About this item
When American explorers crossed the Texas Panhandle, they dubbed it part of the "Great American Desert." A "sea of grass," the llano appeared empty, flat, and barely habitable. Contemporary developments - cell phone towers, oil rigs, and wind turbines - have only added to this stereotype. Yet in this lyrical ecomemoir, Shelley Armitage charts a unique rediscovery of the largely unknown land, a journey at once deeply personal and far-reaching in its exploration of the connections between memory, spirit, and place. Armitage begins her narrative with the intention to walk the llano from her family farm thirty meandering miles along the Middle Alamosa Creek to the Canadian River. Along the way, she seeks the connection between her father and one of the area's first settlers, Ysabel Gurule, who built his dugout on the banks of the Canadian. Armitage, who grew up nearby in the small town of Vega, finds this act of walking inseparable from the act of listening and writing. "What does the land say to us?" she asks as she witnesses human alterations to the landscape - perhaps most catastrophic the continued drainage of the land's most precious resource, the Ogallala Aquifer. Yet the llano's wonders persist: dynamic mesas and canyons, vast flora and fauna, diverse wildlife, rich histories. Armitage recovers the voices of ancient, Native, and Hispano peoples, their stories interwoven with her own: her father's legacy, her mother's decline, a brother's love. The llano holds not only the beauty of ecological surprises but a renewed realization of kinship in a world ever changing. Reminiscent of the work of Terry Tempest Williams and John McPhee, Walking the Llano is both a celebration of an oft-overlooked region and a soaring testimony to the power of the landscape to draw us into greater understanding of ourselves and others by experiencing a deeper connection with the places we inhabit.
About the Author
I grew up in the small ranching and farming community of Vega, Texas, in Oldham County in the northwest Texas Panhandle. I still own and operate a family farm inherited from my parents. My dad purchased the 1200 acres of native grass, wheat and milo farmland bordering Highway Interstate 40 on the south and the Canadian River Breaks on the north in l929, when part of it had temporarily been converted to a golf course with sand greens. This landscape I shared from childhood on, riding with my dad and granddad to check crops and cattle and later jogging and now walking the farm roads.
Though most of my adult life has been spent away from the Panhandle as a university professor in Texas, New Mexico, and Hawai'i, I always return to "the farm"--particularly in the summers--which offered until recently a 360 degree view of earth and sky. Observing the natural world and its changes remain a centering and care-giving activity, following my dad's legacy.
Growing up in small-town Texas you can be a basketball player one night and a candidate for Miss Oldham County the next, giving you a chance to try your hand at lots of things. One of my dearest memories is of our band director who personally taught everyone in the band how to play an instrument. English teachers submitted our names to national contests; math teachers taught us how to read the stock market and use the slide rule in junior high. But running a farm later in life was not one I expected.
Today the landscape surrounding Armitage Farms is sometimes almost overwhelmed by the massive wind turbines, soaring microwave towers, constant oil pumping rigs, and persistent sand and gravel pits. Restoration and conservation of land seems even more than ever a necessity. The farm today is in a conservation program returning it to grass designed to restore fragmented habitat for the benefit of wildlife and long-term health of the land. "Writing Llano," as I call it is also an act of restoration by connecting one's place through story and memory.
My professional life has offered me a more philosophical connection with landscape through studies of photography, environmental literature, cultural and place studies. Choosing to live and work in diverse places--Fulbright grants in Portugal, Poland, Finland, and Hungary, teaching positions in the Southwest and Hawai'i, other grants in New York, D.C., Oregon, Illinois, Missouri, and Connecticut--place has taken on special meanings and promoted fresh curiosities. As author of eight award-winning books and fifty articles and essays, I've held Fulbright Chairs in Warsaw and Budapest, a Distinguished Senior Professorship in Cincinnati, and the Dorrance Roderick Professorship at the University of Texas at El Paso where I am an emerita professor, as well as three National Endowment for the Humanities grants, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Rockefeller grant.
