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Kansas City Irish Festivals, Music, Pubs, & Events by an Artist in Ireland

Lubbock, Texas

Part 57 of the Cycle-Across-America series. (Read from the start in Boston or see the full index)

The next section of the journal was done on audio tape but with tape and transcript inaccessible in storage I’ll just share what I remember and then below the fold will return to excerpts of the handwritten parts of the journal for the next stage.

October 15th.
An ambitious day of trying a 90 mile trip to get to Lubbock and a contact where I can rest for a few days.

I-27 is the road south to Lubbock for everything else leaving Tulia. On the bike I go parallel a few miles to the east of it.

Plainview was my first stop, after over 20 miles. It was grey town on a grey day, littered with water towers, and maybe it was the weather, or the bias its name gives it, but Plainview didn’t impress me.

I did eat in a fantastic cafe though, straight out of another era. But then I noticed the photos on the walls were all of Steve Martin. Closer inspection told me that a Martin film called “Leap of Faith” had been filmed in Plainview, possibly some of it even in this cafe. I hated that the cafe celebrated something else rather than itself.

It made me think of the town I cycled through before Tulia. It was called Happy. Welcome to Happy, the Town Without a Frown, is how its sign greeted you. A tiny industrial feeling little town of those corrugated roofed hangar style buildings along with grain bins and elevators, but the power of suggestion worked.

And when I left Plainview, things got epic. Which in West Texas means lonely.

The cars were so few I counted them. 3 cars in 20 miles. You do everything you can to avoid traffic, but when you avoid it completely you miss its company and you get scared.

It’s mostly west that I looked, because although I was cycling south on this day, overall I was going west across the country, and I kept thinking of the early white settlers, those who had travelled this far west - and then for some reason stopped.

Why would anyone stop here? No rivers, no lakes, and no mountains. No trees even. Just burning sun, and ferocious winds. I passed a couple of historical markers. They were sad. They told of communities that had existed here but after a major dust storm or two had effectively been wiped out.

Within 20 miles of Lubbock I was staring at a field of cotton. For all the cotton I had seen growing in America, I had never touched any of it. I wanted to squeeze a piece of growing cotton. There were no houses, no people; I hadn’t seen a car for miles. Yet for 10 minutes or more I debated touching cotton.

I dropped the bicycle beneath me, looked all around me to make sure no one was within 10 miles of me, and I approached the cotton. In a dirty positively sexual moment, still expecting to be shot at, I quickly and guiltily bent down and softly squeezed some cotton.

It felt exactly as I thought it would feel.

As darkness came in I made it on to the Idalou Highway, and went as fast as I could on a wide shoulder with lots of traffic. I wasn’t going to make it into Lubbock in the daylight, but I was close, maybe 5 miles away so I stopped at a Texaco garage and called my host. I had to wait for a few hours for the van to arrive, but I was happy eating hotdogs outside as insects rained down on me from the roof.

[An account of what happened next constitutes the rest of this entry and it’s below the fold]

October 19th, Lubbock, Texas

Adopt-a-Voter. 8 out of 10 young eligible voters didn’t last time so now there’s a campaign to bring your grandchild along to vote.

And I finally realise that the list of names for tropical storms and hurricanes as well as being alternate male and female, is in fact alphabetical. So after Josephine drowning the east coast, and then Kyle being an ineffectual whimper in the Caribbean, we now have Lili over Cuba and expected to head north-east. So once again I’m unaffected.

They hover in the Caribbean threatening to come north and then they go east. As I’m going west next that should be the end of any dangers from hurricanes unless later I get one coming in from the Pacific, but I think that’s unlikely.

Looking at the route I’ve chosen from here I estimate there’s about 1,500 miles left. It will be tough as I start climbing fairly soon. One more night in Texas - Brownfield I’m aiming for - and then it’s New Mexico.

Because of the lack of roads, and the mountains, I plan on taking 10 days to zigzag across the southern part. That will take me over the Continental Divide from which it should get easier as the slopes on the far side are steeper than this side.

It won’t all be downhill though. I’ll have a couple of days of serious ups and downs and I haven’t yet worked out a route from Phoenix but I can hopefully do that when I stay with my Phoenix contact.

The mileages I’ve chosen aren’t big but throw in a storm or bad winds and I’m in trouble. The route is chosen based on available lodging and there’s virtually no options in between. Not worth worrying about on a Friday though when I don’t plan to restart until Sunday.

