How to Get Out of Texas in Your Car
Texas is a vibe. Texas is a brand. Texas is a large, oddly-shaped state that is not physically in the center of the United States, but is categorically in the center because Texas is more “American” than the rest of America. What is the most American hat? The cowboy hat. What state is associated with the cowboy hat? Texas.
What is the most American regional accent? The Bronx? I doubt if people in the Bronx even feel that way.
The most basic cliche image of an “American” is not the California surfer. It's not the Illinois farmer (whatever that looks like). It's a cowboy astride a horse, and he is from Texas, if not in Texas.
Never mind that there are more horses and cowboys in California. Never mind that Texas is not the westernmost state. We know what they mean when they say “West.” West is a cultural direction. Western Thought, Western Medicine, Western Civilization. The westernmost country is the United States and the westernmost state is Texas.
People who are not from here are surprised to learn that children in public school say two pledges of allegiance every morning. One to the United States of America, and then one just for Texas. It can be overwhelming, especially if you were born somewhere else. You might need to leave from time to time to take a cultural breather, or to be in some public land, which Texas has relatively little of.
I have found niches and corners of the culture and the land to appreciate and take refuge in, but I cannot abide the heat. By May, I am attempting to astrally project from my air-conditioned living room at least as far as New Mexico. I want to be somewhere empty, with more wind and trees. I want an intimate relationship with a creek that is clear and cold and utterly ignored and unvisited. Teleportation or air travel will get me where I want to go, but leave me unchanged and ignorant of how a place became another place. I will arrive like a time traveler, out of sync. With a slower and more grinding mode of travel, I change with my location. My contrived destination starts to seem like something invented in ignorance, an answer to the wrong question. New questions have come to light.
Questions like, how is there a wrapper for an air freshener with a scent called “New Car” in a burned out fire pit off of Highway 20 in Oregon? This question tortured me enough to write a short story (not this one, this one).
The context of my questions changes each time my foot touches the gravel of a gas station. With each new question, I feel my map rerouting and drawing lines based on new information. I see Google Maps in my dreams, where I am sometimes the observer, sometimes the map, sometimes a point on the map. I understand that, even if I get to my destination, I am lost. I am free.
Summer in Texas will make you crave such a state. If you have decided to leave Texas physically by driving, you have three choices: south to Mexico, west to California, north to Colorado. North is what we will cover today.
Big Springs offers a convenient midpoint, a satellite station in low orbit. It’s a hub where truckers spend the night and there are lots of cheap hotels. Well, not really cheap. A mid range hotel is $100/night, light bulbs are missing and it smells weird. There could be drama in the hallways. The night manager has seen things. You cannot walk anywhere because it is an island in a triangle of frontage roads in the armpit of Hwy 20. Perfect for travelers in this car-dominated expanse.
A gas station nearby has hybridized with a Subway sandwich shop. Another with a Pizza Hut. You can pass from one to the other without going outside. They share circulatory systems. If these can reproduce, they are technically a new species, like how a man-o-war jellyfish is a colony of zooids which reproduce as a single organism. Nature is amazing.
You can walk here if you really need a walk and you're willing to cross onramps on foot. It’s not what you are expected to do, and so that alone might feel good. Maybe around sunset it will have cooled down enough. You will find the strange flotsam of unwalked roadsides: a flattened spoon, random nuts and bolts, a Gatorade bottle half filled with urine of an unknown vintage. This northern edge of Texas has the dull resonance of a cast iron pan hit with a wooden ladle, it reinforces your decision to leave.
The main reason to sleep in Big Springs is to avoid Lubbock. Buddy Holly is from Lubbock. There is a small park named after him. Lubbock is like a double scoop of vanilla ice cream with jimmies sprinkles, fallen off the cone, spreading outward on hot pavement. An outer ring road circumvents this mess and your GPS will put you on it unless you make it clear you really want to be in Lubbock. If you want to sleep in here, you will have to pierce the ring road and negotiate the place’s internal organs. Unless you know it well, you’d better find a hotel room, and unless you know the hotels, don’t scrape the bottom of the barrel.
If you are experienced at sleeping in your vehicle, you won't be surprised to learn you can crash in the Walmart parking lot in Lubbock. This parking lot is boring and blasted by the sun all day, but at night, its like a coral reef. Teenagers, older sketchy people, old sketchy people who are emotionally teenagers, and teenagers who are old souls all meet up here. It's a good place for wheelies, burn-outs, the burned out, and for the burned out to do burn outs.
