Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place

by Shelley Armitage

Overview

When American explorers crossed the Texas Panhandle, they dubbed it part of the “Great American Desert.” A “sea of grass,” the llano appeared empty, flat, and barely habitable. Contemporary developments—cell phone towers, oil rigs, and wind turbines—have only added to this stereotype. Yet in this lyrical ecomemoir, Shelley Armitage charts a unique rediscovery of the largely unknown land, a journey at once deeply personal and far-reaching in its exploration of the connections between memory, spirit, and place.

Armitage begins her narrative with the intention to walk the llano from her family farm thirty meandering miles along the Middle Alamosa Creek to the Canadian River. Along the way, she seeks the connection between her father and one of the area’s first settlers, Ysabel Gurule, who built his dugout on the banks of the Canadian. Armitage, who grew up nearby in the small town of Vega, finds this act of walking inseparable from the act of listening and writing. “What does the land say to us?” she asks as she witnesses human alterations to the landscape—perhaps most catastrophic the continued drainage of the land’s most precious resource, the Ogallala Aquifer.

Yet the llano’s wonders persist: dynamic mesas and canyons, vast flora and fauna, diverse wildlife, rich histories. Armitage recovers the voices of ancient, Native, and Hispano peoples, their stories interwoven with her own: her father’s legacy, her mother’s decline, a brother’s love. The llano holds not only the beauty of ecological surprises but a renewed realization of kinship in a world ever changing.

Reminiscent of the work of Terry Tempest Williams and John McPhee, Walking the Llano is both a celebration of an oft-overlooked region and a soaring testimony to the power of the landscape to draw us into greater understanding of ourselves and others by experiencing a deeper connection with the places we inhabit.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780806151625
Publisher:	University of Oklahoma Press
Publication date:	02/15/2016
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Shelley Armitage is Professor Emerita of English and American Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her numerous publications include Bones Incandescent: The Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church and John Held, Jr.: Illustrator of the Jazz Age.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Introduction Writing Llano 3

Chapter 1 Draws 23

Chapter 2 Springs 51

Chapter 3 Refuge 79

Chapter 4 Circling 101

Chapter 5 Rocks and Remnants 115

Chapter 6 Prairie Interrupted 133

Chapter 7 Dwelling 147

Chapter 8 Middle Alamosa, Middle Stories 169

Epilogue: The Suspended Pool 193

Acknowledgments 201

Editorial Reviews

★ 2016-08-15
A debut memoir delivers a meditation on a writers Texas Panhandle homeland. Armitage (The Post-2000 Film Western, 2016, etc.), a professor emerita of English and American Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso, begins her book with a return to her family home in Vega. Located in the middle of a sprawling prairie surrounded by acres of grassland, the area was settled by folks like her father, who arrived there at age 16 in 1926 with his family after being flooded out from their Arkansas delta farm. The author fondly describes the 32,000-square-mile Llano Estacado of her homeland as one of the largest North American plateaus and a place historically cultivated primarily by private ranches. Only briefly does the writer dip into her more recent ecological efforts, using government-funded conservation resources, to restore the native grasses and the natural wildlife habitats decimated from decades of farming. She questions what the land has to say and intends on discovering just that in an expansive series of hikes, beginning at her fathers Armitage Farms ranch and spanning miles to reach the cow camp of original cowboy and area settler Ysabel to track the arc of their stories. In a meandering, somewhat repetitive, but no less resonant fashion, Armitage unfurls the bucolic history of her family and the land through a rather haphazardly assembled procession of convivial anecdotes from her youth. In a series of spontaneously navigated summer treks, she tracks alongside the long-dried-up Middle Alamosa creek bed to behold dramatic canyons, Native American petroglyphs, and majestic mesas, all interwoven with the often bittersweet snippets of her life growing up. Beholden to the dusty plateaus of her past and the sweeping natural beauty that remains, the authors intent was to revisit and rediscover the bounty of the area and to share its nostalgic and environmental potential. Armitages language and her memories are poetically written, even when describing the prairies that have become tainted by human occupation and depleted and disfigured by sheep, cattle, farming, strip mining, oil, gas exploration, feed lots, dairies, microwave and cell phone towers. An engaging geographer and historian, Armitage takes the pulse of the sacred land spread out before her through luminous memories and photographs, all with an appreciative eye and a nod toward its untapped ecological splendor. Both an intensely lyrical and intimate scrapbook of familial history and a uniquely sublime travelogue of the American Southwestern landscape.

Kirkus Reviews

In Walking the Llano, Shelley Armitage does for the Staked Plains what John McPhee did for the Northern Plains in Rising from the Plains. She carefully mines the history, character, and geology of the Llano Estacado and combines it with a compelling personal narrative to create an account that flows with lyricism, authenticity, and wisdom. A splendid and clear-eyed book.”—Nancy Curtis, coeditor of Leaning into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West


“With rare insights and in vivid language, Shelley Armitage introduces readers to the northern fringe of the Llano Estacado, the paleowaters of the Ogallala Aquifer, to Queen Anne’s Lace, and monarch butterflies laying their eggs in milkweed. Armitage ruminates with an adulthood attachment on the changing landscape of her childhood home of Vega, Texas, and her family’s farm, ‘a tiny parenthesis within these vast and persistent prairielands.’ There is poignancy in her account of her mother’s tragic final years, and of her father, once steward of his land and its real farm of cattle and sheep and sea of grass, reduced in the end to a place of wind turbines, cell phone towers, and oil wells.”—Dale L. Walker, editor of Westward: A Fictional History of the American West


“Shelley Armitage’s prose is as poetic as it is intelligent. She masterfully weaves together her personal story with the narrative of the Llano, and she does so in a way that begs the question of what lies ahead for the people and the land she loves. If literature is a study of the human heart—and it is—then Walking the Llano is a quiet masterpiece.” —BK Loren, author of Theft: A Novel


“Once you’ve ambled into the lyrical, evocative pages of Shelley Armitage’s Walking the Llano, the Plains will never seem plain again.”—William deBuys, author of A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest


“Both an intensely lyrical and intimate scrapbook of familial history and a uniquely sublime travelogue of the American Southwestern landscape.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review and “The Best Books of 2016”


“Advanced poetics are at play in this work that is both a tribute to the land and a moving exploration of family ties. Beautiful language and wide-ranging musings make Walking the Llano a treasure.”—Foreword Reviews 

From the Publisher