The Capitol Building in Austin is built from a solid orange-pink stone and capped with a high-spired copper-oxide-green dome. Inside, the floors are decorated with highly a polished phallic tiling. Police wander about in cowboy hats and boots, guns slung round their hips. One of them spots me trying to photograph him from afar and walks over. He asks to see my photos. As he slowly scrolls through my camera, Michael arrives with his government ID card and we leave without a farewell.

In the hanger-shed BBQ restaurant Kreuz Market you walk into a darkness of blackened walls and light and smoke. The dense heat and smells of rendered fat brings to mind religious devotion. Beef brisket is cooked here, Texas style, hot-smoked for hours, and served by the pound on greaseproof paper.

On the patio of a coffee shop in South Austin a small, dull-brown lizard runs skittishly along a banister towards my table. When it comes to within about 30cm from my torso it pauses and observes the gap between itself and my table (about 20cm vertically and 3cm horizontally).

The distance measured, it leans over the edge of the banister, drops, and just about manages to cling on to the edge my table. From there, the lizard pulls itself up and makes another hesitant run to my sunglasses that sit just in front of my resting arm. It observes the glasses briefly then steps up onto them. It pauses again. Then licks the lenses, its little tongue darting out and back in, then a pause, and then another lick.

Five licks later it steps down and returns to the edge of the table, stopping occasionally along the way and flicking its green eyelids. Once at the edge it looks up to the banister, calculates the distance again, stretches out and with an unfathomable leap, manages to grab onto the edge, effortlessly clearing a vertical distance of at least seven times its height, and continues on its way.

Earlier that morning I woke up to read the news on my phone of a shooting in a cinema in Aurora Colorado during a midnight showing of the latest Batman movie. Throughout the day I desperately seek out wi-fi everywhere I go and attempt to find out all the latest developments. Little can be gleaned. Later that day I walk around the campus of Austin University where, in 1966, Charles Whitman climbed the bell tower and shot at people below.

Today’s driving was the kind of driving I had fantasised about. Long, straight two-lane roads, almost a constant speed of 70mph, empty vistas, and infrequent empty towns. I had been told many times to speed through Texas—“there’s nothing there”—and in a way I am, and in a way that’s true. But there’s richness in the speeding and in the emptiness. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve enjoyed driving through Texas in a way that I haven’t enjoyed driving through anywhere else.

What I saw today include...

• Cemeteries filled with tombstones for people called “Hoover”
• Rolling straight roads
• Towns with over half the buildings in them now empty ex-shops
• A large dead deer with two vultures tearing at its muscles
• A large dead bird of some sort, black
• A (living) vulture, swooping down in front of my speeding windshield
• Dust clouds
• Lightning
• Giant wind turbines spreading out to the horizon in every direction
• Rain, falling from neatly circumscribed dense clouds in the far-off distance.

Clovis has a population of over 100,000 and little infrastructure for human beings. There’s a park with reluctantly green grass but the rest is grids, wide and dusty. The buildings are either industrial sheds fenced off with barbed wire and warnings about dogs, or small, broken houses with front yards of dry dirt. More dogs lie here. The larger louder ones are fenced in or tied up but the smaller yappier dogs are allowed to run free and chase me until I am out of sight of their homes.

There’s a mystery to those dirt roads. The ones that leave the highway, cross the railway and disappear south into the Sonoran Desert. Usually about 200 metres along there‘s some kind of structure—a house, a shed, a wind pump—that justifies the effort but beyond this: nothing, and yet the roads continue. To where though? To a heat vortex? The end of the world?

In one of the small rooms of the adobe complex at the Taos Pueblo an old native American man sits flicking through a wholesale catalogue of Indian Relics. He said I could ask him anything but I asked him nothing. I just took a few paces, looked at the whitewashed walls and burnt feathers, made a few sounds I hoped sounded like wonder and curiosity and then left.