Higgins, Texas . . .

. . . is like a thousand other skeletons that haunt the High Plains, a mummy wrapped in sand sage and little bluestem grass and buried amongst thickets of Chickasaw plum. Rusted and spindly relics of old water towers rise above a tomb of streets inscribed with Founders’ names. The term ‘once thriving’ is conspicuously absent from the town limit sign where the cracked and tarred blacktop comes in from Oklahoma, the same sign whose population figures are certainly of questionable accuracy.

The trains don’t stop here anymore, and haven’t for quite some time, and unless Aunt Hortense was trackside at 2:33 am furiously waving down Number 2, the Warbonnet PAs never stopped and never missed a four-stroke beat as they rolled the crack San Francisco Chief through town at track speed. The mixed trains with their mineral brown cabbages quit calling and the agencies closed years ago, and if there is still any grain left in the dilapidated elevators and corrugated storage bins, it has long since fermented.