My Sunday column

We made it.
My old high school pal Jim Donovits and I loaded the Explorer down last week and drove a thousand miles to Archer City, home to the All Booked Up bookstore, the brainchild of my favorite author, the great Larry McMurtry.
If you’re a movie fan you may know Archer City. It’s the setting for “The Last Picture Show,” a classic 1971 film that made a star out of Cybill Shepherd and won an Oscar for the superb old movie cowboy Ben Johnson.
Following the dictates of Hollywood logic, in the movie Archer City is called Anarene, even though in McMurtry’s novel the town is called Thalia. There’s a semi-reasonable explanation for all this, but it’s easier to just file the episode in the Ain’t Hollywood Weird file.
When the movie was made in 1971, Archer City was a weather-worn Texas hamlet nursing at the teat of the oil industry.
Almost 40 years later, it’s much the same.
I say this with no malice. A small-town boy myself, I appreciate a plucky little burg where people find a way to live happily without the accoutrements of more prosperous regions.
Archer City sits at the junction of state highways 79 and 25, on the vast plain west of Dallas-Fort Worth.
The landscape is beautiful, though rugged.
Grass is sparse and cactus common. Rocky redondos thrust upward across the countryside, which is also marked by jagged arroyos. The land goes a long way towards explaining the people who live on it.
Then there’s the sky. Oh that sky!
How something so enormous can sneak up on you is amazing.
But somewhere north and west of Fort Worth I was shocked to realize we had been enveloped by a sky so big it snatched at your breath. It was comforting blue with white clouds slowly, but steadily, working their way across the vastness.
I’ll remember that sky for some time.
People raise cattle out there. Larry McMurtry’s daddy did for many years. But it isn’t any easy place to make the land pay off. Unless you have oil on your property that is ... and many folks do.
Oil wells pierce the dusty ground — pump, pump, pumping that Texas crude.
Many west Texans make their living from the oil industry, but they rarely have stories written about them. No, that honor falls to the cowboys. While the days of the thousand-mile cattle drives are long gone, there are still double-tough young men making their living working cattle.
We saw six of them wolfing down lunch at the Archer City Dairy Queen, that same DQ made famous by McMurtry’s writings.
They wore spurs on their boots and talked quietly as they chewed, except for one loquacious drover who rubbed his near knee-high, powder blue boots while regaling a local woman with the day’s adventures.
She seemed to have heard the story, or one just like it, a dozen times before, but that did not dim the enthusiasm of the rawhide lothario.
Our food came and I made mention to Jim that the smell in the place was a wee bit stouter than I would have preferred.
Yeah, what is that, he asked.
I grinned and pointed from the cowboys’ filthy boots to the doorway, their trail marked clearly by pieces of cow chip.
It was a lot of chip and a lot of smell, but if anyone else noticed or was offended they kept it to themselves.
After the cowboys departed a behind-the-counter worker came out and wiped down the table tops. She did nothing about the cow poop.
We laughed and Jim noted there wasn’t even a mat to wipe your feet off on.
Apparently in Archer City people look at cow leavings differently than we do here. That’s fine by me. I appreciate diversity of opinion on all things.
Oh, yeah, I met Larry McMurtry.
We returned to All Booked Up after the DQ lunch and the great man was standing in the outer office, next to a desk piled high with books he was preparing to autograph.
I introduced myself and thanked him for his writing. When I told him I was from “Dalton, in Northwest Georgia,” he asked about “all that rain” we got the week before.
That big West Texas sky may be gorgeous to look at, but it’s a notorious skinflint when it comes to precipitation and an abundance of rain — anywhere — is news.
We talked briefly about his most recent novel and I asked an overly nosy question about his health, which he parried with humor.
He then hinted about that stack of books to be autographed. I took the cue, wished him well and skedaddled back to the book shelves.
There’s a lot more I’d like to discuss with him. Maybe he’ll surprise me by driving to Georgia next summer and showing up at my office.
I’ll take him by our Dairy Queen.