A few graves on the way to Texas

Yes, 11 hours of driving today. Maybe more. But we broke it up with a few interesting stops along the way. When you're traversing this stretch of the US, you'll take anything you can find that qualifies as "interesting", since most of the terrain looks like this.

After an early start, we made our first significant stop on Route 60 at the Billy the Kid Museum in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. You may not have known that William Henry McCarty, aka Billy the Kid, was shot and killed and buried in Fort Sumner, but just try driving anywhere near Fort Sumner and you'll know soon enough, thanks to historical markers and giant billboards.

The Museum is run by Don Sweet and his wife, and Don wasted no time in telling us that the museum was opened in 1950 by his father and had been run as a family business ever since. He also mentioned that dear ol' Dad had originally opened the museum as the "Fort Sumner Museum", but changed it after 90 days to the "Billy the Kid Museum". What Don didn't tell us is that five miles down the road, adjacent to the actual gravesite of Billy the Kid, is another Billy the Kid Museum... anyway, admission to Don's museum was $5 and, all things considered, it was probably worth it. The museum contains a decent amount of Kid-related memorabilia from the past century, as well as one of his rifles and a few other relics of the age. Of course, the problem with a Billy the Kid museum is that there isn't much to the life of Billy the Kid; his inflated reputation as a killer of 21 men and an expert marksman was really made posthumously by Sheriff Pat Garrett, the man who shot him dead. He was only 21 years old when he died -- not much time for legacy-building. Or maybe it is, as we'll learn later in the day.

After leaving the museum (which starts out strong, but -- as another sign of the thinness of Kid history -- degrades into a very generic "Western" museum with things like old saddles, old typwriters(?), a two-headed calf, etc), we headed five miles down the road to the Kid's grave. We'd learned in the Museum that the actual site of Billy the Kid's grave is somewhat of an open question, but at least since 1940 a marker has been in place of where he was generally agreed to have been interred in 1881. Subsequently, that marker has been stolen several times, leading to its current location inside two concentric cages.

After New Mexico, it was on to Texas. We fully expected western Texas to be big and open, but... we may have underestimated how big and open. Huge expanses of empty land (some being farmed, some lying fallow) were occasionally dotted with tiny outposts of humanity. We saw at least a dozen small towns (Jacksboro, Olney, Jean, Seymour, etc) that made our old hometown of Reedley, California, look like a metropolis, consisting more of empty, boarded-up storefronts and nondescript empty buildings possibly meant for agricultural or industrial use, but more often just in an advance state of decay, than anything else (how's that for a run-on sentence?).

We did, however, enjoy our stop in Lubbock. Lubbock is town of 200,000, but its chief claim to fame is as the hometown of Charles Hardin "Buddy" Holly. The town is home to several modern monuments to Buddy. We made our first stop at the Buddy Holly Center, a small, well-designed, well-organized museum. Buddy was only 22 when he died, but he left behind far more than Billy the Kid -- proof that age doesn't tie directly to legacy. He was only professionally active for a few years, but his output was significant, and his growth as a songwriter was evident even over that brief time. Perhaps more than any other premature rock-n-roll death, Buddy's begs the question of where his career would have taken him in the 1960s or beyond. Some argue today that he would have gone on to challenge the Beatles for artistic adventuresome in that decade. It's an interesting idea, and walking around the Center, we certainly couldn't help wondering what would have become of Buddy had he lived past 1959. Perhaps Buddy's legacy is a beneficiary of his early death. One of Buddy's friends was Waylon Jennings (from nearby Littlefield, Texas), who was even a member of his backup band during that fateful final tour. Looking at photos from that tour, Waylon appears as a clean-cut, professional performer cut from the same cloth as Holly. But a documentary being screened in one room of the museum had a late middle-age Waylon on-screen several times, sporting sunglasses, a sleeveless denim shirt, and a mullet. Would this have been Buddy's appearance had he made it to 50? Would his early recordings and appearance appear anomalous and quaint decades later, like those early photos of Roy Orbison or Willie Nelson, perhaps with just those few early hit records to his name? Would he be touring the oldies circuit by the late 1960s, like so many other early rock-n-roll pioneers?

Our original plan was to leave the museum early enough to spend a few hours in Fort Worth before getting to Dallas for the night. After consulting with Sheila, our new travel companion, we realized this wasn't realistic. Instead, we spent some extra time in Lubbock seeking out the Lubbock City Cemetary. We found it quickly, and right inside the entrance, we found Buddy's grave. His parents are buried to either side of him. You'll notice that pilgrims have left guitar picks and pennies on the marker.

Finally, back in the car. We arrived in Dallas around 10 PM. My initial impression is that Dallas has the charm of Los Angeles combined with the architecture of Las Vegas sans the strip. I'll have a better perspective after we've walked around tomorrow.