Amarillo Chrome and Cruise

I rolled into Amarillo in the spring of 2014 on a self-assigned architectural pilgrimage, a clipboard of addresses in my passenger seat and visions of brick cornices dancing in my head. The plan was sober: document façades, grain elevators, the silent geometry that tethers small-town Texas to its dusty earth. But as I slipped off I-40 and crested into downtown, a deeper engine note swallowed my itinerary. Polk Street was vibrating — literally — with the annual Cruise, five hundred classic cars orbiting the business district in a rolling museum of Detroit thunder. One moment I was chasing angles; the next I was chasing horsepower.

There was no easing into it. Candy-apple Chevys, pearl-white Fords, and satin-black rat rods rumbled past like an armada of living history. Pistons slapped time against brick storefronts, hubcaps flashed heliographs into the high plains sun, and the air smelled of gasoline, leather, and a century’s worth of American ambition. I grabbed my gear and dove in, framing a ’52 pickup that gleamed so red it seemed lit from within, then pivoting to a rust-skinned DIY hot rod wearing screaming-orange wheels like war paint. Every block was a new temptation — chrome reflecting neon, whitewalls gliding over asphalt, drivers grinning like kids let out of school.

I was exhilarated, but halfway down Polk Street the day tilted again. Threaded between the tailfins and moon hubcaps lounged a single Harley-Davidson Softail, angled at the curb as though it owned the patent on swagger. Classic cars may have set the soundtrack, yet this motorcycle provided the hook. Its fork tubes shimmered like liquid mercury, the gas tank mirrored whole constellations of clouds, and every polished fin caught sunlight and threw it back twice as bright. The bike was silent, but in its stillness I could feel the tremor of potential: a chrome animal poised to devour distance in long, hungry swallows.

I crouched low with a wide-angle lens. In the big round headlight I saw the city refracted into dreamlike curves — warehouse walls bending, traffic lights smearing into neon brushstrokes. Amarillo’s permanent architecture declared I endured; the Softail’s chrome insisted I depart. Both spoke of human craft, but in opposite tenses: masonry anchoring memory, metal promising escape. Standing that close, time compressed. Oil, hot steel, and phantom exhaust pulses swirled in my imagination, and I pictured the road unfurling west toward Tucumcari — wind tugging at sleeves, dusk glowing pink along the horizon, each mile wiping the chalkboard of thought until only the word freedom remained.

The Polk Street Cruise and the Softail were not rivals but partners in an accidental symphony: Detroit iron providing the bass line, Milwaukee chrome riffing lead guitar. Cars rolled by in stately loops, flaunting the majesty of weight, while the Harley whispered the gospel of velocity. Together they turned downtown into a cathedral of internal combustion where worship was paid in octane, rubber, and reflected light. My original assignment — those quiet bones of steel and stone — still mattered, yet they now served as a stage set for something wilder, an urban canyon amplifying the romance of motion.

I kept shooting until memory cards filled: a custom chopper under a brooding sky, headlights flickering across a Model T I later light-painted into a moonshiner’s fever dream, and of course the Softail, caught just before its rider swung a leg over and thumbed the starter. When that V-twin finally cracked the afternoon open, the street shook, tailfins quivered, and the Harley slipped into the chrome river of classics heading west—a silver knife through red candy and midnight blue.

Dusk found me packing gear with a grin I couldn’t hide. I’d driven to Amarillo looking for sturdy lines and predictable shadows; I left with exhaust still buzzing in my veins and a portfolio that smelled faintly of 10W-40. That’s the bargain of the road: show up with intent, stay loose enough to be ambushed by wonder. I was — and Amarillo delivered both architecture that endures and a machine that promises flight, welded together for one perfect, gasoline-sparked afternoon.

If you had one unexpected roadside encounter to photograph or write about, what would it be—and why?

— Lawrence

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