Post

I can feel my stomach as I pull into Post. The car is beginning to smell of stale french fries and cold coffee. Up ahead there's a small haboob. The windmills are turning fast. The sun is hot and it shines through, foggy with sand but the wind is chilled. Orange dust scratches against the white hood of my truck.

I’ve made it through Post at least a hundred times. It's the final threshold before Lubbock and, on the flip side, it doesn't feel like you're actually out of Lubbock until you get past Post. 

Today, I am driving in.

The drive is getting less green and more dusty. The land here crumbles in odd hills like giant dirt cakes with wooden post fences sticking out at all angles. The barbed wire keeps things together when the mound slides and tries to take the fence with it. 

Neon gas prices shine way up, way up, on a billboard in the sky. Almost like a light house. It beacons to people coming down from Lubbock, “Post. It’s here. You’re almost here to Post.” 

I pass Old Mill Trade Days and my heart stops when I see the park. It’s a true oasis. It looks like a playa lake they dug extra deep. It’s got a grassy knoll all around. 

We brought our little babies here last year. The playground equipment is super spread out. My two 1-year-olds and my 4-year-old seemed to be a football field’s distance away as they ran from swing set to swing set. You hardly had to push them! The wind blew so hard. 

A video that my husband took on that day plays in my mind. I can see myself standing in that park pushing a baby at the swing and waving across to the others. Everyone played merrily but their little voices were still carried away by the wind. 

I can see myself in that video, pushing the swing but markedly hunched over. Just looking beat down. I can see my knitted eyebrows and graying hair. I’ve got a minor limp and the outfit I wore to cover up my body is all bent out of shape by it instead. 

I can see the pain and fatigue worn into my face from motherhood the past 18 months, the deep, unending, exhaustion and unmet personal needs, the breakdown of my health, the breakdown of my marriage. 

When Rob shared the video with me later the future unfolded before my eyes. The hunch and the limp would only get worse if I didn’t get myself out of this stupor. I refused to go out like this. I refused to let the exhaustion rewrite me into a hunch back at 40.  

I focus back on the road and cautiously work my way through the one or two stop lights. I always think I’m going to get something to eat in Post but then I realize it’s not worth it. 

Town recedes behind me as quickly as it began. There’s the Post Stampede & Rodeo — dusty and vacant — and the new mural near 10th is in my rearview mirror and it’s stellar. 

Down here in Post, the sky is ever so slightly smaller, and ever so slightly bluer. There’s green shrubs, sagebrush, old hills, valleys, dirt mounds, cattle. Ranch, ranch, ranch. 12+ million heads of cattle out there somewhere. 

But as I move toward Lubbock — on the plateau — the grass stretches out in fields for miles. The sky is bigger and browner and the cotton buds seem ever so white. I get one last glimpse of a train snaking over the edge and down into the escarpment. 

The road ahead of me elongates and I drive for miles. As the land gets flatter the wind gets stronger. I brace against my steering wheel and step out of the car. I let the sand blow into my hair and eyes. There’s almost no vegetation save for what's been planted by human hands. 

Some people call it a wasteland and on the surface it is. It really is. But when you look beneath, you see humanity. You see toil and daydream. You see success and failure. You see the industry. 

There’s cotton gins — enormous industrial facilities with cotton seed husks piled like mountains by the road. There’s oil rigs with hammer heads going round and around, up and down, pumping and pumping 6 million barrels a day – by some estimates — miles to the surface.

We’ve got all the wind, sun and oil you could ever want and, beneath us, the Ogallala Aquifer. It’s helped us produce the world’s largest continuous cotton patch, right here in West Texas.

Our people are people. I’m proud of the ingenuity of this place. The stick-to-it of this place. The endurance and strength of this place. The people who stayed despite how harsh it can be. 

This place has got grit but I’m not one of those people who stayed. I’ve been living my life in lusher areas. Some might think it's been easier. 

I pull into Lubbock. 

For all that driving up into the plains it always feels like you’re driving down. The long road is a hundred miles shorter than it seems. 

For some reason I just want to lay in the dirt and dissolve into the land. Maybe that would be the easiest.