“
We took his pickup and rode out of the city on razor-straight roads to the oil fields—an ocean of gray dirt, unmarked, parched, spectacularly monotonous, not a ripple in it except for the occasional sunken spot of a former buffalo wallow, until you get to the edge of the Permian Basin caprock and fall off into the rest of the world. We skirted ranches on which little sprouted except for shrubby mesquite and rows of skeletal pump jacks bobbing for oil, and zigzagged across square miles so wide and empty that, even when we raced along, we seemed to be standing still. It looked like nothing, except that there were millions of dollars underneath us, sacks of money banked in stone.

from Susan Orlean’s “A Place Called Midland” (2000)

Today, while driving, I listened to the audiobook version of a collection that includes this piece. The passage I’ve quoted here jumped out at me. The economy of it struck me as much as anything else. Here, in what turns out to be 122 words, is a convincing, vivid, memorable rendering of a place. Not easy. I just love it.

For those who missed my earlier link, Orlean is teaching a course at NYU right now. The syllabus is here. I’m continuing to fall behind on the reading because I’m doing things like listening to random Orlean pieces instead of reading the stuff she’s assigned to her class. This, I think, is an improvement on my actual college career when I skipped reading assignments so I could have more time to play roller hockey and to um um um … Honestly, I can’t remember how I pissed away the time.

I can’t even blame this amnesia on drugs since I fall into the eccentric category of Berkeley graduates who came and went without ever so much as smoking pot. It’s a good thing, too. I needed to be fanatically attentive during lectures because college exams are rightly cruel to people who skip big chunks of the reading. I wish they’d been even crueler.

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