El Despoblado

On the high desert plains of West Texas, parched mesquite trees breathlessly await the summer monsoon. Reaching toward the impossible sky, their armored branches oscillate in the gusting winds, broadcasting only their ossified inflexibility.  Some years the rains never fall. The mesquite that provided timber for this instrument stood long dead above the cracked desert floor – grey, gnarled and statuesque – a testament to the forces of historical change that delivered the mesquite out West. A descendant of stowaway seeds brought by the vaqueros and American cattlemen, this tree grew where prairie grass once fed buffalo, and they in turn, Apache and Comanche people. A legacy of the Texas state, an accidental marker of territory, the unmistakable tight grain of this mesquite didgeridoo tells a story of migration and conflict, cattle drives and ranching, dusts storms and drought.