One strategy in a Walmart parking lot is to park in the middle, under the brightest light. If you're not trying to hide, it's theoretically safer in the light, and if you have window blinds, it shouldn't make any difference. This strategy makes sense to me, but my instinct to hide still makes me too uncomfortable to sleep so exposed. When I tried this I found that, although Walmart was chill from 10:00 pm to 2:00 am, it really picked up around 3:00 am. Even if you have windows blocked, its disconcerting to hear a car circle your vehicle. Peaking around the blinds, I saw a couple parties of visitors, chatting across their open windows.
I moved to the side lot, which was darker and abutted a lawn and some trees, which felt safer but probably was more dangerous. I was woken up again by the sound of a man parking in the adjacent slot, then urinating in the space between our vehicles. The next time I woke up, there was a yelling, screaming fight between lovers at around 4:00 or 5:00 am. This culminated in one lover running off into the grass behind our van, which was full of puddles from the sprinklers still going off, pursued and caught by the other one, precipitating a tearful reunion and love making in one of the puddles like the surf scene scene in From Here To Eternity.
It was a long, surreal night, and I know the police showed up at some point, because I remember being half awake and seeing the colored lights strobing in the gaps of the window blinds. I lifted a corner and peaked out and was nearly blinded by the carnival outside. The colors from the light bar on the police cruiser would have seemed at home with reef fish and anemones negotiating their lives with every level of the food chain happening at once here at this gathering place. It would have attracted plankton, which might have brought out manta rays, swooping down and gliding back up into the sodium lights. That would be something to see, but even though a similar scene plays out here with an all homo sapien cast, my imagination is not up to the task of appreciating it, or else I am distracted by the possibility of my own participation.
So I avoid Lubbock. I can feel my eyes sputter in the taillights of semi-trucks as I skirt around on the ring road this year.
There is a spot, a scenic overlook at the edge of Caprock Canyons State Park. It’s not a big turn off, you’ll miss it if it’s not on your map, especially if it’s dark. There are three or four picnic pavilions, a nice view of a big arroyo, enough parking for half a dozen people sleeping in their cars to not bother each other. I've seen people set up a tent. Teenage graffiti marks the picnic tables, which are fine places to make coffee in the morning. In the morning, you’ll see a small eroding canyon and layers of sage and mesquite painted out to the horizon. The view is unspoiled and you can see how, underneath, if it's just left alone, Texas is quite beautiful. This is the heart of Comanchería, the last place to civilize, and there is a nice emptiness here.
When you put in Denver, Google Maps gives you different variations, depending on the time of day. The basic route is up 84 to 27 to 87, but just a little traffic causes enough back pressure to reroute east to 36 up through Abilene, and you’ll only cross the tiniest corner of New Mexico. Or you might be squeezed out the west side on 40 to take the Santa Fe route. You won’t know why, but Google will send you down obscure farm roads that go for miles in a straight line and then make a 90-degree turn at a stop sign. The advantage of letting Google tweak the route as you go is you might shave 20 minutes to an hour off your trip, and that it sends you down roads you wouldn't have seen.
This can be fun. If you look closely, you might see pronghorn antelope in the fields that were grasslands before you even leave Texas. But leaving this part of the trip to last minute traffic optimization means you will have to improvise where to sleep that night and may find yourself boondocking in Dalhart, a cow and oil town that smells of manure and sour gas. You can get away with sleeping in a van on the local streets, which are wide and have no competition for curb space. But if it's the summer it will be hot at night, and when you wake up you may drive around looking for coffee and find only DG Market, the local grocery store, which sells coffee beans but does not make coffee.
I have a latent sense of general entitlement which surfaces in the mornings. If my corporate job has coffee brewing 24/7, why does a grocery store, which sells coffee, cream, and even coffee makers, not have a pot of shitty coffee available? I blow on the embers of my resentment to kindle a rage that can function as a temporary caffeine substitute.
I had expected to find a parasitic Starbucks-inside-a-grocery store. Unlike a Subway-gas station hybrid, the Starbucks, normally an independent organism, is an enclosed organ within the grocery store. It doesn't seem like it should work, since the Starbucks takes nutrients (money) from the grocery store’s food source (me), but the Starbucks actually facilitates more shopping, the caffeine making more money available to the surrounding store like beneficial gut bacteria converting fiber to fatty acids.
