I’m getting my fill of abandoned gas stations. I just finished lunch at this one in Toyah. Not much else in town. Everything is closed and abandoned. I had to go to a house to get my water bottles filled. The first house I went to a woman was outside with a red wagon. I asked and she went inside. A few minutes later she came out with a bag of frozen water bottles. She took my empties and went back inside. When she came out she said, “Mountain Water.” She never asked what I was doing. I think she might have been psychic. As I was leaving she said, “God Bless.” The water was the best I’ve tasted all trip.
This guy is walking across the country. He’s almost through Texas. What are you up to these days?
I spent three hours in Toyah one afternoon in May 2000, coming back from a wedding in Odessa when I managed to blow out not one but two tires in 20 minutes in the middle of nowhere that is West Texas. I waited in an old trailer that was the office of an old Texaco that might have been this one, even? and wondered how anyone still lived there. It was 98 degrees outside and maybe 80 inside the trailer, and the station owner went home to find two tires for me off some old cars he had in his yard. I paid for them with a personal check.
