CROSSING TEXAS

So we've left the Dallas area, and are staying the night in
Anson, TX, just north of Abilene. We're still practically in central Texas. It reminds me of Laura Ingalls Wilder's description of crossing the great prairie in a covered wagon: "The prairie formed a great circle, and all around it was the sky, and in the middle was their wagon. All day long the horses walked and walked, trying to walk out of the circle, but all day they were still exactly in the middle of it." That's not word for word, but it's close. Texas is a w-i-d-e state to cross. Laura was not in Texas when she made the observation about the horses; maybe Kansas. I forget exactly.

I went running after we set up "camp" (we plugged in our electricity and connected water and sewer, and TV/internet satellite, but haven't gotten out any of the things that have been secured away for travel). We don't call what we do "camping" but for just an overnight stay, the term is good enough.

Anyway, the road seemed flat but wasn't...prairie has swells, and, again as Laura observed, "It was flat, but it wasn't flat." That is the only way to describe prairie. She hit the nail on the head. So I ran over a couple miles of gentle rolling swells, and back again, for just under an hour, 5.6 miles. I felt like a block of concrete. Maybe from sitting in the truck all day. Journey barked at cows grazing in the scrub bushes. Maybe she thought they would be fun to chase, like deer. On the two-lane Interstate 180, there was very little traffic, and nice wide paved shoulders. It was great for running, temperature 61*F. I still don't know how I'm going to manage a marathon in 2 months.

There is a cotton-milling facility next to our campground. Cotton grows alongside the roads in great fields of rough, twiggy little bushes, poufing in fluffy white gobs about 2 inches across. Little balls of it lie all along the shoulders of the road where they've blown off bushes or maybe farm machines. I've never seen cotton growing before, and I've certainly never seen it being milled (ginned?) A conveyor hoists the raw cotton way up high in the air and dumps it into a hopper, and cotton fluff comes out the bottom, free of seeds. The air is filled with cotton lint. I think you can get some kind of pulmonary disease from breathing it all the time... something like black lung, only white lung. I'll have to look it up. Or not. I'm only staying overnight.

Tomorrow we should finish crossing Texas and land just across the New Mexico border, near Carlsbad, where we'll pick up mail, and we'll stay a few days, hoping to go to the Caverns, and Guadalupe Mountains National Park.