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The Caliche Pits of West Texas
When I was born during the Great Depression, my dad had a
part-time job guarding a “caliche pit” just east of the nearby town of Wellman,
TX. There was heavy equipment in the
pit, used for digging and crushing a soft rock called “caliche.” During those
hard times, theft was rampant as people struggled to survive the depression.
Although Caliche layers keep the surface of West Texas soil
limited in the types of vegetation that can grow upon them, the substance was
invaluable in surfacing country roads before the more expensive asphalt became
more affordable. Although surfacing a
road with caliche made it smooth and impermeable to rains, roads surfaced with
it became as slick as greased glass in rainy weather. A motorist had to be careful not to slide
off it and get stuck in what was called “the bar ditch,” a depression off each
shoulder used to collect runoff water.
How caliche subsurface in West Texas affects the type of
vegetation that can grow there:
“Caliche beds can cause many problems when trying to grow
plants. First, an impermeable caliche layer prevents water from draining
properly, which can keep the roots from getting enough oxygen. Salts can also
build up in the soil due to the lack of drainage. Both of these situations are
detrimental to plant growth. Second, the impermeable nature of caliche beds
also prevents plant roots from going through the bed, which means the roots
have a limited supply of nutrients, water, and space, so they cannot develop
normally.” (From Wikipedia definition).
So, the low, tough vegetation one sees on the Texas plain is
influenced more by the subsoil than the 18 inches or so of rain that is normal
for the area.
On the Texas plains, abandoned caliche pits became
substitutes for “lover’s Lanes.” As a
beginning writer some forty years ago, I wrote a short story (titled “The
Caliche Pit,”) about a small West Texas town, manned by a two-man police force,
one of them the “chief” and the other a new rookie, who had more to learn about
small town policing than the criminal code teaches. While patrolling outside the perimeter of the
town, the “chief” decided to check out the local caliche pit. There was one car parked in the pit, and the
chief drove to the bottom of the pit and circled it. He did not stop to check out the occupants of
the car. When queried by the rookie as to why they did not check out the occupants
of the car, the chief replied that, in a small town, the first thing one must
learn is to be blind to some things. The chief had noticed a prominent, local, married
couple in the car, married to someone other than each other.
When I queried the below link on caliche pits, I found the
first answer, by “steve’o” interesting,
and not inconsistent with my image of the “local caliche pit,” one of which seems to be near all small West Texas towns.
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