It’ll Do
Vernon, Chillicothe, Quanah, Clarendon, Estelline, Childress, Memphis, Goodnight and Claude. For decades, I’ve driven through these declining West Texas towns, pit-stopping at gas stations and Dairy Queens, lamenting the lack of a decent restaurant along the stretch of Hwy 287 between Wichita Falls and Amarillo.
It’s a good road, with fewer trucks than on, say, Interstate 40 between Amarillo and Albuquerque, and the town speed limits allow glances to the right and left as you gear down. I’ve passed through enough times now to know that Goodnight was named for the legendary rancher and Quanah for the last great Comanche chief. Estelline makes me think of my friend, Jane Roberts Wood, who wrote the historical novel, “A Train to Estelline.” Last year, I made my first stop in Claude, to locate ancestors buried in an old cemetery there. Sometimes, I pause long enough to take a photograph of one defunct commercial enterprise or another. A favorite is the It’ll Do Motel in Clarendon (pop. 1,857).

I love the old things I spot on these road trips, but if the It’ll Do were open, I still would opt for franchise lodging, as I recently did in Childress (pop. 6,096). There, you access the Holiday Inn Express by winding your way through an ad-hoc motel created by dozens of RVs and semis parked for the night in Walmart’s accommodating lot. My standardized room backed onto a horse pasture and, from the second-floor window, I watched the occupants mosey into their barns at sunset. When I went looking for them in the morning, I found instead a full moon competing with the sunrise.
Such sights slake a thirst I never satisfy living in the big city. That’s why I dread seeing the tumbledown burgs along Hwy. 287 become ghost towns. Passing through them offers up a little Texas history set under a sky uncluttered with high rises and overpasses; it gives me clouds and storms I can see gathering from miles away. And increasingly, it gives me white wind turbines, those elegant ballerinas that dance into infinity on the treeless plains. I thrill to see them popping up among the abandoned diners and rusting cotton gins, cattle roaming beneath their elegant arcing blades, their modernity reaching into the future.
