I took a week off in September to head west – a little business, a lot of pleasure. Destinations: Pampa, Texas, where I would research Woody Guthrie's five or six years there in the late '30s; north to Kenton, Okla., to climb the Black Mesa; up to Denver to visit my pal David "I'll Have the Place Clean This Time" Zachritz; then back home through the billboard wilds of Kansas.

It was an invigorating trip. I require this kind of travel every now and then – alone, wandering a bit, exploring. The journey began auspiciously, too, with a somehow symbollic storm right out of the gate. From my journal:

Some nice symbolism for the journey, too: I broke through the storm. As I left Tulsa, the air smelt of staleness and heat and way too much stagnant water. I hit the turnpike and put on The Soft Bulletin. It was darker than it should have been, because the western sky was grey, that indistinct swath of doom. As I careened in my champagne colored Ford Taurus toward Stroud, the sky stepped down the color scale from sky blue to steel blue to midnight indigo to sock grey to ash grey to death grey to black. I slipped underneath a shelf of clouds, and the lightning started, light delicate static at first growing into disorienting flashes and fat bolts of voltage. Ahead, at 8 p.m., it was as black as if it were 2 a.m., and the scenery in my rear view mirror was a beautiful blue, like heaven receding in the eyes of a sinner. I got through the stargate east of Stroud, past the McDonalds, then the spatter. Then, fuck, the wind. The lightning showed the line of the back end of the cloud shelf, and as I passed under it the pissing started, and the wind shoved. I slowed to 40mph and stayed there, in the wake of a semi truck, for half an hour as lightning pounded and thunder flashed and rain spewed and wind heaved and I squinted at the road, searching for the center-line reflectors, desperately, white-knuckled, listening to KVOO’s cheerful and melifuous weather reports, calling half-seriously to Jesus oh Jesus. After a half hour of hell, the rain stopped, the wind was becalmed, and I rolled down into that Oklahoma City loop at the other end of the turnpike, feeling victorious, as if I’d just crawled out of the whale’s belly. Call me Ishmael.

Pampa is a dump, which was not much of a shock – a crummy little town less than an hour northeast of Amarillo in the heart of the Texas panhandle. It's the kind of place with absolutely no institutional entertainment – no nightlife, no interesting shops – just necessities (Albertson's, Wal-Mart), 19 baptist temples and the high school. Pork chops, church and football, that's what keeps middle America strong as an ox and just as bull-headed.

I arrived mid-afternoon, and by evening I understood why Woody had grown so restless here. He moved here to be with family, after his mother was institutionalized in Central State Hospital in Norman (they thought she was insane, but she had Huntington's disease, which would eventuall kill Woody himself) and the family had scattered. Woody's dad, a washed-up politician and bar brawler, had retreated here to recover from an injury, with Woody's sister Mary Jo in tow. They ran a rooming house, a sleazy row of tin rabbit-hutches rented out to the oil workers and other boomers. Woody cleaned the rooms. Later, he worked at a drug store selling under-the-counter moonshine. He found his calling as a sign painter; alas, none of his work survives in Pampa.

When he got married, he and Mary lived in several places on the fringes of downtown Pampa. All of them – and one in particular – are within earshot of the railroad tracks. Everything in Pampa is in earshot of the railroad tracks. The shotgun shacks he lived in were a blok from both the tracks and the main highway. In the early '30s, with hard times hitting middle America with brute force, these two arteries became clogged with migrants – Okies and other plains folk who'd been tractored off their land and were heading west, heading somewhere, anywhere. Woody could sit on his porch and watch the jallopies roll by, watch the railroad cops chase freight hoppers out of the yard. It's no wonder he started busting out, hopping freights himself and sticking his thumb in the wind. Pampa was as boring then as it is today, and he was spawning kids with alarming rapidity. His feet got itchy. It was from Pampa that he started traveling, and he wouldn't stop criss-crossing the country for the rest of his life.

I left Pampa a day earlier than planned, and used a longer day to weave through the panhandles. A colleague at the World had recommended a cafe in Canadian, Texas, so I aimed the little rental that could northeast toward the river. The Texas panhandle was not what I had imagined it to be, and it was a lesson in the misinformation provided by interstate views. It certainly looks desolate and dreary from Interstate 40, but off the main road – on the Blue Highways memorialized by William Least Heat Moon – the land is clear and open, sure, but also colorful, detailed and with its own personality.

