269. A Temple to Entropy - Jedidiah Jenkins
From National Geographic, Vol. 156, No. 2 (August 1979), pages 200-201
Her tone is reaching for the feeling, but the coldness of this forgotten house, a temple to entropy, quiets her. She squints, as if to say it doesn’t look exactly as it should. Or does it?
“Your father and I were walking through Crowell, Texas, in furnace-like heat when a ‘76 Dodge pickup pulled up and a cowboy stepped out. A tall man in his sixties said, ‘We figured y’all might like a cold drink.’ Everybody in a hundred-mile radius knew who Peter and I were because we’d been featured on the front page of local newspapers. Lots of people set out to find us, driving up and down the highway. Back then there wasn’t much excitement in small towns. Anyway, that was Homer, and he let us sit in the cab of his truck in the AC and we were so grateful. Before long he invited us to come stay with him and his wife Ruby, back at their ranch here in Gilliland... which even then was hardly more than a pothole in the road.”
We turn off the pavement onto a dirt road, passing a couple of abandoned homes. A little further and we pass a stone building, regal with tall windows and castle-like arches. “Whoa, what is this?” I ask.
“That was a school. Built with FDR money in the thirties,” she says, still looking for our turn. “Right here.”
She hasn’t been here in over forty years.
We pass an old store with an awning that looks like it might have had a gas pump a thousand years ago. “Wait wait wait, stop,” she says and she flips through the National Geographic issue. She shows a picture of a smiling old man in a cowboy hat and his gray-haired wife, both holding glass-bottle Coca-Colas in the doorway of a building. “This is Homer and Ruby in front of that old gas station right there.”
“Wow.” I recognize the photo. I’ve seen it hundreds of times before in that National Geographic. I look up from the magazine and at the exact door, porch, and white cracked siding. There it is, snapped into the context of the world.
“OK now, turn left here,” she says. We pass a few houses, all empty. Mom has her hand to her mouth, squinting at each home.
“No, it wasn't this close to the road.” We drive slowly by a house standing alone in an overgrown field. The windmills watch us in the distance. The house is abandoned but it’s brick and looks sturdy. Nothing caving in. Just weeds and young trees hugging its edges.
We park and Mom opens the door, possessed. We have to step high over the tall grass and gnarled weeds. The front door is sealed with a padlock. The windows boarded up. Mom stands in the yard and puts her hands on her hips. “This is the house, I believe.”
“It’s abandoned now,” I say.
“Oh yeah, well they died years ago. This was their ranch—320 acres of wheat and cotton. They were what’s called dry ranchers, because they had no creek or river for a water source. Just rain. The cotton came up all the way to this porch. Homer and Ruby were in their mid-sixties when they met us. Never had any children. And they scraped by a hard life out here. Toughest, best people you could ever find. And they treated Peter and me like we were their family.”
On the front porch is a loose brick that has the word Texas pressed into it. “I’m taking this as a souvenir,” I say. My mom is wrapped in a blanket of rushing memories. “I think this is it. It looks different. No one's been here in a long time." Her tone is reaching for the feeling, but the coldness of this forgotten house, a temple to entropy, quiets her. She squints, as if to say it doesn’t look exactly as it should. Or does it? She battles the cruel truth that what we remember does not stay as it was, and maybe never was what you remember at all. Fact overlapping with feeling, exaggeration, and gaps filled with imagination.
I put the brick in the trunk, and we drive toward Amarillo. Mom’s hands are folded in her lap.
- Jedidiah Jenkins
