Digging Stars

Art and redemption on the West Texas plains.

This is an excerpt from my book The Last American Road Trip, written in 2023, released in 2025 – and now out in paperback. This excerpt takes place in March 2021; most of the book isn’t as dark. But my mood is, so I’m running this short piece. Read to the end! As mentioned, I’m taking it slow after my father’s death. I will be back. Keep finding light in that sky. — SK

It is March 2021, and we are at Palo Duro Canyon, four years after our original visit and my promise to the kids that we would return. We are staying in Canyon, Texas, a town south of Amarillo. We skipped Cadillac Ranch because I had nothing left to say.

We are in Canyon to get a break from the plague. We drove in from Dallas, where we celebrated a belated Covid Christmas at my sister’s house. It was the first gathering of my family since 2019, my newly vaccinated parents falsely believing they were now immune. A fake Christmas, a fake cure, a fake government, a real end.

I thought 2020 was the demarcation point between Then and Now, but I was wrong. Americans could still see in 2020. They had 2020 vision: the ability to see through the lies of tyrants and say “no more.”

The fatal flaw of 2020 vision is that it fades when you close your eyes. Close your eyes or be chastised: those were the rules of 2021, when people were ostracized for grieving, slandered for sympathizing. A chorus clamoring for justice was seduced to silence by the sweet succor of a soft-focus death cult.

“It’s over,” people would say in 2021. I would agree without knowing the topic because there were so many options. The pandemic? The coup? The protests? America? There were so many things we were not supposed to discuss it was hard to keep track. With the denial came the blood, the breakdowns, the rise in rage that experts pretended was mysterious. It was not. There is a saying that grief is love with nowhere to go, but grief with nowhere to go is . . . this.

My road trips now required careful regimens to elude death. But we took the trips anyway, because to stay in place was to elude life. Nothing could beat the open road, and nothing could deny the pain in the eyes of everyone I encountered on it. No one could deny the horror of what had happened except for the government and the media, who denied it until the public joined in their delusion. This is not a partisan thing; this is a liar thing.

I was out for escape. Palo Duro fit my criteria: isolated, outdoors, ageless. It fit 2021’s criteria too: cursed. One week before we arrived, a tornado hit the town of Canyon, causing no casualties but massive damage. I was sure we would not make it to Palo Duro, sure that I was looking at another promise to my children I could not keep.

But nothing can defeat rock so weathered and worn. That’s how it found its shape in the first place. We got to Canyon and rented a house at the end of a dirt road, where only wild animals could find us.

Our first day at Palo Duro was idyllic. In the morning, we hiked through a maze of sun-colored hoodoos, each more enchanting than the next. In the afternoon, we rode horses along the canyon edge, the site of brutal battles between the Texas government and the Comanche in the 1870s. The sky was a brilliant blue, the canyon a cauldron of history and color—and I felt nothing. I felt as empty as the plains around me—not like I was disappearing into a void, as I desired, but like a void was disappearing me.

In the evening, my husband grilled dinner outdoors while our children played nearby. I could hear them through the window. I kept away because I wanted them to be happy. They had spent most of the past year in virtual school, praised for their efforts for the “quaran-team.” When school reopened, my daughter would gather her books and her violin and a plastic bag marked BIOHAZARD that contained four vials of our saliva to be tested by doctors at Washington University for a deadly disease. This was our life now.

I wanted my children to explore the world without fear. Palo Duro gave them that chance. I wanted them to be free. But I wanted to be free too, in a way that did not benefit anyone but myself, so I stayed inside. I loved my children and did not want them to see me eyeing the canyon edge like a temptation, like a conclusion.

I paced the house, browsing the owner’s books in an effort to distract myself from bad ideas. They told the history of this slice of Texas, this panhandle of sorrow and survival. One of the books was a collection of letters by the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, whom I knew best from her paintings of New Mexico. But it was in Palo Duro that she’d lost herself and found her vision.

“I don’t know how to begin—don’t know that I have anything to say—only all inside I’m crazy and I don’t know what over—how—why or anything,” she wrote. I stopped pacing and began to read.

“What in the world is the matter with me these days anyway,” O’Keeffe continued. “I feel full of wheels and empty spots—Out of kindness to the rest of the folks I ought to leave everyone alone—I feel like a curse to everyone I talk to.”

O’Keeffe’s letters were written in 1917: during her world war, her pandemic. She wrote with increased desperation as World War I raged and the Spanish flu lay in wait. Hired to teach art at West Texas State Normal College, she was swept away by the beauty of the plains, comparing their vastness to “what comes after living.” She stopped painting city streets and started creating southwestern color.

O’Keeffe made New Mexico her home in 1949. But West Texas settled into her art like a permanent prelude. In the book, her letters were accompanied by her pictures of Palo Duro, jolting in their familiarity. She spent three years climbing the canyon walls, painting landscapes that “looked like Hell let loose with a fried egg in the middle of it.” She dreamed of having the freedom of a man, “so I could hunt for that big loneness—away from folks—I don’t think I’ll have the courage to go as far as I want to alone—being a woman—I wonder—is it much different?”

I read her mind like a time traveler gone full circle. Sometimes a book takes you to another place, and sometimes it clarifies where you are. O’Keeffe longed for a “dust-colored vacation,” and I did too. Ashes to ashes, I thought, and watched smoke rise from the grill.

As night fell, I put the book back and joined my family outside as my husband served dinner. I pretended I was fine and I was not convincing. He knew I was in a bad place, but no one knew the depths, because I could not fathom them myself. For the first time, I was out of words. The sun vanished into blackness, and I looked up for glimmers of hope, and felt none of the wonder that had marked my previous sightings of the sky.

I had spent a year blocking out memories. The gulf between past and present was too painful to process. But as I gazed into the night, my family by my side, memories forced their way back. Memories of the same Texas sky in 1998, in 2007, in 2017, emerging like stars when your eyes adjust to darkness, at first few and dim and then bright and all at once, leaving you wondering how you did not see them before.

I felt something—a crack in the numbness, a wave of grief waiting to be unleashed, an ache I welcomed because it meant I could still feel. The constellations had not changed. My mind gripped them like an anchor.

“I want to pick holes in everything folks call Art,” O’Keeffe wrote in 1917. Her colleagues did not understand: not her paintings, not her pain. She left Canyon one year later. She became sick during the pandemic, and her father died. But she never questioned the purpose of her time in Palo Duro.

“I’m not trying to do Art,” she explained. “I’m digging stars.”

* * *

Thank you for reading! I do not paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please become a paid subscriber. That allows me to continue writing and keep my articles open to all. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family, so I need and appreciate your support. I am deeply appreciative of my subscribers’ patience during my family tragedy. New articles to come!

Palo Duro Canyon, March 2021. All photos by me.

Palo Duro Canyon, March 2017. We fell in love with it. I promised my kids we would return. We did not know the world to which we would be returning.

Don’t let anyone tell you Texas isn’t beautiful!

The answer to “How many geology photos are you going to post?” is “Never enough.”

Heading into the canyon, walking toward the sun.