Sunset, February 17th, 2024 finds us rolling west on US Highway 60 pacing a BNSF stack train through Lipscomb County, Texas.
It is for me to see the simple beauties---
A sprig of sage plucked from this ancient land, rubbed gently between thumb and forefinger, releasing the mystic and the mythical, the native belief in its power of healing, inhaled in a heady aroma that is heavy with rosemary and overtones of camphor---
A breath taken and held deep within, there for it to cleanse a being and bring peace to a soul.
We’ll slip the sprig into a breast pocket, over the heart---
To keep the ill spirits at bay.
There are no mountains to block the view, and no stopping the winds.
It is day all day from horizon to horizon.
And when the sun sinks below the land on its journey to light other places, it is night just the same.
The constellations pay their visits, Sagittarius riding the southern horizon as the Milky Way rises in all its Summer glory, leaving Sirius and Orion to drift through the chill Winter’s night.
There is little here to keep one from seeing all the beauty of the sky and the land.
Only oneself.
One must stand upon it and open their soul to it; to become of it in a way that the Passers-Through will never know. To experience the grandeur of it through one’s own insignificance, the crunch of dry grass beneath our feet as we draw the soft blanket of stars round weary shoulders on our way to slumber.
Among the lights and shadows and textures, there is never nothing.
The sky is a canvas, stretched taut upon an infinite frame. It is pure and unforgiving and terrifying in the same blink of an eye, yet never blank. The clouds can wisp across it in random and magical form, shimmering with silvery whites and ice crystals that paint the spectrum and glow with the fantastic colors of dusk---
Or pound the parched land with a fury unleashed from the heavens, the smell of rain on the wind making its intentions known before a darkened afternoon sky descends in sheets from above.
The rivulets, etching miniscule canyons through the dry ground, run fast towards the streams---
The streams towards the rivers---
And the rivers flowing fast, carrying the land, grain-by-grain, with them out to the seas.
For eons, the winds have sculpted the land, scouring the earth, lifting the dust from faraway places, carrying it across the great mesa of the Llano Estacado until, finally, the battle with gravity is lost, and it fell from the sky---
To land here: A sandy, rolling scape where the roots of sage and yucca and bluestem grasses burrow to great depths that allow them to return after even the fiercest of wildfires ravages the land, burning out lesser growth and the woody intruders that seek to make a foothold where they don’t belong.
By chance or by design, I, too, came to this place, blown in gently on the winds of life.
I, too, fell to earth here; a long way from the place of my birth.
The trains of my youth are long gone, yet glimpses of their ancestors can be had in the local freights that ply their trade at places like Panhandle and Hereford, where mutated GP30s and such might be seen speeding a few cars towards Amarillo or Bovina at the whim of the dispatcher. The nomenclature and technical data of modern power holds little fascination with me today, as do train symbols and other such minutiae.
My love of trains runs deeper, as does the love of this land, and speaks to the wandering quality of my soul; a soul that was cultivated as such by the transient nature of passing trains as they were witnessed in those formative boyhood years in southeast Texas, where Espee was king, and all the others made occasional appearances.
They took me with them wherever they were going, and the writings of Beebe and the images of Steinheimer and Shaughnessy and such lent both wonder and credence to the journey.
Those trains are many years gone, yet my love for them endures on an almost spiritual level. They have been a part of me forever, and I cannot fathom a life without the thrill of watching an approaching headlight shimmer through the heat waves rising from the surface of the Llano Estacado, trumpets blaring across the land, and the ground rumbling upon their arrival.
I would love this place---this land---even without them.
But they are here.
And so, I think I’ll stay.
---RAM
Rick Malo©2025
At dusk on the cold evening of December 29th, 2024, an eastbound BNSF train rolls past a gap in the sagebrush-covered sandhills of Lipscomb County, Texas.
Power of The Llano. At 32,000 square miles, the Llano Estacado is a big, wide-open place. Early on the morning of January 3rd, 2024, a westbound train rolls across it between White Deer and Cuyler, Texas.
A westbound BNSF grain train slips over the Canadian River on an April dusk.
The setting sun hangs in a dust-filled April sky and watches over a westbound stack train that sits idle on the main at Black, Texas.
On a summer night on the very edge of Hemphill County, Texas, the Milky Way rises behind the signals at the Coburn Crossovers, 5 miles east of Glazier.
A westbound hotshot rolls into the maw of a spring morning thunderstorm near Glazier, Texas on the BNSF Panhandle subdivision.
A heavily mutated GP30 leads the Saturday Evening charge of the Pampa Local at White Deer, Texas as it highballs back to Amarillo.
A flight of feathers near Kingsmill, Texas.
A pastoral Sunday morning vignette at Black, Texas.
Thank you!