You can’t see it from outside, you just run across it inside the store, like you're outside in the world, not inside a grocery store at all, or maybe the implication is that the grocery store is the external environment, a test of the idea that there is no neutral space, that any aspect of your experience can be owned, branded, and sold to you. That we never need to leave the confines of a commercial interior.
This is a rough idea to assimilate at dawn, without coffee, in the streets of Dalhart, but thirty minutes later I fill up and get coffee at the Allsup’s on the north side of town. I needn't have gotten so upset, there are a dozen forms of caffeine in every gas station for thousands of miles in every direction. The world wants me to have caffeine nearly as much as it wants me to have gasoline.
Once over the state line, billboards abruptly offer cannabis dispensaries and abortions. When you drive back, the billboards on the Texas side will advertise attorneys to represent you should you be arrested upon re-entry. You may have acquired enough emotional baggage about Texas to get a tingle just by crossing the border, but it's not just that, something really changes. The towns, the land; it's still flat but the lingering humidity of North Texas has dissipated along with the smell of oil wells and cattle. Some of the old abandoned single story buildings along Highway 87 are pueblo style, pseudo adobe ruins. It’s subtle but it’s something.
I always do it the same way now: the first night, I drive past Lubbock, past Dalhart, to Santa Rosa, New Mexico. After hours on the high desert, Highway 84 drops into a roadcut that passes through layer upon layer of marine limestone, a layer of sandstone, and finally spits you out at an interstate crossing. There at the light, tell your inner donkey to find water. You will head down a street lined with 1950s motels with desiccated space age signs, and then turn downhill once more to a road that runs alongside a creek. Good boy. Follow the creek downstream through the park, where it disappears near a large parking lot and a public looking building. On the other side of the building is a giant hole filled with shimmering cobalt blue.
As wide as a house, dark and translucent, it is backed by a low cliff like the curtain behind a stage and empties through an aperture in a low wall opposite, into a ditch that leads off into low farmland. It feels ancient and permanent. The sidewalk, the parking lot, the water park, the town itself, all feel like they emanated from this hole. According to the sign, this thing is called, “Blue Hole.”
If you watch a swimmer dive as deep as they can, they get smaller but still bright and clear in the midday sun, their edges wobbling and breaking against the dark blue void below them, before turning upward in a scattering of arms and legs, never having touched the bottom, or even having seen it. It’s cold enough to remove all traces of the nine hour drive. I like to get in, get cold, pan-sear myself on the sidewalk, then repeat.
The parking area is gated but the gate never seems to be closed. Even arriving at night, I've never been unable to enter.
One night, thinking myself alone in the pool, I was surprised by lights below my toes. At first I thought it was the reflection of the moon wobbling on the surface, but they got brighter and closer. Three scuba divers ascended around me and made their way carefully up the stairs, re-adjusting to the weight of their gear. Pulling off masks, they became chatty, euphoric aliens. They had seen something beautiful down there and been unable to speak during the experience, it saturated their blood under pressure, and now was expanding into gas like the bends.
The Blue Hole is famous among diving communities. Beyond the main chamber, which opens up 80 feet down, there is a cave with mapped chambers down to 200 feet, and unmapped passages beyond that draw the craziest of crazy people: cave divers.
This summer, I rolled in at night after the nine hour drive to find yellow tape around the entrance. Heavy rains had caused unusual flow and there had been a collapse somewhere in the main chamber. The water was an opaque chalky blue.
A local teenager wearing a parks employee shirt was chatting with some friends in the sodium light by the hole. I approached them, wearing a bathing suit and holding a towel. “Is it ok if I get in the ditch?”
They might have been a little amused, but it’s probably hard to surprise the locals here. This is an ancient crossroads, where creatures that don’t normally interact have been encountering each other for millenia.
The water in the ditch was the same water. I got cold, did a little yoga, got in again, and then moved on to find my campsite.
If you're willing to drive an additional 20 minutes, Santa Rosa Lake Campground provides the kind of high desert landscape that is prized in West Texas, but is hardly worth mentioning in New Mexico. Driving up the mountain to Santa Rosa Lake on a summer evening, the temperature might be in the 100s, but as soon as the sun dips, the evening winds will replace that air with cool 70s. It still takes the van a couple hours to cool down, and I leave the door open as the steel frame ticks against the body panels in the breeze. There are no mosquitoes, no racoons or chipmunks. Only a solitary moth visits my headlamp.
