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Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place, by Shelley Armitage
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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.
- Sales Rank: #638285 in Books
- Published on: 2016-02-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x .85" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 216 pages
Review
“In Walking the Llano, Shelley Armitage does for the Staked Plains what John McPhee did for the Northern Plains in Rising from the Plains. She carefully mines the history, character, and geology of the Llano Estacado and combines it with a compelling personal narrative to create an account that flows with lyricism, authenticity, and wisdom. A splendid and clear-eyed book.”—Nancy Curtis, coeditor of Leaning into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West
“With rare insights and in vivid language, Shelley Armitage introduces readers to the northern fringe of the Llano Estacado, the paleowaters of the Ogallala Aquifer, to Queen Anne’s Lace, and monarch butterflies laying their eggs in milkweed. Armitage ruminates with an adulthood attachment on the changing landscape of her childhood home of Vega, Texas, and her family’s farm, ‘a tiny parenthesis within these vast and persistent prairielands.’ There is poignancy in her account of her mother’s tragic final years, and of her father, once steward of his land and its real farm of cattle and sheep and sea of grass, reduced in the end to a place of wind turbines, cell phone towers, and oil wells.”—Dale L. Walker, editor of Westward: A Fictional History of the American West
“Shelley Armitage’s prose is as poetic as it is intelligent. She masterfully weaves together her personal story with the narrative of the Llano, and she does so in a way that begs the question of what lies ahead for the people and the land she loves. If literature is a study of the human heart—and it is—then Walking the Llano is a quiet masterpiece.” —BK Loren, author of Theft: A Novel and Animal, Mineral, Radical: Essays
“Once you’ve ambled into the lyrical, evocative pages of Shelley Armitage’s Walking the Llano, the Plains will never seem plain again.”—William deBuys, author of A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest
About the Author
Shelley Armitage is Professor Emerita of English and American Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her numerous publications include Bones Incandescent: The Pajarito Journals of Peggy Pond Church and John Held, Jr.: Illustrator of the Jazz Age.
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Armitage inspires us to become part of the landscape
By Texasbooklover
MEMOIR/TEXAS
Shelley Armitage
Walking the Llano:
A Texas Memoir of Place
University of Oklahoma Press
Hardcover, 978-0-8061-5162-5 (ebook also available), 216 pgs., $24.95
February 15, 2016
Out of sorts as her mother ages and her brother falls ill, learning “what it means to be in a space between what something was and what it is becoming,” Shelley Armitage embarks on what she calls the “summer of hikes,” looking to the land she loves to ground her. A handsome volume that includes historical as well as contemporary photographs, Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place is her exploration of, meditation on, and homage to her home—the place where she grew up and has always returned to, searching for a place for women amid the cowboys—the Llano Estacado.
Armitage grew up in Vega, a tiny farming community in the western panhandle of Texas, and on Armitage Farms, her family’s two sections of land just outside of town. She is interested in how place shapes us and how we best fit into that landscape, looking for continuities in the places made by time and space, between before and after.
Armitage feels that time is compressed in the Texas panhandle. The end of the Old West and the “burgeoning wind energy generation are separated by a little more than one hundred years.” She explores still-discernible bison trails and archaeology sites; hunts for and discovers fossils, petroglyphs, and hidden springs; thrills to each wildlife sighting—golden eagle, mule deer, porcupine, pronghorn antelope, bobcat—and notes the health of cottonwood, willow, mesquite, and cholla; marvels that “the color, shape, texture, and attitude of the rocks signal the movement of wind, water, gravity” in striations of ochre, purple, and orange.
The Llano bears little resemblance now to the short-grass prairie traversed by the Antelope Creek Phase peoples and “discovered” by the Spanish. The “sea of grass” has been permanently altered by “sheep, cattle, farming, strip mining, oil, gas exploration, feed lots, dairies, microwave and cell phone towers, and now wind turbines,” she observes. Armitage regrets altering the prairie ecology further even as she signs the contracts to allow wind turbines and transmission towers to be built. She explains the “dewatering” of the Ogallala from wells, irrigation, evaporation and the rate of recharge and mourns the “paleowater.”
Armitage discusses imagist poets and then proves to be one herself. “The side oats grama wave like sailboat flags, their tiered semaphores flexed in the wind. Scaton is stately by comparison, its undulating trunk bearing a sparkler-shaped burst of seeds. Buffalo hugs the ground, short-legged like its namesake.”
“Biophilia” is a field of study which “posits that certain kinds of landscapes may attract us as a result of our evolutionary past.” I know this is true whenever I travel to East Texas and get claustrophobia from the trees. A West Texas girl, I need to be able to see the sky and, preferably, the horizon. Quoting Nora Tilden (“places … pretend to be blank, though beneath the surface if everything that has ever happened there”) and Apache elders (“being conscious of the storied place, of all that has gone before it, of the natural layers and the membranes laid down through time.”), Armitage inspires us to become part of the landscape.
Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A Walk to Remember
By Amazon Customer
“When you see yourself as part of a story, then you’re really living,” Shelley Armitage writes. The lucky reader of her Walking the Llano: A Memoir of Place experiences really living the discoveries of springs, creeks, canyons, ridges, bison trails, eagle nests, deer, petroglyphs, colorful rural folk, and more. Armitage invites the reader to come along on her memory excursions and her present-day walks, to discover the land in a way only the most observant and most mindful walker on the earth might.
The land Armitage grew up on is part of the Llano Estacado, so named by the Spanish who explored the grassy High Plains region of North America centuries ago. In literally walking the land between Vega, Texas and the Canadian River some 30 miles to the north, a walk that took place in numerous excursions over a period of time, she seamlessly weaves together an intricate pattern of histories—geological, archaeological, ancient and modern human history, wildlife, and plant life of the region, along with anecdotes of the writer’s own personal experiences growing up there.
Along the way readers meet the many peoples who participated in the clash of cultures on the Llano, including ancient humans, Spanish and Mexican explorers and residents, farmers with their water diversion techniques, ranchers with their fences, and oil producers—all of whom bring changes to the land. Many of those changes appear to be irreversible.
All in all, this is a breathtakingly comprehensive tour of a place, its waters, the many peoples who have populated it, and of the animals and plants that have and do live within. Armitage speaks of her deep relationship with all these elements as part of a “sacred mystery” and of the experience of interrelationship with all.
There are some nice surprises in the later portions of the book. And, as with many memoirs, the reader comes to know, respect, and like this writer, and her family and neighbors as her stories unfold.
Like so many experiences, this book gets better as you move into it, through it, and with it right along with its walker/author. Reading it is an experience not to be missed.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
I am still reflecting over the pages so beautifully written. Armitage has woven her personal memoirs in ...
By Explorer
I was not prepared for the effect this book had on me. I grew up in rural America on grasslands and fled them as soon as possible. I never understood the place of my childhood…until now. I am still reflecting over the pages so beautifully written. Armitage has woven her personal memoirs in and out of history and around the geological formations in the Llano. These stories gave me laughter and tears and thoughtful insights about my own purpose, family and place. I think anyone who takes this “walk” is certain to be enriched.
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