Odessa
After a railway had reached El Paso in the 1880s, a sleepy cattle town grew outward across a dusty plain, Grant and Texas avenues, a place changed by energy, where effort and determination resulted in houses and opportunities.
If all you’ve got is $40, there’s room for you in art, and that’s what’s genius about Odessa. Odessa is an extraction community at the eastern edge of the Trans-Pecos, where a frightening midday sun burns hot.
Some move or leave, and I land somewhere in the middle and know a hard-earned dollar. Bury me wherever it’s hottest and driest and drill if you feel lucky, eight hours a day, five days a week, paycheck to paycheck, one after another.
There’s a particular charm when people gather around a table, sharing good food and laughter. Even amid trouble, we have the power to ignite our inner joy, where a kind word or gesture can steer us away from danger. Have you ever been captivated by something beautiful? Art can transport us to those moments of beauty and joy.
Stampede, an oil panoramic on canvas, shows cattle charging in a nighttime thunderstorm. A lightning bolt illuminates the scene’s figures. A helpless cowboy—flung off his horse—careens toward rocks and thorny vegetation, and a black longhorn lurches upward behind the rider’s ill-fated mount. The size envelops you, and you can almost walk right into it. The longhorn’s eyes follow you wherever you stand. Its pallet is gray and brown. It’s the painting I’ve seen most because of our hometown post office.
As El Paso artist Tom Lea completed his Stampede mural in 1940, the United States began to emerge from the Great Depression. World War II escalated in Europe, and the country elected Franklin D. Roosevelt for a third presidential term. Rainfall on the high plains remained below average, and 9,500 people lived in Odessa.
With the return of steel and an energetic workforce after the war, people moved to Odessa as fast as the oil gushed; its population swelled to about 80,000 within twenty years.
Give us one more boom, and we won’t blow it. My father’s home moved with Rig 26.
My father grew up near oil exploration and lived wherever my grandad worked. He identified with an area instead of a hometown and once moved three times in a school year. He admired derrickmen and told stories about throwing the chain, and I inherited his attitude.
My father said folks would travel to Odessa, stay in the Eliot Hotel, and go to the Texas Cafe to write their names on a chalkboard for something as regular as shift work on a rig floor at three in the morning with rain in derrick lights.
