Thursday, March 27, 2008

More glitches.

March 17, Honey Grove, Texas (73 miles.)

More circus fare: a motor-home slid off the road in a town called Blossom, on highway 82 in Texas, on the drive over this morning, and several other drivers, including Fridman, stopped to help pulling it up. There were three cows grazing in a field next to my truck as I waited, feeding Dylan the crumbs of a gas station muffin and later nursing Nicolas when he woke up. It was sunny but a fleet of low-lying clouds was racing across the sky under a stratus of other clouds much higher up that looked completely still.
Ironically crossing the border into Texas almost felt like coming home. Too many movies or just Thelma and Louise, and I kept thinking about how someone fleeing the law would feverishly run to the border, say, to escape Texas deputies. Speaking of, if you were ever in need of a gun in a small town called Detroit, Texas, the Red Oak Gun Shop sits in a shady grove a few miles outside of town; the surprising beauty of a short, single strip of downtown facades in Detroit, the faded hues of the mismatched, forlorn brick fronts, all the more beautiful for their decaying descent into the slow oblivion of rural America, beautiful the way I imagine Havana, Cuba, to be beautiful, its appeal exacerbated by its very shabbiness, at least for those of us lucky enough not to be scrapping a living there. And there is something about highway 82 and airplanes; outside of Blossom, on the left side of the road, the nose of an airplane in the dust of a yard, and later on, west of Paris, in a place called Toco (Toco?) an entire aircraft sitting there pointing at the road as if the crew were waiting for us to board; it is old and rusty but above all incongruously big; I had seen it before on the way to Hugo from Dallas over the years.

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