Wind, Cattle and the Long Flat Truth: Portales, NM (257.9) to Boise City, OK (483.2)

Racking up miles on the road

The stretch from Portales to Clovis is about twenty miles of Highway 70, which sounds simple until you do it on foot with the wind trying to hit your face. Here the terrain does not rise or fall much. It just opens up: broad, agricultural, purposeful. When I arrived in Clovis, my face was numb from the cold and the wind had done its worst. Whatever the destination of this walk, it had already begun to ask to be taken seriously.

Leaving the land of enchantment

From Clovis, I left New Mexico on Highway 60 and quietly crossed into Texas. No drama. Just a sign shaped like Texas and the feeling that the map had shifted slightly under my feet. Here the roads are widened. The distances are lengthening. The ground flattens. From Hereford, Highway 385 took me north to Vega, on Interstate 40.

Vega, waiting for it to happen

The wind was relentless. Not dramatic, just constant, a low-grade resistance that never went away.

Then the cold came. The kind that makes your face numb before you realize you’ve stopped feeling it. The rumors were traveling faster than I was: Snowmageddon, Snowpocalypse, the winter weather advancing with no interest in my plans.

I adjusted layers. Adjusted expectations. He kept moving.

Two different Sheriff’s Office deputies responded on separate occasions. They knew how dangerous these temperatures were and wanted to make sure I was safe in my tent, which by then was buried under snow and sealed with ice.

They didn’t have to do that.

They just did it.

And it meant more than they probably thought.

Later, a kind rancher named Keith took me to a nearby Days Inn, where I laid down, thawed out, and let my body catch up to me.

I arrived in Vega, Texas, and decided to wait out the storm rather than try to prove anything to the weather. The cold had become serious, but I felt fine.

I’m still alive. Still intact. Still bound for Alaska.

A gas station and a little mercy

A night or two before all this, I walked numbly into an Allsup gas station and my backpack was left outside where I had dropped it. My hands were shaking a lot from the cold.

I made some hot chocolate, poured warm water on my face, and lay there waiting for feeling to return. When the cocoa was ready, my thoughts scattered. I forgot what I was doing, I forgot why I was there, and for a moment I thought I might pass out right there, between the cream and my eyelids.

I paid for the drink, hands still shaking, and the clerk looked at me for a long second before saying, «Now take care of yourself. Stay warm.»

No rush.

Unwritten.

The kind of farewell Texans want to say.

As I stepped out to shoulder my backpack, I noticed a rolled-up dollar tucked into my belt pocket. Someone had seen me from their vehicle and had left it there calmly. No note. No credit.

I’ve been mistaken for a homeless person before. Usually hikers and tramps use their miles differently, but that night the lines blurred. I took the gesture as a compliment.

I didn’t need labels or explanations at that moment.

I needed warmth.

And someone noticed.

Cattle country and ‘cow pie’

Feedlots stretch across the plains, thousands of cattle gathered in narrow pens: brown units that breathe and convert grain into protein on an industrial scale. The smell reaches you before the sight, carried by the wind, and once it arrives, it settles in without apology.

That’s how it works. The calves are born on pastures, sold and transported in trucks. Grass is replaced with delivered feed. Concrete mixer trucks cruise the alleys, dumping measured rations into concrete containers. Automatic water lines keep the waterers full and the pumps run day and night. The weight is added deliberately. Time is money, measured in pounds earned.

Here I learned about “cow pie”: dense, compressed blocks of feed that are thrown onto pastures to supplement grazing. They look harmless enough, squat and dark, but they are pure calories: grains, proteins, minerals compressed into something that cattle can lick and break down for days. Ranchers place them where grass is scarce or winter bites, a way to stretch the pastures and maintain the weight of the animals when the land cannot support them on its own.

Near Bovina, home to Cargill’s massive feeding operations, rail tracks bring grain directly to the lots, while livestock transporters, feed trucks and service platforms circulate without pause – an operation based entirely on movement, volume and efficiency.

Silos

In smaller Texas towns, grain co-ops stood as silent monuments: silos huddled alongside railroad lines, sun-bleached, steel-marked, still doing the job they were built to do.

Silos are simple by design, but not by chance. Grain is lifted from trucks using augers and elevators; The belts transport the corn or sorghum upward, vibrating it to the top. From there it is poured into tall containers, settles under its own weight, dries and waits. Fans push air through the grain to prevent it from spoiling. Gravity does the rest. When the time comes, the gates open at the bottom and the grain flows back into the trucks, the wagons, and the next stage of its life.

This is the stored time. Months of sun and rain reduced to grain. Corn. Sorghum. Food intended for livestock, trains, or both. Nothing decorative. Nothing wasted.

It is not necessary to romanticize these places to understand them. They are designed to support weight and withstand inclement weather, serving as an intermediate point, where the harvest stops before everything continues.

night trains

The BNSF rail line ran so close that I slept next to it more than once. Close enough that the first warning was not sound, but movement: the ground tightening beneath me, the earth carrying it straight through my foam pad and onto my back. Freight trains do not sneak past at night. They open it. The horns tear the darkness. The engines growl. Steel screams as it crawls past. The air became strange: the wind blew hard towards the tracks and then came back hard as the cars sped by. You stand there counting locomotives, waiting for them to loosen, knowing that there is nothing to do but let the train finish what it started.

That’s trail dream. You don’t wake up but absorb it. Your body decides there is no danger and stays still. You pray there is no derailment. But the train continues to drag your weight across the continent, and in the morning you shoulder your backpack and drag yours, slower, quieter, one foot at a time.

I didn’t care about trains. Camped alone and facing north, it was strangely calming to feel something else moving hard and fast while I stayed still.

The Llano Estacado and the Caprock

This entire region sits atop the Llano Estacado, a massive plateau of land that abruptly ends at Caprock, where the land finally admits it has edges.

Here the apartment is not boring. Flat is exposing. There is nowhere to hide from the weather, nowhere to break the wind, nowhere to lose your thoughts.

Crop circles and dairies

To the north, the land filled with crop circles: irrigation pivots drawing green halos on brown fields, water driven by machinery to keep the fields alive a little longer.

Somewhere near the Boer Jersey Dairy, the smell changed from the usual feedlot to milk and silage. Texas dairy farms operate on routine and volume: Cows circulate through rotating rooms, milk tankers leave on schedule, the air is thick with feed dust, warm steam, and the bittersweet smell of work that never stops.

Rita Blanca National Grasslands

In the Rita Blanca National Grasslands, the country felt different: still wide and wind-driven, but managed like land meant to remain open.

The tumbleweeds rolled with intent. The roadrunners crossed the road with stiff legs and at full speed. I first saw them in Palo Duro Canyon: wild, alert and surprisingly familiar, like something straight out of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. There were no painted tunnels or falling anvils here, but the posture and attitude were exactly right.

And then… horses.

There are few scenes more moving than horses running across the high plains: backs bent toward the wind, calm eyes, power held lightly, beautiful movements, freedom written in every stride.

By the time I arrived in Boise City, Oklahoma, the miles had settled into my legs. Another town further down. Healy still felt incredibly far away—a cold, distant point beyond the edge of the map—but the work ahead of him, enormous as it was, had only one direction. North. State by state. Province by province. And I knew, as you only know after enough hard days, that one day the hike would take me all the way to Alaska.