Pampa

Well, my name's Tyler Hudson.

I'm from Pampa, Texas, small town, North Texas, and, um, I moved to Australia when I was 18 years old, studied music at a, at a Bible college in Sydney where I met my wife, who is a beautiful young Aussie named Libby.

We got married very young.

I was 21.

But I'm gonna go right to the happy ending, and we're gonna call this a wrap, because I'm not gonna make it another probably 30, 40 minutes.

Pampa, Texas.

Man, he showed up uninvited at a guy's house.

He forced his way in.

Inside a home, they found several people, including a man who had been shot.

Well, that's good.

I guess he's still there, right? Officers and other emergency personnel began treating him before the EMS took him to the Pampa Regional Medical Center, where he was transferred into the Amarillo Hospital and in critical condition, where he expired and he assumed room temperature.

They identified him as 33-year-old Cameron Hassler.

and was running as hard and with everything I could away from the Lord.

I'm at this public high school track meet in Pampa, Texas.

No one preached the gospel to me.

No one laid hands on me.

I fell on my face, began weeping, confessed Jesus is Lord and gave my life to Jesus that day.

I just had this moment with the presence of God that nobody will ever be able to take that from me.

Anytime I start to wrestle with unbelief or start to wrestle with skepticism, when my heart starts to become a cynic and I feel that temptation, all I have to do is remember what happened in Pampa, Texas at a track meet.

And I go, God touched me with his presence.

Yeah

... and they have to stop in a place called Pampa at the Cottonwood Motel-

Mm-hmm.

Yeah

I don't think they ever said.

I think-

A place called Pampa.

Yeah.

That's no pl- we're no pl- West Texas and, uh, in Arizona, no place for an electric car.

We got, we got stuck in Pampa, Texas.

They looked like they'd seen a UFO.

[laughs] Good stuff.

By evening, it had rolled into Amarillo, more than eight hundred miles from where it had started that morning in the Dakotas, still carrying enough force to plunge each town it passed through into the same absolute darkness.

Fifty miles northeast of Amarillo, in the town of Pampa, a twenty-two-year-old sign painter and part-time musician named Woody Guthrie was in a room with a group of neighbors when the light went out.

He'd moved to the Panhandle at eighteen and would spend the rest of the decade writing about what he saw there.

The people around him that afternoon said out loud that this was the end of the world.

Two hundred thousand of those who left the region went to California, though later research would complicate the popular image of a mass, singular exodus westward.

Most who left the Plains moved only as far as they had to, to the next county or the next state over, chasing whatever work or rain seemed close enough to reach.

Woody Guthrie, who you heard from in Pampa on Black Sunday, spent much of the decade writing songs about that particular kind of despair, not the sudden, dramatic kind that comes from a single crisis, but the grinding kind that wears a person down over years of scraping by on less than enough.

He left for California in the spring of nineteen thirty-seven.

Look, that is all the way out there.

Pampa? Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Spearman? That's Steve Walker country.