January 28, 2025: We’re in Texas now and we’re crossing it as quickly as we can, cutting across the Panhandle and sticking to the high-speed interstate. We’ve never liked Texas and our passage across the state by even the shortest route is an endurance test. (There’s a hate-mail sentence if I ever wrote one.)
Starting in New Mexico yesterday after we left Fort Sumner—and the town’s centerpiece, Billy the Kid’s grave—all moisture was drained from the soil, leaving us with endless miles of blank treeless horizons. Primary colors of the terrain: Beige, Yellow and Highway-Pavement Gray. Sage, sage, sage.
We passed through Tucumcari, New Mexico; I’d read about the place and thought it might be a fun, kitschy place to stop. Route 66 nostalgia and all that.
The first dead gas station appeared two miles outside of town. Then another, and a boarded-up hotel, and a small terra cotta building with a weed-choked drive-through window. As we entered Tucumcari, there were three rotten teeth for every one still left standing in the mouth. Even the famed Neon Row of retro motor lodges sat dim and uninviting in the frank glare of the midday sun. It’s eerie, discomfiting, and sad to drive through abandonment like this. From once thriving businesses (the 1960s, perhaps?), to desiccated insect husks in a matter of years. Some bad economics, the death of Route 66 (killed by the interstate), and human apathy swept through here like a virus; everyone got infected and closed up shop, putting concrete barriers across entrances to parking lots, giving weeds free reign, and soaping windows. Even the FOR SALE signs here are weathered and faded. Graffiti rules the day, birds have a heyday with broken windows. A cold winter wind shivers through the dead grass and a tumbleweed finally gets up the gumption to cross the road.
In the headlines, Trump continues to dismantle America. Tucumcari is the country’s preview. Withered lives, abandoned dreams, decayed ruins.
Soon after we entered the Lone Star State, we passed a hand-painted home-spelled billboard along the interstate: “Eat Beef You SOBS, Your in Cattle Country.” It was both an invitation and a warning.
We stopped for the night in Vega, Texas: an odd little town that straddles a thin line between life and death. It’s still breathing, but each gust of wind that passes through town is a drawn-out exhalation, a death rattle. You can see it in the permanently-closed stores:, their wooden signs weathered and cracked, letters faded. You feel it in the hollowness of the town square, all shops shuttered by 4 pm, if you even catch them on a day they’re open. Even the neon OPEN sign at the local bar is dark. Still, the town plucks along, keeping its streets as tidy as the ever-blowing dust allows.
We’re parked for the night at the Milburn-Price Culture Museum, which displays artifacts like a Model T Ford, a wind-turbine blade, “extremely old pickles” (Atlas Obscura) dating from the 1970s, and the world’s largest branding iron. I stopped the van at a level spot just a few feet from the 22-foot long branding iron, wondering at the size of cattle in Texas if they need an iron that big.
In the rest of the museum grounds behind us, there’s a free-standing concrete slab with a saloon facade painted on one side, Billy the Kid slouching to one side of the swinging doors. Midway across the courtyard, a three foot rabbit wearing jeans, a cowboy shirt, and a frown stood with crossed arms, glaring at Billy the Kid. I assume the rabbit’s name was “Pat Garrett.”
To the right of the van, a sculpture of a pissed-off, red-eyed Texas longhorn—caught in mid-whirl—looked like it was about to gore into Sugar’s side with one of its horns. I sidestepped the angry cow and went to the museum’s front door: locked and closed for the day. I cupped my hands on the glass and peered into the gloom: rows of kerosene lamps hanging from nails, glass cases full of bullets, train timetables, and tattered notebooks from the hip pockets of long-dead miners. Everything was frosted with dust.
I went back to the van and invited Jean to come out and take a walk around town. “Should only take about 15 minutes,” I said.
The one bright spot we found in Vega: Mama Jo’s Pies and Sweets, right off the town square. As we walked past, we thought it looked quaint—and possibly a place to use the bathroom one last time for the day. I went to the front door and pushed; it stuck a little in its jamb and had to be nudged.
The coffee shop was dim inside, lit mostly by the late afternoon sunlight coming through the tall front windows. It was a large room, likely the town’s former mercantile, now lined with cozy chairs and antiques. There was only one other person in the place: an older woman with lemon-white hair who greeted me from behind the counter. “Why, hello there!” Her voice, as it goes with many a Texas woman, was music. It was Mama Jo herself.
“Hi,” I said. “Are you open?”
“Well, I was just closing up, but I’ll be glad to stay open a few more minutes.”
“Oh, you don’t have to go to any—”
“Nonsense.” She waved my words away. “Now, what’ll you have?”
“Coffee?”
“You’re in luck. I brewed a fresh pot just a bit ago. Take cream?”
“Yes, please.”
She poured.
“Thanks.”
“Not a problem.”
Jean, dancing from foot to foot, finally asked, “Do you have a bathroom I could use?”
“Sure, hon! Just through that doorway there and then hook a left.”
While we waited and I sipped my coffee with tiny hisses, Mama Jo filled the silence with: “Y’all just passing through?”
I told her the standard tale about our vanlife odyssey. She, like most, responded with a story of her own about a relative of hers who “tried it for a few months.” In most of those stories, a) the adventurer never sells their home but goes out on the road for a limited amount of time; and b) they’re in a big land-yacht RV, or a fifth-wheel pull-behind with all the amenities of fixed-home living. I’ve yet to hear a “boomerang story” resemble anything like what we’re doing: no one sells nearly everything, no one cuts all ties to a home base to go on the road, and no one pares down as far as we did to get in this van. And certainly NO ONE does it with three cats!
Anyway, I’ve veered from the point of my story, which is to say that the yellow-haired white woman with the wide eyes and the Texas-sized smile was just as nice as nice could be, even though we wandered in two minutes before closing time. Mama Jo, with a voice like a happy song and a personality to match, went a long way to off-setting the town’s off-putting atmosphere. She was also the only living person we saw in our entire time in town.
Pro tip: try the gluten-free brownies. They’re made with pecan flour and they are to freaking die for—so delicious! Those brownies, man, they’re the one reason I’d go back to Vega, Texas.
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Your writing is just so good, even about a place you're trying to avoid. Thanks for this.