Palmo

There are unknown dozens of forgotten settlements scattered throughout California’s central desert: mostly mining towns, or former outposts along an old Post route. It’s just as sad for those who stayed behind as it was for those forced to flee. The driver can barely make out the remnants of these dilapidating towns through the dust-caked windshield and the gloom of a wintry dusk, but they make him think of how it must have been for his Pa and Ma to leave the parched remnants surrounding Amarillo.

The driver knows it is a mistake to remind himself of Ma and Pa, but he's grateful for the few moments of distraction these thoughts afford. The howl of a dry desert wind brings him back to the present; but in his mind, there remains little difference between the parched Texas fields of his earliest childhood and the arid hovels all around him.

“Same eve-ware. Nah differen’ thin ‘ere,” the driver sums up as the last of the long-forsaken shacks of Palmo fade from view. A twinge of melancholy adds a certain fittingness to the drunken slur of his thoughts.

Lucky for him, the driver was too young to remember the squalor and sheer barrenness –of the once-abundant plains of wheat sheafs and steers' heads- that he and his parents left behind. The rails subsequently became a way of life for a lot of the dispossessed rural folk. That is to say, wherever boxcars continued to rumble, there remained the sliver of hope that once could escape. Ma and Pa, like so many others at the time, hopped a freight train for the growing industrial belt up North. In their case, the endless trains carried them parts of the way to St. Louis and Lansing, Michigan, before they finally settled in Dearborn, just outside of Detroit. Each time a freight would groan to life from a sleeping rail-yard, a frightened three-year old would be hoisted up by his side onto a rolling flatbed; all the while clutching that scrappy bear of a rag doll.

“F’that ol’ flop-rag din c’lect all the soot from Tulsey ta Dee-troy.”

At the thought of his younger self, the driver’s mouth breaks out into the effort of a smile. It can’t be called a memory as such, because all he can remember is being told the story of his parents’ exodus; countless times, not only by them but by cousins and farther-removed relations who bore a strange Texas brogue and who he only saw once or twice in his life.