King country, with the “town” of Guthrie as county seat, is in MY area of TX, although approx. 70-80 mi from me. But in TX, trust me, that’s not very far.
It is ranching and oil country. Period. With a few government workers thrown in. People leave there and don’t go back, when they’ve done with the local schools. It is remote, isolated, pretty in a rough-hewn way. The population trend is inexhorably downward and one day, unless a new energy boom or the like occurs there, it will be a ghost county/town.
People there still hold to timeless American values, but they are dying. It used to be Democrat, way back when, such as when Rick Perry’s dad was a Democrat county commissioner in Haskell county, east of there. But the Democrat party left them, they didn’t leave it. And they finally recognized it and now vote accordingly.
I have been there once or twice, but truly unless you have some reason to go there or go through there, you are always better off taking a different route, whereever you’re going. Once we went through there on our way to another remote small town, Paducah, for a religious service held by a preacher we knew. Another time we took our Tennesee relatives on a tour of this area and went through it.
Imagine mile upon mile upon mile of rolling, occasionally hilly but mostly rolling, reddish landscape with mostly scrub cedar, with an occasional “regular” type tree thrown in. Ranch headquarters so far off the road you don’t even see people. Some oil pumps and natural gas tanks. Very few vehicles on the roads. Vultures circling endlessly, etc. But it is quiet and natural and it is “God’s Country”.
But “the children” can’t wait to leave for the wider world...
Sounds like a Louis L’Amour novel..............
Your wonderfully descriptive remarks about King country put me there. The loss of our youth (education, faith, values) has been exacerbated by Big Education, social mingling/pastor appeasing churches/popular culture and state media.