Written on my porch in Abilene, listening to cicadas, still wondering.

I Wonder What They Felt When the Dust Settled I catch myself thinking about it sometimes, usually when I'm driving past one of those old homesteads that still stands by Highway 84 the kind with the windmill missing half its blades and a house that's more roof than walls. I'll slow down without meaning to, staring at that skeletal frame against the big sky, and wonder who woke up there a hundred and twenty years ago. What did they see when they opened their eyes? What did they hope for before their feet hit the dirt floor? Being a cowboy back then. I think about that a lot. Not the movie version with the spotless bandana and the one liners, but the actual, bone tired reality of it. The kind of tired that starts in your lower back and lives there for months. Sitting on a horse for fourteen hours, your thighs aching in ways that no amount of modern comfort can quite simulate. The smell God, the smell of sweat and horse and leather that never quite dries in the humidity, and the way your hands must have felt, permanently calloused, permanently dirty no matter how hard you scrubbed.But also: the quiet. That huge, swallowing quiet that doesn't exist anymore. No engines, no hum of electricity, no distant highway noise that we've all learned to filter out. Just wind through grass and the creak of saddle leather and maybe, if you were lucky, another rider to talk to about nothing in particular. The stars stars without light pollution, so thick they looked like they might fall on you. I wonder if any of them stood out there on the prairie at 2 AM, holding the reins while cattle slept, and felt overwhelmed by the bigness of everything. Or did they just get used to it? Do you get used to awe? And the ladies. I think about them even more, honestly, because their lives had less romance attached and therefore more reality. The women who followed husbands or fathers or brothers into that hard country, who stepped off wagons into nothing no house, no well, no promise that anything would work. Building a home from what you could find or carry. Cooking over open flames in every kind of weather. The babies born without doctors, the children buried in homemade coffins, the constant arithmetic of "do we have enough" applied to water, to flour, to hope. I wonder what it felt like to be useful in such an absolute way. When your work milking, mending, planting, preserving was the difference between making it through winter or not. No one was asking them about their five year plans or their personal brands. Their value was immediate and physical and non negotiable. Is that terrifying or freeing? I can't decide. I wonder if they had time to feel lonely, or if the sheer volume of labor drowned out the quieter emotions. Did they miss having friends nearby? Did they create elaborate fantasy lives in their heads while they worked? Did they sing? There's a museum in Muleshoe that has a woman's diary from the 1880s. I read it once, standing in the air conditioning while outside the Texas summer did its brutal work. She wrote about killing rattlesnakes in the henhouse. She wrote about her daughter's wedding dress, how she dyed the fabric with walnut hulls because the store bought color was wrong. She wrote about missing rain. Not missing the concept of rain, but specific rain the sound of it on a metal roof she once knew, a roof that belonged to her mother, three states and a lifetime away. Three sentences about rattlesnakes, two paragraphs about a dress, and then that ache for rain, written plain as recipe ingredients. I think about the cold, too. Not Texas cold, where we panic at thirty degrees, but real cold. The kind that came through Panhandle winters before climate change softened the edges, when wind found every gap in every wall and sleeping meant burrowing under every blanket you owned. Cowboys riding drag in sleet, their fingers too numb to feel the reins. Women breaking ice on water barrels with axes, their breath freezing in the air of their own kitchens. Did they complain? Did they have the energy? Or did they just do it, day after day, because that was what the day required?Sometimes I wonder about the boredom. We romanticize the past, fill it with dramatic Indian raids and epic stampedes, but most of it must have been so incredibly boring. Days of nothing happening. Waiting for rain. Waiting for the herd to move. Waiting for a letter that might take months to arrive. Waiting, waiting, waiting in that vast space where entertainment was whatever you could make with your own mind. Did they tell stories? Of course they did. But I wonder if the stories ever ran out. I wonder if they sat in silence sometimes, husbands and wives, and just listened to the wind because there was nothing left to say.And the horses. I always come back to the horses. These weren't pets. They weren't therapy animals or Instagram content. They were machinery, transportation, tools that happened to breathe. Cowboys must have known their horses the way I know my truck every knock and rattle, every good day and bad day temperament. But more, surely? You can't sit on something living for ten hours and not develop some kind of relationship. Did they talk to them? Did they have favorites? When a horse went lame or got stolen or died, did they grieve? Or was that just inventory loss, another problem in a life full of problems?I wonder about the first time they saw an automobile. The first time they heard a radio. The world changed so fast in their lifetimes faster than ours is changing now, though we like to think we're living through unprecedented times. They went from open range to barbed wire, from candles to electricity, from writing letters to making phone calls. Some of them must have remembered the Comanche wars and lived to see men walk on the moon. That kind of whiplash. Did they feel nostalgic for the hardship? Did they miss the quiet once it was gone? The other day I was at a feed store outside of Lubbock, waiting for them to load my bags, and an old man started talking to me about his grandfather. How the man could track a rabbit across granite, how he never owned a pair of boots that fit right until he was fifty, how he cried exactly once in his life at his mother's grave, and even then, he turned his face away so no one would see. The old man said it like he was describing a saint. Or a ghost. Someone who belonged to a different species entirely.Maybe that's what I'm really wondering: were they like us? Did they feel the same range of things, the same doubts and small joys and existential terrors at 3 AM? Or did living that close to survival change the shape of their hearts? Did they love differently? Did they hope for different things? I don't know. The homestead by the highway doesn't tell me. The diary in the museum gives hints but not answers. All I can do is drive past and slow down and wonder wonder what they felt when the dust settled at the end of a day that started before sunrise, when the work was done or at least postponed, when they had a moment to look up at that impossible sky and just be there, in that place, in that life, without knowing how it would all turn out.Written on a porch in Abilene, listening to cicadas and wondering.