Texas is supposed to be the land of guns, Bibles, pickup trucks, and cowboys. Right? Well I was in for some surprises on a Drive through the Panhandle.
To get to Clinton, Oklahoma from Moriarity, New Mexico along I-40, you need to drive through the Texas Panhandle.
If you’re going to attempt to cross any portion of Texas, the panhandle is the place to do it. Driving from let’s say, Corpus Christi to Colorado will convince you that Texas never actually ends and you will be driving for the rest of your life in a vain attempt to reach another state that you know, theoretically, ought to be reachable before you die. And driving from let’s say, Louisiana to El Paso, Texas will simply make you want to give up on life outside the state altogether and resign yourself to never actually escaping Texas at all.
It’s a big state.
But the panhandle, zipping through Amarillo, that is, comparatively speaking, like zipping through downtown.
Unless you have to drive through a Texas thunderstorm. I had to drive through a Texas thunderstorm.
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Driving into Texas
I started the day admiring the rest of the New Mexico scenery. I noted, as I crossed the border into the Lone Star state that the terrain almost always seems to change near a state border.
I don’t know why, maybe it’s because different states have different approaches to maintaining the environment. Maybe it’s because borders often reflect something real, even if that real something is sometimes subtle.
I had planned to stop at Cadillac Ranch. Cadillac Ranch is a roadside attraction/oddity near Amarillo that consists of 10 Cadillacs half buried with their rear ends skyward. You stop by the side of the road, grab some spray paint, hike a hundred yards or so to the Cadillacs and spray paint whatever you want on them. A woman I met in college turned me on to the Ranch, giving me the impression that it’s a pop culture icon. Which I guess it is.
I figured out that you reach it from a frontage road (it’s not exactly advertised along the interstate), pulled over and hiked out to the Cadillacs, along with a dozen or so other tourists.
Whoops! I forgot my phone to take a picture of it. Damn! Will anyone even believe you were there if you didn’t take a picture with your phone?
Probably not. Who drives through Texas to Cadillac Ranch and doesn’t take a picture?
The Thunderstorm Begins
I started trudging back to my car and promptly got dumped on. The skies opened up and just drenched us all, as though someone were opening a bucket above us.
I was not surprised. I’d checked the weather before I left. I saw there was a pretty good chance of a thunderstorm in the area.
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I did note that everyone took the storm seriously. Everyone, and I mean everyone, started skedaddling tout suite. So I did too.
Thunderbolts and lightning, very very frightening!
Well, not really. I lived in Texas for quite some time and I’ve been in thunderstorms that would make you leap into the air in fright, mostly because the thunder sounds like it’s 3/4 of an inch from your ear and the lightning seems to be 41 centimeters from your fingertips. Which it might be.
This particular storm had some impressive lightning but not the kind of stuff that fries your hair. But the rain. They say everything is bigger in Texas. The raindrops sure seem to be. As you quickly discover when you try to drive through them.
Again, I’ve been in thunderstorms where the rain comes down so hard you cannot see anything but the windshield. You can hear the wipers flailing wildly but you can’t actually see anything but water.
This storm was not that bad. At first.
Wait!? Safe Driving in Texas?
By the time I got to Amarillo, cars were pulling off the road. Wise.
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According to my weather app, the thunderstorm was moving quickly and should pass fairly quickly. Wait it out by the side of the highway. No point in pushing it.
Texas has a driving motto.
Yes, a special Texas motto devoted especially to driving. It is ‘Drive Friendly.’
When I lived there, Drive Friendly basically meant this: “Texas is a very large state filled with vast expanses of dusty nothing and nobody and places called things like Dime Box that have almost no one living there and MY GOD THE ROADS ARE LONELY so if you see another car just velcro yourself to it and drive side by side for hundreds of miles to keep yourself from losing your mind with endless dusty nothingness and MY GOD DOES THIS STATE EVER END?!’
Driving across Texas used to give me the unsettling feeling that I might suddenly find myself in a Twilight Zone episode.
Nothing Twilight-Zone-y happened on this trip.
They Really Do Drive Friendly in Texas
The Texas drivers were so well-behaved I am tempted to call them docile. No other drivers in any part of North America were as considerate, safe, or dare I say it, friendly, as the drivers in the panhandle near Amarillo.
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As I mentioned, they politely pulled over in neat little lines along the shoulder of I-40 outside Amarillo, Texas, waited 15 minutes or so until the deluge stopped deluging so hard and then resumed driving at a sensible and polite speed.
Thunderstorm crisis averted.
No wait, not in the clear yet.
Then the Road Floods
One of the underpasses on I-40 flooded. Turn around, don’t drown kind of flooding.
The only part of the highway going east not entirely flooded was the left shoulder. So everyone patiently, quietly, got into a single line on the left shoulder and slowly sloshed through not quite top-of-the-tires deep water. Maintenance vehicles were out already to address the issue, but the drivers were handling it for themselves, cautiously but successfully.
This was not the Texas I left some decades back. The Texas I left was full of people (including cops) who would drive so enthusiastically through flooded roads that they’d get stuck, drown, or cause multi-car pileups. It used to amaze me that people who presumably would have some familiarity with storms could behave so recklessly.
Not the good folks of Amarillo. They kindly waited for each other to nose through the flooded sections and then drove on unbothered as the lightning dissipated.
The rain, however, was not done. Not even close. It came down heavily. Heavily enough to significantly reduce visibility. So you know what these Texas drivers did – including the trucks?
They put on their hazard lights and drove at a moderate 45 mph pace through the pouring rain, giving each other plenty of breathing room.
So I did too. It took a long damn time to get out of Texas driving that way, but it was safe and not entirely unpleasant. I’m not saying that a view of pouring rain is better than a view of dusty nothingness but it’s not exactly worse.
Texas Drivers Are the Best
Let me tell you, there are no other states I saw on my trip, and I saw a lot of states, where drivers would be that courteous and non-aggressive with each other. I drove through thunderstorms and pouring rain all over the east coast and southern United States. No one, I mean no one, showed the kind of consideration for others that the Texas drivers did.
Not in the United States. Not in Canada.
Verdict: Sometimes stereotypes are made to be broken. No guns. No Bible signs. Not that many pickup trucks. No cowboys. No aggression. Go figure.
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