High and Mighty

Abstract

High and Mighty Kathleen Blackburn (bio) Dad liked to run as full dark thinned to morning in West Texas, cotton fields rolling out to the rim of a lilac horizon to touch the final seconds of night. The Texas panhandle escarpment is called the Llano Estacado, the staked plain, a name speaking to the endless flatness that can blind a person to his terrain. The earliest colonizers drove palos into the ground to mark the way from present-day Santa Fe to San Antonio. Otherwise, one might wander in oblivion. On the morning of Dad's CT scan results, I'm sure he stepped into the nautical twilight certain that his path was clear. But the landscape is a semi-arid savannah, a fleeting place. The southwestern plains are a playa wetland, meaning the region's water is a chimera. Sometimes real. Archeologists have discovered Paleo-Indian artifacts in excavated playas on the Llano, linking human and playa origins together. Indigenous peoples in the Paleocene roamed the panhandle along a path of ephemeral lakes. Later, Zuni shepherds followed the same glistening trail in wet seasons before the rain retreated and surface lakes vanished below the earth's surface to quench the aquifer. But to the outsider's eye, water in this place was always invisible. When imperialist Francisco Vásquez de Coronado climbed the northwestern edge of the Llano, the land spread so evenly before him, he couldn't see the shimmering wet surfaces of over twenty-thousand shallow basins carved by wind and filled with rain. Playas emerged like apparitions. When the conquistadors happened upon one, it took them by surprise. A mirage materialized into a well in the sand. Lagunas redondas! Pores for the largest aquifer in the world. But the essence of a playa is its impermanence. When they found no gold, Coronado and his men declared the land forsaken and forced their Apache captives to take them east along an ancient shepherd's path that began in what is now Lubbock. ________ These days, it is for the runner to discover terrain by foot. Dad's pace was slow at first. He had a high step, soft fall. Many mornings, I rode my bike next to him. We usually took a route that shot straight up a northbound street toward a church with a white steeple that grew like a blade from the edge of a field of cotton, marking the one-mile point. The West Texas heat didn't batter in the early hours, but the wind could be relentless. One morning, dust-filled gusts pummeled Dad and me. With each pedal downward, I lifted my body in a climb. My thighs burned. Dirt mixed in my mouth and muddied my throat. Dad moved against the wind like it wasn't there. Did he sense in those gales the mesa's formation of water and man? He made opposing the wind appear easy. When at last he glanced over his shoulder to find me trailing, he turned back. "I'll push you," he said. He took hold of my seat, and the bike jolted aright. "Pedal hard, Kate!" he cheered. "Pedal!" Over the years, there were many mornings where we contested wind, Dad's stamina like a virtue. One time, the gusts were too much for me. The church steeple grew taller, but it was still at least half [End Page 58] a mile off. Dad slowed to a stop. I climbed down from my bike and Dad stood with his hands on his hips. He surveyed the highway, the church ahead. He looked at the sky and the field alongside us, as if to scan wind. His first assignment in the Air Force was weather reconnaissance over the Pacific. As a right hand to the captain on commercial flights, he checked the dials for air pressure and airstream speeds. Watching him calculate the wind and distance, I witnessed him pilot. "You'll be okay if you wait a few minutes while I finish the run," he said, muddling question and statement. "I'll turn back at the church." He told me to take my bike a few yards into the cotton field and watched...