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West Texas

By PAPPY MOORE

THERE IS nothing in the world that makes an East Texan appreciate East Texas more than driving through West Texas.

A week in Lubbock is an eternity in Hell.

It’s flat. It’s dusty. There are no trees. It doesn’t rain, except when it makes tornados and hail. Tumbleweeds roll around everywhere. There’s goathead stickers in the lawn and scorpions hiding around the base boards. There’s fine, red sand lined up along the inside of the windows, in spite of the same being closed.

What compels these people to live there?!

My family lived near Lubbock until my fifth birthday, in 1954, at which time we moved to East Texas. I like to claim that when I got to be five years old, I told my parents “I’m moving somewhere there’s trees, and yall can go with me or stay here!”

We made that long drive in a day, and dusk was settling in as we came into the Piney Woods. I was in awe of the tall, straight pine trees casting long, looming shadows everywhere. These were real trees, not scrub brush like in West Texas.

THE NEXT DAY I got to play outside and see the splendor that is East Texas. It was fall of the year, and the days were cool. The sky was blue, the trees were green and there were hills! Honest to God hills!! I felt like I had escaped from hell and gone to heaven.

I have relatives that swear by Lubbock. I have relatives that still live near there. I have relatives that now live in a prettier part of Texas but want to go back. It must be something in the water, because it cannot be the scenery or the weather.

There is one thing good I can say about Lubbock: it’s easy to get around in. If you’ve never been there, they have a grid, with streets numbered in one direction and letters of the alphabet in the other direction. If you can count and know the alphabet, you can find your way around. It’s nice and flat, too, so you can gauge your position based upon landmarks easily.

WEATHER IS A major problem in West Texas. It seems to be more intense and more foreboding than in East Texas. Maybe it’s because of the flat surface and the way you can see the horizon in every direction that makes the sight of funnel clouds so spooky. They snake their way down toward the earth, often not reaching the whole way. That’s when they become a tornado — when they start tearing something up, when they start swallowing dirt and spitting out trees.

Tornados, sand storms and hail storms. Those three weather events can scare the West Texas out of you, and they often happen all in the same day at the same place. First the sand storm, then the tornado, then the hail storm. Ain’t no way to treat a car.

THINK ABOUT living in West Texas. You know there’s land prettier and more hospitable if you go northwest to Colorado, or west to New Mexico. You know it’s prettier if you go southeast to central Texas, or east to East Texas, or even northeast to Oklahoma. You know it looks worse in West Texas than anywhere you could drive in five hours. But you stay there, in West Texas. Hot, dusty, flat, barren. If I had to move back to West Texas, I’d say “just take me now, Lord, take me now!”

© 2008, Pappy Moore, All Rights Reserved. Pappy Moore is a humorist, a native son of East Texas who still makes the piney woods his home. oaktreefm58@hotmail.com

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