Notes from the road:

The county roads aren’t on the map, but the four-digit roads are and those are called ranch roads ... heading northeast to Canadian, with the railroad along the north side of the highway, the same tracks Woody rode on that trip he mentioned from Pampa to Canadian in 1935, one of the few times he was inside a train instead of on top of it ... the land alternates between grazing land and agriculture, farmer and rancher – can they be friends? ... saw fields and fields of some crop that I would see all the way into Cimarron County, short plants with dark green leaves coming to a point and splaying out like a pineapple head, with bushy pendulum-shaped flower heads on top that ranged from field to field in color from dark red like sumac to golden like ragweed ... into Roberts County, more texture to the terrain, grassy washes, then dipping into some shady groves, those Texas trees with high canopies and short grass underneath ... intriguing looking cafe in Miami but it’s closed ... U.S. 83 north high with a view of the plateaus, stop and photograph someone’s giant metal sculpture of a brontosaurus, this is dinosaur country, which is, after all, why it’s oil country ... great meal at the Cattle Exchange restaurant in the Moody Building on Main Street, Canadian, Texas, the old Moody Hotel, the restaurant is a mesquite barbecue place (with a diverse menu) and you can smell the mesquite coals blocks away, thank you Shaun Schaffer for that tip ... oh, and while I’m sitting there in that restaurant, the sound system was playing old western songs and they played Woody's “Born to Lose”!!! ... climb out of the green, leafy pocket of Canadian on the river back into the empty grassland and sagebrush moonscape, those settlers knew where to settle ... warmer and windier on the high plains, the grass and occasional trees all bow to the east from the constant pressure of the west wind ... most unpaved roads coming off the highway are pure white, they’re chalk, that’s limestone jutting through the thin carpet of greenery ... Martin Sexton’s The American was the perfect album for this drive ... every town has a water tower with its name on it and a huge multi-cylinder granary near the railroad tracks ... into Oklahoma, Beaver County, and this from my tape: “I’ve described the land as being flat before, but this is curvature-of-the-earth flat” ... sign: “Eat More Beef” with a cartoon of a winking rancher ... Guymon is ugly, tawdry, bad sugar-free ice cream at Braum’s where a bus pulled up and the whole staff shouted, “Bus!” ... from Guymon to Boise City, high, flat, the cellular service and the fences disappear ... from the tape: “Being out here in all this open space with nothing to cling to and nothing to pin your concentration on makes you realize how much of our existence is dependent on the things immediately surrounding us – the people and the things within arm’s reach, within an easy grasp, the small things we can see and that make that big difference” ... highway 325 west of Boise City is trance-inducing, I was nodding off, no shoulder, no traffic, just bright sun and the endless unfurling ribbon of road.

Kenton, Okla., pop. 35. The only town in the state on Mountain Time. It's a smattering of trailer homes and native stone cottages in the shadow of the Black Mesa, the highest point in Oklahoma, from the top of which you can see five states.

Dinner that night at the only place to eat a meal in Kenton, the Kenton Mercantile. It's a grocery store. It's a cafe. It's a gas station. It's a chamber of commerce. It's the hitching post for the locals, and it's run by Allan Griggs, who's exactly the over-intelligent eccentric you'd expect to find in such an outpost. He's a retired engineer – "a long life of suits," he says – who moved to the desertscape of the panhandle to, um, grow wine grapes. He conducted his own climate tests for years before purchasing the land and planting his vines. He thinks it's an ideal location for pinot noir, and he also grows chardonnay. To get by while his vines got started, he took over the mercantile. That's where you'll find him – swatting flies, gabbing on and on, typing on his "confuser" – when he feels like it. The back of his business card reads:

Kenton Mercantile Hours
Open everyday except Christmas about 9 or 10, sometimes as early as 7 in the Summer, but some days as late as 11 or 12 in the Winter. We close about 6 or 7, occasionally about 4 or 5 in the Winter, but sometimes as late as 9 or 11 in the Summer. Some days or afternoons, we aren’t here at all due to snow or high river, and lately we’ve been about all the time, except when we’re someplace else, but we should be here then too, unless noted on the door otherwise.

There are two bed and breakfasts in Kenton, both working ranches. I had a reservation at the Black Mesa Bed and Breakfast, the home of Vicki and Monty Joe Roberts. Monty Joe works the land, his day job is with Beaver County. Vicki tends to guests, when they have them, and drives a mail route 120 miles into New Mexico and back a few days a week. My room was a back bedroom with its own entrance. I chilled out on my stoop, watching the sunset behind the mesas and listening to the coyotes rustle and coo in the distance. It was a beautiful long moment, and I wished a still smoked. It would have made for a great, contemplative cigarette.

