. It helps that Texans love Texas Highways. Every grandma, dentist, law firm, and real estate office in Texas subscribes to Texas Highways. Texans put Texas Highways on their coffee tables because the cover is pretty. There are usually wildflowers. And it says “Texas” on it. Texans fucking love shit that says “Texas” on it. The only thing they love more is anything shaped like Texas, like a swimming pool, hot tub, cutting board, or hotel waffles. As soon as I said the words “Texas Highways,” it was like I’d uttered the secret code that unlocked an entirely new level of Texas friendliness. I started thinking this was fun as hell. I felt like a real writer. I was carrying a notebook and everything. I started thinking I’d gotten it wrong about these people.

At night, I’d go back to my room at the Route 66 Inn, where I had to stand on a wobbly chair to flip on the ancient, wheezing air conditioner. I’d try to read or sleep or work on my story, but nothing changed the fact that I was alone in a way I hadn’t been in a long damn time. It’d been nearly a year since my dog had died, and I still didn’t know how to sleep without hearing him snore. Didn’t know how to take a walk off leash. Was still finding dog hair in places like the bottom of my laptop bag. Still getting choked up about it. I’d kept the loneliness at bay as best I could by staying busy. But the loneliness kept creeping back.