Impressions of the West: Robert Penn Warren

Another in our series on Impressions of the West by great authors:

“…I drew some money and got my car out of the garage and packed a bag and was headed out.  I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve.  I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon.  Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west.  So I pulled the sun-screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor.  And kept on moving west.  For West is where we all plan to go some day.  It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach.  It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered.  It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it.  It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills.  It is where you go to grow up with the country.  It is where you go to spend your old age.  Or it is just where you go.

It was just where I went.

…Then I was traveling through New Mexico, which is a land of total and magnificent emptiness with a little white filling-station flung down on the sand like a sun-bleached cow-skull by the trail….”

All the King’s Men (p. 376-377), by Robert Penn Warren