The next morning was, of course, Sept. 11 – Vicki knocking on my door and saying, "Thomas, I think you should come out here and watch the news." A terrifying morning (discussed in detail elsewhere) wondering what other attacks would come, whether the entire country would be attacked further. My fear was buffered only by the comfort in knowing that I was at the safest possible point on the map, hundreds of miles from anywhere, including anything a foreign terrorist would have even heard of. That was a blessing, but also a curse.

By noon, I'd had my fill of the news, and I decided to stick to my original plan – to hike the mesa. If ever I needed an escape from humanity, this was perfectly scheduled. I suited up, tied on some water bottles and set off for the trail.

Notes from the mesa:

Left about 1pm, under the high noon sun, like an idiot. The trail is truly absurd – it could not be more indirect. You park just off the road and then walk two miles before the trail even turns toward the mesa. There’s no reason the road couldn’t extend across that land, though I’m sure the Nature Conservancy doesn’t want cars going that far off the main road and across the protected land. The result, though, is a difficult walk, not because of grade but length, esp. in the heat. I had a walking stick borrowed from the Roberts and I was glad I wore my tough long pants; the trail is an old jeep trail, sometimes two tracks and sometimes one, that is overgrown in spots with rough sagebrush and grasses. Easy to follow, though, as it charges off to the west, and then the north. It’s maddening, esp. when the trail veers directly away from the mesa and you wonder why you can’t just go over there and start climbing the damned thing. ... My walk and ascent was a little harried because I was somewhat afraid. I had two bottles of Aquafina with me, but I began to worry they wouldn’t be enough. I started to remember that afternoon I drove up South Mountain on the rim outside of Phoenix and walked around in the 110-degree heat with no water, how I worried I’d not make it down. ... Crazy buzzing and clacking grasshoppers leapt across the trail in front of me. The valley was utterly quiet; sometimes I’d stop and soak up the silence. Once the trail actually turns toward the mesa, it’s a direct climb, snaking up the side fairly easily, though it is steep. I almost didn’t go to the top, but I pressed on, all the while wondering if I’d be the city boy who had to be rescued from the mesa. The last few hundred feet are rocky, but the view is grand, the whole valley floor, the deceiving monotone. ... When I got to the top, I noticed I was singing Joe Jackson’s “Another World” aloud, for some reason, and it kinda fit the otherworldly landscape into which I had stepped. I took some pictures on top, of course, then sat in the shade of a juniper and ate some peanut butter crackers and a fruit bar. I felt much better having tackled the summit and having rested. I tried to meditate, then pray. A weird day to be seeking solitude, and not easy. ... Looking out over the floor of the valley, all this space, all this sky, all the remains buried in this arid earth – all of it wiser than me, wiser than politicians, wiser than terrorists. I prayed for some guidance, some direction, asking aloud, “What can I do?” It was humbling, that eternal stretch of atoms, and at the mercy of the merciless earth I asked as humbly as I could to be allowed to do something right and good. ... I retook the trail and stopped to scribble this verse note: “It’s the earth that pulls us down / It’s the sky that lifts us up / I’m in the gulley looking at the stars.” I tried to think of what I am seeking, then remembered this passage from Siddhartha:

“When someone is seeking,” said Siddhartha, “it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal. ...”

Also, just before I stepped off the top of the mesa, a small whorl of wind passed across the mesa. It wasn’t a gust of wind, it was an eddy, and the grass hissed as it moved along, and I watched it, like an invisible dervish spinning along the mesa top, and it danced from west to northeast. I always thought the wind was one mass. For that matter, I always thought the Texas panhandle looked exactly the same all over, the Oklahoma panhandle, too. I have learned on this trip how topography and climate can change dramatically within a mile or two, how one vast area can contain rich diversity and detail. The same is true of humans, even Americans. The little differences are crucial and extremely sensitive. Our government and our economy operates as if we are all the same monochromatic mass. That is its greatest flaw.

On Wednesday, after Vicki prayed over me for my journey, I made it to Boise City, relieved to discover that gas was not $5 per gallon. Fueled and flagging, I shoved The Clash in the stereo – the only politically aware and angry disc I had with me – and rocketed into the Colorado grasslands. On toward Denver, picking up shreds of news as I followed the Arkansas River headwaters toward the ridge of the Rockies. I had planned to mosey this toute and pay attention to these highlands, but the events of Tuesday had shattered my sightseeing spirit. I pressed hard up I-25 to Denver and fell into the welcome bliss of friends, in-jokes and shared media. It was nice to form a support group a day after the tragedy, to have someone with whom to blockade the barrage of scary news.

Rebelling against the 24-hours news networks, one day David and I got in the car and drove into the mountains. Just to get away. Just to get out. It was a delicious, overcast day, and we found a healthy, cold stream. We were baptized.