Desperado in Palo Duro

KATHRYN JONES 

April 16, 2020

If I could run away, where would I go? 

I know.

 I take a road trip, if only in my mind. 

 I’m driving the long road from Canyon to Palo Duro, checking my rearview mirror,  feeling like I’m on the lam. Nothing in sight except for land and sky. Nothing much in any direction except a lone windmill drumming the wind and pumping water into a concrete trough mobbed by cattle with no tree for cover, no shelter in sight. 

The world out here on the Llano Estacado feels like a rectangle so flat you can see the edges. I drive a bit farther and the crack begins in the tabletop. With every mile the crack yawns wider and deeper until the Earth exposes its insides.

I drive toward the abyss, check in at the state park station, get my campsite number, and drive down, down, down into millions of years carved and sculpted by wind and water, ochre and vermillion striped cliffs and hoodoos shaped like chimneys and lighthouses. The sinking sun throws darts of fire into the violetness descending into the canyon.  Cattle turn into ebony ghosts moving along the rim. The ivory moon rises, clouds caught on the mesquite thorns.

 I pitch my tent, eat some slices of cheese, crackers, and grapes for dinner, wash it down with a camp cup of wine, and watch the electric sky. There goes a silver-tailed star falling into the nothingness. I crawl inside the tent, unroll my sleeping bag, and lie on my back, listening to the echoes of time and the coyotes’ refrain – a howl from the bowels of black space. 

 When the sun peeks over the rim, a woodpecker awakens me, squawking from the top of a dead mesquite tree. Another day, another chance to outrun the invisible demon. Surely it cannot find me at the bottom of Palo Duro. If it does, no one is safe anywhere. 

 I cook eggs on a camp stove. Shadows move on the ground.  I look up to see buzzards — nature’s dark angels – circling above in the big blue sky. I point at them with my fork.

 “You ain’t getting me,” I tell them. “Not just yet.”

KATHRYN JONES is a longtime journalist, essayist, author, and teacher. A regular contributor to The New York Times and  a contributing editor and former writer-at-large for Texas Monthly magazine, her essays have been published in Texas Monthly and in two anthologies, A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, (University Press of Kentucky, 2019), and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016 ). She currently teaches journalism at Tarleton State University and is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor (The Last Picture Show, The Wild Bunch) and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.