Stand at the rim of Palo Duro Canyon or look down from any vista along the caprock, and let your imagination take over. Beneath an endless canopy of blue, you find yourself at the edge of an enormous island of rippling grassland that stretches from the New Mexico borderlands down through the Texas Panhandle. The Llano Estacado, Coronado’s legendary “staked plains,” comprises all or part of thirty-three counties in Texas and four in New Mexico. It covers approximately 32,000 square miles of arid prairie used primarily today for ranching and farming. It lies atop the vast Ogalalla Aquifer―its primary source of water―and partially covers the oil-bearing Permian Basin. Its population, outside of four mid-sized cities, is sparse. The Llano has always required and appealed to discerning eyes. The artists and writers gathered here are hardly the first to have felt the pull of this place or the urgency to capture its essence. Yet the idiosyncrasies and ideals, the successes and failures, the strangeness and beauty and power of the land and its people beckon fresh discovery. Look at the Llano with eyes open to possibility, and you will encounter the unexpected, a keener understanding of the ways in which landscape and life are always inescapably intertwined, thrumming, as Barry Lopez suggests, the eternal Where are we? And where do we go from here?

“I have been in love with the working ranch cowboy for my whole life. As a girl, I sat beside my dad in coffee shops and feed stores, listening to livestock men cuss the weather, examine cattle prices, and make deals. I held the halter rope while he shod the remudas of large ranches as well as reset the shoes on people’s family pets. I begged to go when he trotted off into desert mornings with crews of men on horseback. And I dreamed of living on a cow camp, of the kind of ranch romance that Texas rancher Tom Moorhouse talks about with his drawling, twanging long a sounds.” —from the author’s prefaceFrom the Texas panhandle to the mountains of Arizona, Amy Auker has lived the cowboy life—as wife, as mother, as cook, as ranch hand, as writer. In fine-grained detail she captures the prairie light, the traffic on small farm-to-market roads, the vacant stillness of shipping pens when fall works are over. But she also captures the unmistakable westernness of the people and creatures around her: the son who must get back on the horse that just bucked him off, the husband who gives great gifts, the animals whose names and temperaments are as recognizable as family. Auker understands those who live in the sway of nature’s moods far off the main roads, and she commends them to us in luminous prose backlit by her own hard-earned experience.

Michael Ventura owned only one car his entire a green ’69 Chevy Malibu. Its wheels have crisscrossed the American landscape over more miles than a round trip to the moon. From Times Square to Terlingua, from Maine to Los Angeles, from Austin to Deadwood, Ventura has chronicled the continent in “a kind of switchback journey in image and thought.” His essays convey a tactile and intimate relationship with land and people—and of course the car. Ventura’s distinctive voice and vision are familiar to readers of the Austin Chronicle (where many of these pieces first appeared), as well as the Austin Sun, Psychotherapy Networker, and LA Weekly . In this collection, its title borrowed from a Butch Hancock song, the essays switch lanes with Hancock’s evocative black-and-white photographs. Slowing down to take notice of a makeshift shrine in the Texas Panhandle or zipping along the New York Thruway before dawn, Ventura captures the details that make us think profoundly about work, music, poverty, beauty, our home on the planet and in the universe. About volcanoes and the Very Large Array. About friends and companions. About gods and goddesses and God. With Lubbock, Texas, and the Southwest as the book’s home base, If I Was a Highway roams widely and freely as Ventura takes readers on an unforgettable journey not only into the country but into the soul.