Coming home from a conference in San Antonio I decided to take an alternate route and headed north from Fort Stockton on U.S. 285.  It’s a road under reconstruction.  I found out why as I travelled north from Pecos.  There was activity on both sides of the road, apparently many companies making a play for some part of the oil fields below.  It is hard to describe, and couldn’t be photographed from the road, it would require an aerial view.

Flat landscape flattened,
scraped, large rectangles
of sand, a small
building or a few trucks
on each.  Construction
that is destruction
of a delicate ecosystem.

It must be an unpleasant place to work when wind stirs up the sand. And it must be a discouraging place to work now that the demand for fuel has gone down.  That’s another story.

If I had continued north toward Carlsbad I would have seen the same thing in New Mexico; the road runs above the Delaware section of the Permian basin.  Fortunately for me I turned off US 285 toward the Guadalupe Mountains, where I soon had desert bushes on both sides of the road, though there were several signs warning of pipe line construction.  It had been forty long miles of landscape damaged to feed our human world’s need for fossil fuels.

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