My Lubbock host’s son goes to Texas Tech. The Law School. The campus of the University was listed in the country’s 10 ugliest. We waited outside yesterday for him at 5pm. A patch of grass by some trees was waterlogged. It attracted birds. Some Mockingbirds which are the state bird were there, as were some large blackbirds. I first thought they were crows but they were sleeker and with a blue-green sheen, somewhat like a magpie. They also have a fan tail like a magpie’s. Maybe they are crows. Magpies are in the crow family after all.

The campus is not ugly. It’s simply western, squared off and built of a yellow brick. Maybe the list was compiled on the east coast.

My host works for the prison service and he’s spoken a lot about work there. He told me of a man in his 30s who’s serving a 10 year sentence for dealing in Marijuana. In reality he was just using but he sold over a pound to a friend. He had gotten it from someone who grew it here in Texas - 2 acres of the stuff.

Never having been in trouble of any kind before this was his first offence but as he sold over a pound he could be convicted of a felony whereas use of the drug is a minor misdemeanour. He told the police where the 2 acres were but he refused to give the name of the person who grew it (it wasn’t the owner; he had no idea his land was being used in this way).

So he was tried and convicted and sentenced to 10 years suspended. However he turned up at one of his weekly meetings with his parole officer, drunk - that’s expressly against the conditions of the suspension of his sentence - so he was forced to serve time. Being a model prisoner he was due for release shortly having served only 4 years, but this is election year. That means some politician didn’t like so many prisoners serving minimum time so he now has to serve an extra year or so. Now he’s not a model prisoner anymore.

There are over 600 prisoners in Lubbock. In Amarillo where my host was based for the first couple of weeks there were 4,400 inmates and in Brownfield, where I intend to go next and my host was based before his transfer to Lubbock, there are 500.

My host says he doesn’t have problems with the inmates. It’s not his job to punish prisoners or make them follow rules - that’s in the hands of the courts - he’s simply there to keep them in custody. If he needs to get them to do something he doesn’t come down hard, he simply gently suggests things almost in a joking manner. That means they don’t look bad in front of the other inmates and the prisoner knows he should do it anyway.

Most of the prison officers his age are mature enough to know that but the younger officers tend to almost provoke resistance. He says it’s mostly young black prisoners who cause the problems and it’s down to not being able to control their tempers. There’s no problem with older blacks or with whites, and the Mexicans weren’t much trouble either.

When someone kicks up they call in the special units who arrive all padded up. They hit the problematic inmate with a shield and then cuff them, leaving them like that in their cell until they calm down.

The polls say that Dole has made up a little bit of ground on Clinton by focusing on the so-called character issue. On the campaign trail today and yesterday he’s still hammering it.

A poll I found much more interesting was one on which is your favourite member of the Holy Trinity. The Son won with 46% of the vote, the Holy Spirit came second with 33% and the Father trailed in with a mere 21%

I watched the Chiefs beat Seattle comfortably last night. That stops their losing sequence and makes them 5 and 2. They looked good and I’m definitely getting attached to them. Meanwhile over in baseball the St Louis Cardinals were humiliated 15 - 0 in their final game against the Major League champions - the Atlanta Braves. So when the current storm is finished with New York, the Braves will take on the Yankees in the World Series.

And now my host has gone Line Dancing yet again, in his best shirt and boots, and his son is studying. He’s been studying every night - I’ve barely seen him. Once last night he floated past with cotton wool in his ears. It’s good to see all that subsidised cotton getting put to use.

My host tells me the cotton grown in Egypt is better quality and cheaper. The government pump money into West Texas so they can grow all this cotton I see. I’m glad, at times it looks like snow - there’s so much whiteness. So I’m watching an Irish film with Albert Finney doing yet another Irish accent. It’s littered with Monaghan accents and I’m laughing. When the studying is finished we’re supposed to be heading out for beers.

In the local paper - the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, - there’s an article on Inishmurray and Sligo. It’s by a Joe Murray who reckons his ancestors came from the island.

The front page has a picture of a lot of peanuts. More than 30,000 pounds of peanuts spilled from an 18-wheeler yesterday on Locust Avenue, when it overturned. Meanwhile in Austin the State Higher Education Co-ordinating Board has given a tentative approval to build a 47 million dollar sports arena on its campus.

