“Man, roughnecks galore,” I said as a constant line of pickups passed us by with various work cargo in their truck beds.
“That’s not very nice,” my wife replied. “Why would you just assume they are a bunch of roughnecks.”
“It’s a compliment as far as I’m concerned,” I continued. “Look up the term on your phone.”
And so she did. “Roughneck is a person who performs manual labor in the oilfields, often associated with the west Texas region,” she read. “A roughneck’s job typically is in a drilling capacity.”
I just did my arrogant nod. We were driving across the moon-like landscape between El Paso and Abilene, Texas. It is not the scenic route by any means but we were heading home from Tucson and making a stop in Dallas to visit my brother and sister-in-law.
There was no other way to get there. So we saw west Texas and all of its oil pumpjacks at its finest.
Yep, there are no accidental tourists on Interstates 10 and 20 in these parts. We could drive hours before ever seeing another out-of-state car. And with our Indiana license plate, my wife’s Scotland bumper sticker and our bikes on the back of our CRV, we must have definitely looked like foreigners.
But then this was like another planet to us, too — an area of our country I have never experienced before and may never again.
It is a land of cattle ranches, oil derricks and wind turbines. It is a land of hard work, crusty cowboy and baseball hats and calloused hands. It is a land of faraway horizons, dust and tumbleweeds.
It is not pretty.
I’m going to be honest. I wouldn’t want to live here. The landscape reminded me of the movie “No Country For Old Men,” and I’m a pretty old man these days.
I do appreciate how this area helps make our economy grow, though, and also the workers — many of them roughnecks by definition — who often live in temporary housing and toil through 12-hours shifts.
This part of Texas starts at El Paso, almost a million strong and an All-American City the last two years. Road signs let you know that you can drive 843 miles on I-10 and still be in Texas and that 80 miles an hour is the speed limit.
After El Paso, it’s as if we were in the middle of nowhere for hours at a time until we switched over to I-20 and hit the dusty and wind-blown cities with such great names as Pecos … Odessa (real-life setting of “Friday Night Lights”) … Midland (where we spent the night) … Big Springs … Sweetwater … and finally Abilene.
At that point, I started singing to my wife:
Abilene, Abilene
Prettiest town I’ve ever seen
Women there don’t treat you mean
in Abilene, my Abilene
She was so impressed with the song (released in 1963 by George Hamilton IV) that she closed her eyes and fell asleep. By the time she woke up, we were almost to the outskirts of Dallas.
“This really isn’t Texas,” my brother later said of Dallas, his home for 45 years. “What you drove through to get here is the real Texas.”
I’m glad I saw it — once. I’m glad I didn’t have another flat tire.