28 Apr Go Forth and Find Peace
Highway 287 executes a long diagonal across the entirety of Texas, from the Oklahoma border in the far northwestern corner of the state above Dumas all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico at Port Arthur. Just south of Amarillo you can take a turn off of 287 onto Masterson Road, due north. You pass beneath interstate 40 and highway 60 and the landscape quickly turns empty and desolate. A few miles further on there’s a cotton warehouse on the left and a Tyson plant on the right where I imagine belligerent, squawking barnyard fowl being stuffed into one end of a gigantic machine and perfect little chicken nuggets emerging from the other. Take a right on St. Francis Avenue, go past the Tyson employees entrance, and when you reach Dee King Trucking Company on the left there’s a graveyard on the right. There are only a few dozen headstones and a low chain link fence and if you’re not specifically looking for St. Francis Cemetery you could easily miss it.
Steven Lance LaRue’s granite grave marker is near the center of the cemetery, away from most of the others. The stone bears Steve’s name, his life dates, an image of a guitar (a Fender Telecaster), some musical notes, and the inscription ‘Go forth and find peace.’ Steve was indeed a Fender man, but I don’t ever recall him playing a Tele. Throughout the 37 years of our friendship he was a Strat player, pretty much exclusively (he felt that Telecasters were for cowboys). It’s a nice grave marker and it’s apparent that his family put some thought and care into it. The inscription suggests something about Steve that those of us who knew him know only too well—that there was torment in his soul, especially in his later years.
I have driven highway 287 dozens of times—it is a primary road on my frequent trips back and forth between Santa Fe and New Orleans—but it was not until just recently that I looked into how close or how far Steve’s final resting place was from my usual route. Turns out that it’s only about five miles. When I first stopped there back in March the wind was howling out of the southwest, as it typically does in the vicinity of Amarillo, and the air was pungent with the smell of manure from the fields just beyond the graveyard fence. Railroad tracks run parallel to highway 60 about a half mile off to the south and every now and then a freight train laden with Maersk and Amazon Prime shipping containers passed by on its way to the big railyards in central Amarillo. There was one small, faded clutch of artificial flowers by Steve’s marker and the overwhelming sense of the place was of loneliness and isolation.
Steve has been gone for nine years now, but confronting his grave marker offered a sort of closure that I had not previously achieved. Here it was, literally carved into stone: A beginning, an end, and a few grace notes to suggest the parameters of a life in which music played a central role. I decided then and there that I would attempt to cheer the scene up a bit and add something more to this far-flung monument, to offer a slightly fuller picture of a person who played a central role in my early-to-mid adult years.
Back in Santa Fe, I firstly assembled a rather purposely obnoxious arrangement of artificial flowers, culled from the finest offerings at Michael’s craft emporium: Traditional funerary white lilies offset by gaudy stargazer lilies, roses, and sunflowers. A sort of miniature galvanized milk can seemed like a good container. I acquired a little American flag to add to the mix as I have found that its presence can discourage hooliganism. Finally, a mix CD of Steve’s music: A selection of fifteen songs from his solo work, from the projects we did together, from his band the Philisteens, and from our Los Hermanos de Gein sessions. There was a lot to chose from and no way to know which pieces the Goof might consider the best or most accurate reflection of his musical sensibilities, so I just went with my instincts. I burned a baker’s dozen of the discs and put them into a plastic container with a brief description of the contents taped to the lid and the encouragement to ‘Please take one!’ I added the address of this website as well.
Returning to St. Francis Cemetery last week, I marveled once again at how exquisitely remote it felt even though it is just a few minutes drive from Amarillo’s brand spanking new Buc-ee’s and the famous Big Texan steakhouse on I-40. I positioned the floral arrangement to best advantage and placed the plastic bin with the CDs. As if on cue, a freight train appeared in the distance, adding poetry to the west Texas high plains desolateness. It was an early Sunday afternoon and, other than the wind and the slowly advancing train, everything was still and quiet.
(For more about Steve go to my February 2017 blog post and the serialized chapters of The Road Crew also to be found here, plus the Music page.)
