If you did what I did today, drive from Waco to Dalhart, you would swear that the whole drive was flat. But in fact Waco is 470’ above sea level and Dalhart is at 4000’. The gradient is so gentle as to be unnoticeable, but it sure adds up.
Afternoon sky over a gas station in Dalhart, Texas. Couldn’t do anything except grab a quick shot through the window. I guess it’s true that the best camera is the one you have with you.
See also one of my favorites among my own essays, “Filth Therapy.”
I appreciate the respectful tone of this essay, but … I guess I am bemused by the widespread feeling that the American South needs to be explained. (And is susceptible to explanation.) The view seems to be that people born elsewhere — Iowa, in Jeff Taylor’s case — constitute a norm from which the South is in various ways, some good and some bad, a deviation. Taylor is a native midwesterner who lived in the South for three years and is now explaining it; I am a native Alabaman who lived in northern Illinois for twenty-nine years, but it would never occur to me to write an essay explaining the Midwest.
Lunch!
