A Farewell to the Lone Star State

Near Oglesby, Texas

Texas, that vast expanse of farm land sliced through by pale four-lane highways, the sides of which sprout fast food joints and chain stores, umber and gray suburbs like a hexagonal growth. Behind the suburbs stretch endless fields scarred by the crossing of county roads, and behind even these, the purple flat-topped lines of mesas.From the highway the land out there seems impossibly large and clearly abandoned. From county roads it reveals itself as a treasure trove of the bizare, abandoned and run down.

Ireland, Texas

Bosque River, Texas

An army of leather-skinned older men in pickup trucks and aging trailers guard the

tops of their hillsides with a shotgun and a dog or two. They change nothing of the land, not the barb wire fences, the scrub wood, corroded truck bodies, or the ancient churches left behind when people moved on. The land changes human artifacts into weather-worn heaps of wood, cinder-block and tin.

Ireland, Texas

The cemeteries of the past go silently feral in their spots of shade. Infant tombstones stretch in rows of cemented over graves from the first pioneers of this land. Broken slabs of granite separated from their cadavers by time are heaped in the corners.

Outside Hamilton, Texas

Ireland Cemetery, Ireland, Texas

Lost towns sweat away silently in the sun, inhabited by a handful of souls still eking their living out of some long-horns and the violent green of early summer. The grandiose gates of ranches reach toward the cloudless sky, the houses set far back from the undriven road, a true privacy that seems abhorrent to most modern men. Here prevails the independence of a life that needs no supplies but a tiller and a truck and a hardware store and a gas pump.