North 6, Texas: Walking in a Soldier's Footsteps

In West Texas © Erin Faith Allen

West Texas. When I say it is wild, I mean it. This land is largely untamed and I like it that way. Something happens within me as I tear down these highways. The untamed part comes out. History swooshes on by and I witness it from behind the windshield.

From the wide open road under a massive sky, in an atmosphere that hasn't progressed much with the times, it is easy to get lost in eras gone by. Way out here, where progress has left these small old towns stranded in the middle of nowhere, their last gasps happening in plain sight.

I’m here to walk the streets where a soldier once lived. I found the house where he grew up. I found the place where his father worked. I found the street where he went to church. I found the cemetery where his family is buried, and then, after a little work, I found where he was buried too.

I wandered through what must be one of the most ancient little towns in Texas. I visited the graves of his family and the graves of the soldiers whose names are carved into the town memorial, a memorial he himself worked tirelessly to erect. I wandered through abandoned buildings that I know he would have wandered through too. The same doorways. The same light coming through the same windows, falling on floors that have held decades of dust since anyone last crossed them.

There is a melancholy to driving through ramshackle towns watching visible signs of demise. These places are dwindling. But the evidence of the lives lived in them is still there, if slow down and look.

I love simply letting the rest of the world drop away, in miles and miles of un-progressed wildness with not another human or automobile in sight. This is the sensation of standing completely still while watching time march past, except I am moving so fast that I cannot possibly touch time and time cannot touch me.

There is comfort in the old places, the old things, the people who lived through it all. And there is the comfort of being so present that nothing else exists, nothing else matters, and life is exactly what it actually is.

Aliveness.