Flicking through the paper you can see that Texas Tech is mentioned in most of the articles.

There’s a refreshing dose of international news though too, not just in the paper but on the box. Lebed’s prominence in Yeltsin’s Russia, the crowd tragedy at the football match in Guatemala, the protests in Belgium about the removal of the judge, the nuclear protests in Taiwan, but as I prepare for the land of Cochise and Geronimo, I don’t know that I care.

October 19th Lubbock, Texas

A virtual reality life of Christ. Another evening of Texas television. Charles Grodin interviews Gerry Spence and they talk of the greater issues brought up by the civil trial of O.J. Simpson. On another station Grodin acts with De Niro in the comedy “Midnight Run”.

The Huskers were in town today to play Texas Tech. They brought 20,000 fans with them which is worth a lot to the economy of Lubbock with its population of 187,000 fans. We met some of these Nebraskans last night as they ambled around the downtown looking for a restaurant. They were dressed in red and they weren’t young.

I watched the game on the box feeling a bit like a traitor as it was not the Red Raiders that I cheered on. There’s a limit to how many teams I can adopt and this was a definite conflict of interests but I remember fondly the passion of my host in Omaha and it prevailed. So did the Huskers 24 - 10.

As I write, in the WBA Middleweight Championship, Joppy the defending champion is beating up McElroy for the 4th successive round but McElroy keeps coming back for more. My host has told me that he sees Barry McGuigan doing commentating over here. Round 5, Joppy had predicted a knockout here. It didn’t happen. Round 6 and it did. He whupped him.

Monarch Butterflies have begun a migration across an uncharted expanse from southern Canada and all parts of the US to their winter refuge in central Mexico. How the insect with only a 3 to 4 inch wingspan can fly unerringly across half a continent to an unlearned 10-acre spot in the mountains of Mexico is not clear to scientists.

The butterflies visit flowers to store up energy needed for their annual migration that can require a flight of more than 2,000 miles. Until 1975 the place they congregate in winter was unknown to the outside world. A tree may contain from 15,000 to 20,000 individual monarchs and tree limbs droop under their weight.

I see a couple of them every day. Now I’m wondering if it’s the same couple I see all the time. Its wings have a distinctive orange colour with black markings. Its milkweed food supply provides protection from predators. As they consume the leaves they accumulate in their body some chemicals that make them taste very badly to birds.

Hawks are at it too. A wide variety of hawks are among the hundreds of bird species that fly across West Texas each autumn en route to warmer climates for the winter. Whether seen riding a thermal updraft or sitting on a telegraph pole, some of these birds of prey are on a trip that may exceed 10,000 miles. Some of them stay in West Texas for a while. The most common is the Red-Tail who are here pretty much the whole year round. The Mississippi Kite comes in April or May, stays for 6 months and then leaves. Most of the medium size hawks take rabbits, whereas smaller ones primarily eat smaller birds and mammals.

Other birds of prey that pass through this area are Kestrels, Bald Eagles, Swainson Hawks, Marsh Hawks, the Osprey, Northern Harrier, Harp-skinned Hawk, Coopers Hawk, Northern Goshawk, Harris’ Hawk, Ferruginous Hawk, Rough-legged Hawk, Merlin, Peregrine Falcon, and Prairie Falcon. I’ve seen a couple of these dead on the roadside. Even dead they often have a presence.

Round 2 of the next fight. An English fighter from Telford called Woodhall takes on Keith Holmes for the WBC title. He’s the underdog and playing it safe at the moment. 9 rounds complete and it’s still very even. In fact it’s so even if it stays like this the American will keep his title in his home town of Marlsboro, Maryland. The final round (12). Woodhall is urged to do it for King and Country. Stopped. 30 seconds from the end Holmes puts Woodhall down and then unleashes a punishment of sorts.

So in the morning I get taken me back to that Texaco garage and I begin the fight into the forecast south-west wind 10 to 20mph with gusts up to 30. I’m apprehensive but heartened by news from home.

Have I made a stupid mistake by not replacing my tyres with the next chance 900 miles away ?

Read the Next Entry (#58) in My Bicycle Trip Across America

Read more from my Cycle Across America

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 7:30 am and is filed under 1-eolai, Cycle Across America. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.