Getting farther and farther away from Levelland and closer to Lubbock...
Parched, flat, desolate-- vast expanses of dirt-- conditions are ripe for another dust bowl.
This one begins in Levelland on College Avenue and ends in West Lubbock on 82nd Street! The occasion was an estate sale in Levelland. My wife and I found some things at the estate sale, like vintage underground comics (selling on eBay as I write this). I found some wooden boxes to house chess pieces, too. On the way home, my wife used one of my estate sale cameras and took lots of pics on the road. All have been down-sized for use here.
A pear tree! Not likely to bear any fruit.
All these blossoms will be killed by a late freeze-- that's how it goes here.
Lots of truck traffic...
On the Levelland Highway, heading toward Lubbock.
There's a big cotton gin coming up...
It has a storage shed for heaps of cotton, but at this time it was empty.
Oil!
More oil industry stuff...
And many more pics to go, in future posts! If you like flat, you'll see a LOT of flat!
The dust is blowing over this parched and increasingly desolate land. We pray for rain every day. It really begins to seem that a miracle will be required. Sad, that this part of Texas would need a miracle in order to survive. I have not heard much lately about the state of our "new" source of surface water, Lake Alan Henry, but I kind of suspect that it is going the way of Lake Meredith, now a mudhole and unusable. Lake Meredith supplied most of our drinking water for many years. But when that dam was completed, the pipeline served a population about 1/4 of what we have at present. And I say again that the city's new wells won't be a reliable source of water. Those wells will become less and less efficient as time goes on. You could check the Baily County Well logs over the past few decades and see what happens. Water moves very, very, slowly through the aquifer we use. Each well creates a "cone of depression" as it pulls water out of the formation, creating a dry hole. It takes years for that cone of depression to refill from the aquifer. It is a sandy aquifer. You can't keep the sand out of the water you pump. That sand eats up pump turbines. It gets pumped into the pipeline and settles in low points and in storage reservoirs. Every few years you've got to get front end loaders into the Baily County reservoir and scrape out tons of sand. You're pulling wells every few years to service pumps. You're spending a lot and fighting hard to get the water out. And once that water is gone, it won't be replaced in the lifetime of anyone now alive.
Here are the rest of the Shallowater photos:
I took a few photos in Shallowater with my own camera. Forgot about those. I'll spend a couple of days putting them up. These are just variations of the same things my wife photographed.
The DROUGHT goes on. It is getting very serious. Never, ever, before have I seen it so dry here.
These two shots of "cliffs" near a drying playa lake finish this series. These would be majestic if you could do Asimov's shrinking thing. I put the camera down on the ground.
Pretty nice weather yesterday but another norther last night. Cold and gloomy again.
