Opinion: Life in the Big Empty is full

Now that summer is in full bloom most folks are off on vacations or otherwise spending quality time with their families and friends.  People in the know say that interest in the fall elections will ebb until the end of summer and the kids return to school.

This is not a bad thing, especially since both political parties are spending hundreds of millions of dollars furiously casting dispersions at each other’s candidate.  Some of those dispersions may be justified, but most are probably half-truths and outright lies.

Fortunately, most of the ads are aimed at voters in the swing states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Florida, Colorado, and Nevada.  The citizens of Clarendon will not be subjected to these ads because 99.999 percent of our fellow Americans don’t know that we exist, which is a good thing.

The Texas Panhandle is often referred to as “fly over” and “drive through” country.  New York liberals call rural areas empty places and metropolitan areas crowed places. For reasons I don’t understand, most Eastern liberals, and more than a few conservatives, think that crowded places are superior to empty places.

If such were the case, Clarendon would not have been founded by religious Yankees shortly after the Native Americans were forcibly rounded up and relocated to Indian Territory.  Of course, the Saints’ Roosters (Christian colonists) arrived 13 years after the end of the Civil War.  I wonder what the resident Texans, still smarting over the Confederate defeat, thought about the sudden settlement of Yankees.

At that time, the two earlier boom towns in the Texas Panhandle, Tascosa and Mobeetie, were founded on more libertine principles.  Their citizens were considerably more rough-hewn than the better educated newcomers and they disparagingly referred to the “sobriety settlement” of Clarendon as Saints’ Roost.

Now that I’ve been back home a couple of months shy of two years, I’ve come to realize that the quality of life in Clarendon and other empty places is far superior to the quality of life in crowded places.

Sure, our air may be frisky and always in a hurry going somewhere, but I don’t miss the stagnant brown smog that stings the eyes and makes strenuous outdoor activities dangerous to one’s health.  Our air is clean, sweet, and fresh.  Urban air is brown, smelly, and ugly.

Folks in crowded places have no way to connect to the universe because light pollution prevents their being able to see the wonders of the Milky Way and other heavenly bodies.  My first night back, when I looked up to the heavens, I was startled to see the intensity of the light emanating from our galaxy.  I had forgotten the infinite beauty which surrounds our exquisite planet.

Majestic sunsets celebrate the end of each day, painting the endless western sky in elegant colors and patterns that please the eye and soothes the soul.

Even though our place may be considered empty by urbanites, this land is actually teaming with a remarkable diversity of flora and fauna.  While larger towns and cities may be bursting at the seams with people, our neighborhood is filled with a menagerie of remarkable animals, and exquisite plants gloriously clad in colorful, delicate flowers.

To me, living life in this wonderfully empty place is much fuller than the barren life that is found in crowded places.