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Western Ways
The simple-minded interstates have it now, and the motel- and-filling-station towns: Holiday Inn, Best Western, Quality, with Gulf and Texaco: the clean featureless caravanserais: gas pools good beds sanitary indifferent food. Oh yes, but beyond and outside lie not only reservations and actual ranches but also that special little town of the plains, at intervals strung on the gleaming straightaway of the tracks. First seen miles off, green smudge, white silos at the southern edge, and the northern marker of the water tower: Hays Russell Kit Carson: oasis groves in the grasslands dropped there out of the nineties. Yes but sometimes the cruel flow-ways have passed them, leaving a once proud road now secondary; coarse grass and broken windows and festering boards, decay without circulation, stare at us in squalid reproach, at us, the suburban passers-through on our way from urban to coastal urban. We might have lived another life by the silo and water tower. Sometimes in the great desert the Greeks imagined Atlantis.