West Texas: `Geographical Center Of Nowhere'

EARLY EXPLORERS described a vast and barren chunk of Texas as the closest thing to hell, deservedly ignored. But the relatively few people who live there now see only heaven; one native son reveres it as God's very abode. What secret does this lost and lonely land hold? ----------------------------

JAYTON, Texas - A century and a half ago, an Army explorer stumbled onto a hauntingly remote and desolate chunk of Texas prairie and was not much impressed.

W.B. Parker branded the hills and plains "inhospitable" and declared:

"Destitute of soil, timber, water, game and everything else that can sustain or make life tolerable, they must remain as they are, uninhabited and uninhabitable."

He vowed never to return.

That raw land was eventually settled, if sparsely. But major highways bypassed it, other Texans ignored it, and it remains today a region with little population or prosperity and no name or identity of its own beyond a few hardscrabble farms and ranches and small and struggling towns.

Apparently, though, the land holds a wonderful secret that touches the native soul.

Joy Cave, a Guthrie schoolteacher, put it this way: "We don't belong to anybody. We belong to ourselves."

Then she added: "Guthrie is the geographical center of nowhere . . . but something has kept me here. I just love it."

Says Micky Parker, the librarian in Jayton, population 638, "We're really kind of stepchildren here."

8,500 SQUARE MILES OF NOWHERE

So where is "here"?

It is an ill-defined territory, well west of Fort Worth, where the West purportedly begins. It lies north of Interstate 20 within a triangle connecting Wichita Falls, Abilene and Lubbock.

A true map of "here" probably would include all or large parts of nine West Texas counties and bits and pieces of five others. That's about 8,500 square miles, an area larger than the whole of Rhode Island, Delaware and Connecticut.

Fewer than 25,000 people live in this phantom state within a state, many on small farms and larger ranches where the earth yields few crops and a relative trickle of Texas crude oil.

There are no tourist attractions, no daily newspapers, no TV stations. Jobs are scarce, health care is erratic, the population is aging and declining. Many schools have closed. Others, unable to field 11 players, play six-man football, sometimes in front of an audience of pickup trucks.

What does the citizenry say of this geographic dead zone?

They boast that drugs and crime are pretty much nil, that the people are close and caring and, most of all, that it's a great place to raise kids.

"It's God's country," insists Janelle Barry of Spur, which is about as close as any to being this region's quasi-capital.

"The Big Empty," native son Jim Corder jokes.

"I'm always looking for West Texas or my part of it, and not finding it," writes Corder in "Lost in West Texas," a whimsical and charming book that deals largely with his nameless homeland.

"My part of West Texas doesn't show up much in books," thus leaving a "hole" in Texas, he grumbles. Outsiders, he says, "miss the strange and lonesome beauty: the view one sees of the Double Mountains down the Salt Fork from the highway bridge between Swenson and Jayton; the first dramatic drop into the deep of the Croton Breaks."

Corder, an English professor at Texas Christian University, was born near Jayton, but even he cannot pinpoint the boundaries of his province. "It just doesn't have any identity, except in the minds of the people who live there," he said recently.

Corder figures W.B. Parker and his expedition leader, Army Capt. Randolph Marcy, flirted with his province when they ventured many years ago into what is now King County.

As quoted by Corder, Marcy was even less impressed with the region than Parker.

"It is, in almost every respect, the most uninteresting and forbidding land I have ever visited," the commander grumped, and spoke harshly of its "barren parsimonious soil."

Still true. This place is too dry, too dusty and hammered too often by winds from hell.

The prevailing south winds are lashing gnarled mesquite trees as a visitor arrives in Rule, population 783, on the southeastern edge of Jim Corder's cosmos.

The playground at Slim Sorrells Park is as empty as the Western Winds Motel and the Rule Memorial Museum, which is "open by appointment" only. The Rule drive-in theater is open weekends from April "until it gets cold."

Across the Double Mountain Fork of the Brazos is a German settlement once named Brandenburg but which, for patriotic purposes, became Old Glory in 1918.

A U.S. flag still flutters in the center of what is now little more than a shell of a town. Its school shut down eight years ago, the grocery and gas station more recently.

"Right now, I'm the only fella here," drawled Lisbon Letz, the Old Glory postmaster for 36 years. "Time's starting to pass pretty quick now."

A GHOST TOWN

Down the road is Swenson, named for the once-great Swenson ranching empire. Fat cattle wearing the famous SMS brand once roamed ranches in central, west and northwest Texas.

Now Swenson is a ghost town, its most forlorn remnant a red brick bank, founded in 1911. The hot Texas sun peers through holes in the roof. Over the doorway an awning of metal and wood hangs like something dead.

Few natives know the country better than Gene Swenson of Stamford.

"There's a lot of this damned land that the only thing you can do is run a cow on it," he says, and even then it sometimes requires 35 acres per cow. "Basically, this is ranch country. In my opinion, some of it was plowed up that shouldn't have been."

In Jayton, the walls of the shuttered Barfoot Hotel are cracked and the paint has peeled. The weekly Jayton Chronicle is moribund, too, even though the town has fared better than most. Mobil Oil and the highway department are active employers, and there is a Chevrolet dealership.

A downtown historical marker reveals that the Double Mountain Salt Works was situated along the Brazos River on the "Indian-infested frontier" and was the northernmost business in Confederate Texas.

FIRST-RATE SCHOOLS

The Jayton school system is first-class. Don Richards, a Lubbock attorney, played on Jaybird teams three decades ago and plans to return for this year's homecoming game and his 30th class reunion.

"It was a great place to grow up," he says.

He remembers having to travel to Aspermont for the movies and to Spur to shoot pool. And mischief in those days was faking late-night accidents to stop truck drivers on U.S. 380 and driving a car across the train trestle at the Brazos River.

Ironically, Jayton's superb educational system is now threatened by the state's so-called Robin Hood school-finance plan, which funnels tax money from rich to poor districts.

As a school official once explained: "Our people are very poor. We just happen to have a pool of oil in the center of the county."

Knox City, population 1,440 and the county seat of nearby Knox County, is also something of a paradox. Debbie's is a friendly catfish and chicken-fried-steak place, but the Oil Patch Cafe is closed and abandoned.

The golf course looks prosperous, and the main street is shaded by sycamores and leafy pecan trees, but J.D.'s Oil Field Construction Co. sports a "for sale" sign.

A church marquee captures the flavor of this entire region: "Like life, few gardens have only flowers."