I'm not exactly sure anymore where Ralls leaves off and Lorenzo begins, but I'll at least be approximate. These images are all Ralls.
We could not drive exactly where we wanted to in Ralls or Lorenzo because melting snow had turned many unpaved roads into mush. These small towns can't afford to do much paving. They really can't afford to do much of anything. Small towns like this are perfect places for an Objectivist to live. Every man for himself. My roads, my wells, my way or the highway. A lot of squalor amid tiny islands of wretched excess. For some, a perfect world. In practice, ugly, but ideologically, pure as driven snow.
On and on we go.
Ralls is small but it didn't seem so bad. It was cold and it was a Sunday, so we didn't have a chance to interact with anyone. We didn't see many people around. We saw a surprising number of folks driving around in Ralls but we had no idea where they could have been going because nothing seemed to be open for business. That was sort of a mystery. It was too late to be going to church.
I think the structures below have something to do with the local water supply. It looked to me like a small storage reservoir and a pump building but if that's what it was it was in sad shape.
It's kind of hard to tell which buildings are in use and which ones are ruins.
Residential areas in some of these small towns are tricky too. You see a house in such awful shape, so derelict and neglected, you think it must be abandoned. Surely no one could be living in such a ruin, with holes in the walls, and rotting plywood nailed over windows, and weeds everywhere. But no. Close examination sometimes reveals that somebody indeed lives there, and they drive a new Ford extended cab heavy duty King Ranch edition pick-up that must be worth several times the house, or shack. The truck is usually parked in back. And of course, there are satellite dishes. And you can lay money that these folks enjoy a giant screen plasma TV and have a hundred or more channels to choose from. It's all a matter of priorities.
As you depart Lubbock on Highway 62/82, the order is: Idalou, Lorenzo, Ralls, etc. I already had pictures taken in Idalou. So, after a recent snowfall, with some snow still on the ground here and there, we drove to Ralls and took photos and then turned around and stopped in Lorenzo on the way back and took more photos there. The first pics, then, depict Ralls.
In order to actually ENTER these towns you need to turn off of 62/82...
This structure is the first thing you see as you drive into Ralls.
We did find something interesting, however.
We found these facilities, used by the South Plains Food Bank. It appeared to us that their fence had suffered recent vandalism. Somebody in what must have been a very heavy truck had mashed it down in one spot. Vandalism is a major problem in Lubbock.
This is in the Southeast, where development is not taking place.
All this stuff is well within the city limits, and goes to show the stark contrast between the "rich" and "poor" sides of town... although some might object to that terminology, Lubbock is and always has been a divided city.
Southwest Lubbock expands beyond all bounds, with housing developments, some very, very rich.
In that part of town you can see vast estates, mansions, castles, redoubts, bastions of wealth and privilege, dwellings you could wander in for days, and never find your way out. In some of those homes, I swear, you'd need a GPS device to locate the nearest of a dozen bathrooms, each the size of the average home in the "other" side of town. Stark contrast!
We could not drive exactly where we wanted to in Ralls or Lorenzo because melting snow had turned many unpaved roads into mush. These small towns can't afford to do much paving. They really can't afford to do much of anything. Small towns like this are perfect places for an Objectivist to live. Every man for himself. My roads, my wells, my way or the highway. A lot of squalor amid tiny islands of wretched excess. For some, a perfect world. In practice, ugly, but ideologically, pure as driven snow.
On and on we go.