Having left Texas, you may need to return. The return strategy is much the same, but, for me, tends to accelerate towards the end of a long trip. I have had a long time to think about things, to plan the next phase of my life, to tire of living on the road. I become enthusiastic about my life at home and am eager to return. This alone is worth leaving for.
In Denver, with 15 hours of driving between me and home, I will have planned a thoughtful, calm trek back over three days, but something happens on the first day. All of the destinations of the summer are behind me. All the road ahead is road I've seen. With Blue Hole closed, it's an easy decision to burn it out and drive all night. The extra two days at home can be spent recuperating.
Once the decision is made, the trip is over. It is now a commute, for there is a destination with more gravity than the road itself. I'm not traveling, I’m falling. Falling into the orbit of home and of my life.
Returning to Texas in the wee hours is not life affirming. People at truck stops are sketchier than in the day, myself included. I blend into my environment by shambling around in old torn up carharts and flip flops, scurrying in and out of the bathroom like a cockroach. A wiry old dude circles the parking lot on a BMX bike, a guy in a jacked up F150 has come here to have a lengthy conversation with the cashier at 2:00 am while his truck idles loudly.
The road continues to present me with new questions, but I no longer bite. I will not assign stories to these people. I'm listening to a podcast until my mind is unable to accept complete sentences and then I switch to music. When I'm numb to music, I listen to entire Black Sabbath albums end to end. Internal voices get stronger, and I’m tempted to look for relief by socializing at nocturnal gas stations, but I know it's the wrong time and place.
Llano was 100% dead at 4:00 am, except for Stripes, which was going off like the Star Wars bar. I was loitering by the rear of the van when a sedan pulled up to the pump behind me. It didn't look like it was going to slow down in time. I thought, perhaps they didn't see the bikes, which stuck out an extra three feet from the bumper, so I held my hands up and said “Whoa, whoa, whoa!”
A short, wiry woman jumped out. I could tell her emergency brake wasn’t on because the car was still rocking back and forth when she ran around the car and caused me to back up a few steps.
“WHOA, WHOA, WHOA, MOTHERFUCKER!”
I wanted to de-escalate, but the only word that came into my mind was, “Whoa.”
I said, “Wh… “
She released a flood of profanity that felt like the tip of a very large iceberg. My hands were still up in the “Whoa” position and I kept them there. I don’t remember the words, but the raw, natural fluency of her abuse made my head spin, and I wondered if I was getting the same recycled phrases she used for other occasions, or if this was pure Charlie Parker flow pinning us both into the present moment. She finished with something about, “YOU FUCKED WITH THE WRONG MOTHERFUCKER,” and went into the Stripes to pay before pumping.
I was relieved when a truck was pulled over by a state trooper with all the lights going into the adjacent row of pumps. The ticket business took a while and then they both got gas, which I thought was strange, but also made sense. She came back out, filled up, and drove off without addressing me again. She could have been starting or ending her day, but I was pretty sure it was starting.
About two hours north of Austin there is a zone where suicidal deer congregate along highways at night, a kind of Kuiper Belt of Whitetails. They graze the shoulder and seem uninhibited by tons of steel whipping past at 70 mph. Once I encountered a doe around a turn with just enough time to center her between the headlights. With a massive boom, she flew off into space. The front of the van was wrecked but drivable. I was on guard this year, and saw bucks grazing the fenceline, does and fawns exploring the edges of the shoulder, one even making its way across my high beams. I slowed. She ran away looking embarrassed but not as frightened as she should have been.
In the surreal, sleep-deprived dark, the roads become increasingly familiar until they are intimate, then so intimate it feels like a dream. The directions from my phone, which have been a lifeline for over a month, are suddenly annoying. That voice, the podcasts, audiobooks, music, and highway wind go quiet as I turn into my neighborhood. I pull into my own driveway and silence the engine, unable to process what just happened. There are lists of goals, changes to be made to my life. There has been much time to think and to dream, but this moment is not the time to interpret those dreams. I am leaving everything in the van tonight. There will be time to unpack tomorrow, or rather, later today.
Ryan Gossen is a writer living in Austin, Texas, where he also pursues dance, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and climbing, and is an active member of Texas Search and Rescue. He has had many vocations, including user experience (UX) designer, experimental psychologist, construction worker, arborist, and ski bum. He writes mostly about man’s interaction with nature. More of his writing can be found on his website.
