The wind of the upper flat plains sung a high lonesome song down across the blades of the

dry iron grass. Loose things moved in the wind but the dust lay close to the ground.

It was a clear day. A blue sky. A few puffy, white-looking thunderclouds dragged their
shadows like dark sheets across the flat Cap Rock country. The Cap Rock is that big high,
crooked cliff of limestone, sandrock, marble, and flint, that divides the lower west Texas
plains from the upper north panhandle plains. The canyons, dry wash rivers, sandy creek
beds, ditches, and gullies that joined up with the Cap Rock cliff form the graveyard of past
Indian civilizations, flying and testing grounds of herds of leather-winged bats, drying
grounds of monster-size bones and teeth, roosting, nesting, and the breeding place of the
bald-headed big brown eagle. Dens of rattlesnakes, lizards, scorpions, spiders, jackrabbit,
cottontail, ants, horny butterfly, horned toad, and stinging winds and seasons. These things
all were born of the Cap Rock Cliff and it was alive and moving with all these and with the
mummy skeletons of early settlers of all colors. A world close to the sun, closer to the wind,
the cloudbursts, floods, gumbo muds, the dry and dusty things that lose their footing in this
world, and blow, and roll, jump wire fences, like the tumbleweed, and take their last earthly
leap in the north wind out and down, off the upper north plains, and down onto the sandier
cotton plains that commence to take shape west of Clarendon.

A world of big stone twelve-room houses, ten-room wood houses, and a world of shack
houses. There are more of the saggy, rotting shack houses than of the nicer wood
houses, and the shack houses all look to the larger houses and curse out at them, howl, cry,
and ask questions about the rot, the filth, the hurt, the misery, the decay of land and of
families. All kinds of fights break out between the smaller houses, the shacks, and the larger
houses. And this goes for the town where the houses lean around on one another, and
for the farms and ranch lands where the wind sports high, wide, and handsome, and the
houses lay far apart. All down across this the wind blows. And the people work hard when
the wind blows, and they fight even harder when the wind blows, and this is the canyon
womb, the stickery bed, the flat pallet on the floor of the earth where the wind its own self
was born.

The rocky lands around the Cap Rock cliff are mostly worn slick from suicide things
blowing over it. The cliff itself, canyons that run into it, are banks of clay and layers of sand,
deposits of gravel and flint rocks, sandstone, volcanic mixtures of dried-out lavas, and in
some places the cliff wears a wig of nice iron grass that lures some buffalo, antelope, or beef
steer out for a little bit, then slips out from underfoot, and sends more flesh and blood to the
flies and the buzzards, more hot meals down the cliff to the white fangs of the coyote, the
lobo, the opossum, coon, and skunk.

Old Grandpa Hamlin dug a cellar for his woman to keep her from the weather and the men.
He dug it one half of one mile from the rim of Cap Rock cliff. He loved Della as much as he
loved his land. He raised five of his boys and girls in the dugout. They built a yellow six
room house a few yards from the cellar. Four more children came in this yellow six-room
house, and he took all of his children several trips down along the cliffrim, and pointed to the
sky and said to them, “Them same two old eagles flyin’ an’ circlin’ yonder, they was circlin’
there on th’ morning’ that I commenced to dig my dugout, an’ no matter what hits you, kids,
or no matter what happens to you, don’t git hurried, don’t git worried,’cause the same two
eagles will see us all come an’ see us all go.”

And Grandma Della Hamlin told them, “Get a hold of a piece of earth for yerself. Get a hold
of it like this. And then fight. Fight to hold on to it like this. Wood rots. Wood decays. This
ain’t th’ country to get ahold of nothin’ made out of wood in. This ain’t th’ country of trees.
This ain’t even a country fer brush, ner even fer bushes. In this streak of th’ land here you
can’t fight much to hold onto what’s wood, ’cause th’ wind an’ th’ sun, an’ th’ weather
here’s just too awful hard on wood. You can’t fight your best unless you got your two feet on
th’ earth, an’ fightin’ fer what’s made out of th’ earth.” And walking along the road that ran
from the Cap Rock back to the home place, she would tell them, “My worst pain’s always
been we didn’t raise up a house of earth ’stead of a house of wood. Our old dugout it was
earth and it’s outlived a hundred wood houses.”

Still, the children one by one got married and moved apart. Grandma and Grandpa Hamlin
could stand on the front porch of their old home place and see seven houses of their sons and
daughters. Two had left the plains. One son moved to California to grow walnuts. A daughter
moved to Joplin to live with a lead and zinc miner. Rocking back and forth in her chair on
the porch, Della would say, “Hurts me, soul an’ body, to look out acrost here an’ see of my
kinds a-livin’ in those old wood houses.” And Pa would smoke his pipe and watch the sun go
down and say, “Don’t fret so much about ’em, Del, they just take th’ easy way. Cain’t see
thirty years ahead of their noses.”