On a cool October afternoon, I was standing outside of what could be the smallest U.S. Post Office in America. It served Wayside, Texas, a slim shadow of a town located in the Panhandle, that square top part of the state framed by cattle ranching and wheat farming. The post office resides inside a faded blue building of hammered tin; out front is a gravel parking lot and a single red gas pump next to a pail stuck with a mop handle. I guess you clean your truck with a mop in these parts. I set up my tripod and photographed the gas pump in front of the fading gas station, rust red against bleak blue. An old pickup truck muttered by on the road. The driver in a cowboy hat waved. I waved back. Everybody waves in Texas. Inside, the postmaster, Katie Bell, who had the look of a rancher’s wife--beef on her frame, a smile on her face, a drawl to her voice--told me her father had been running the service station for forty years. “The post office goes with the territory.” I figured there wasn’t much mail to handle. The population of Wayside is twelve, with an additional fifty-some folks spread out on farms and ranches. Wayside holds much in common with many small towns across the American frontier. It is slowly vanishing.

For twenty-five years, through photography and writing, I’ve been trying to capture the spirit and soul of America through its evaporating frontier icons: the small towns like Wayside, the farmers, the cowboys, the Indians, the storytellers and the characters that make up the wide open spaces of America.

As I search for these familiar frontier images, I rarely drive a four-lane road. I keep to the farm and ranch roads, sometimes gravel by-ways, always looking for some photographic opportunity, a farmer on a tractor, an old outbuilding, a collapsing barn, an advertising sign, a dying town, a lone ranch house, a rusty pickup. If I spot a deserted farmhouse, I sometimes go inside, letting my imagination loose on the lives gone by -- a sagging couch in an empty living room, a kitchen slumped in ruin, a shadowy hallway, the landscape through busted windows.

These TomJenzAmerica photographs from my road trips chronicle my search for what still exists of the authentic frontier of the collective American imagination.

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