I lie back on the picnic bench and dip one toe into the sand , tracing lines to and fro . An arm thrown over my head blocking the sun . A slow breeze rustles the strings of my cut-off shorts , and I can just make out the sound of waves lapping in the distance .

Above , clouds of watered ink stretch across a crisp , white canvas , shaping themselves to the contours of the land . I rise , walk the dogs out into the dunes and look toward the west . A wind from nowhere takes my hat for its own . I chase it downhill , sliding as I go , but this West Texas beach buries my hat like old bones in the desert . Just another secret enfolded here alongside broken roads , discarded water bottles and long-ago lost wagon trains .

We wander farther to find shade in the shadow of a westward dune , where I wait until the dogs stop panting . Silos full of frac sand rise above the desert to the northwest . The same place I started my search for the horse three years ago .

I can still hear the train . The growing , rumbling engine and shattering horn . The same monster that spooked my horse during the night , sending him out into this wasteland . Lost for two days . You can disappear in the dunes here , and he has . I wonder if he remembers . I do . I remember stepping into the nothing where solid ground should have been . An empty pen , scattered hay and hoofprints to nowhere , the only proof there had been a horse there the night before . I remember driving these dusty backroads , dodging pump jacks and cacti , focused on only one thing : finding my horse .

In West Texas , the summer never knows it ’ s over , and September of 2020 was no exception . For two years , I ’ d carried a Texas State Park brochure in the glovebox of my truck like a good luck charm , all the horse friendly parks highlighted . I had finally made the leap , going a month on the road to travel Texas , New Mexico and Colorado . I was a bit lost in the beginning , reeling from COVID and pending divorce . But this horse propped me up and then , after 2,100 miles together , I found myself casing the desert and dusting for prints like a crime scene investigator .

Resting on the border of the great Chihuahuan Desert , the town of Monahans is best known for two things : oil and sand , both found in abundance . A once prosperous ranching land , the original settlement was taken over by oil in the 1920s and is now the center of the Permian Basin , the most productive oil field in the United States .

The workday seems to never end for many here . On the outskirts of town , trucks and machinery run all night under the watchful eye of sweating spotlights . A giant blight in the distant desert sky . But Monahans is a proud town , one of roughnecks and ranch hands , oil fields and sand plants . A mix of past and present where locals greet each other with a one or two fingered casual wave , the grocery store serves as social hour , and the lights of nearby Odessa and Midland wink from the northeast horizon .

We camped that September at Sandhills State Park , surrounded by its ever-changing embankments . Part of a vast series of dunes 20 miles wide and 70 miles long that stretch through West Texas into southern New Mexico . A world held in place by the occasional shin oak and scrub grass , where the ground leaks back the day ’ s heat , and the sky reaches down to reclaim it .

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