By Dori Glanz and Rupa Shenoy, Medill

Pampa, TX—The folks up in the Texas Panhandle still hang on to the lifestyle of the great state’s past, and Texas kitsch surrounds you here in “the top of Texas.”  In the Palo Duro Canyon State Park, we hitched a ride to our car from a cowboy with an eye-patch and a studded leather vest, after watching the opening minute of “Texas, the musical drama” in the amphitheatre at the base of a cliff.

“Yeehaws” echoed as the sun set on the rugged land near where hundreds, if not thousands, of new wind turbines are being planned. Here, it seems like the only restaurants are steakhouses and BBQ joints. Just as telling, the walls everywhere from the local restaurant to the state representative’s office (which also serves as a meat processing center for his ranch) are covered with mounted animal heads.

We spoke to Salem Abraham, a local businessman, rancher, and big-time futures trader in the tiny town of Canadian. The Panhandle culture, he said, is one strongly tied to the history of the region.

“Up here, you vote Republican,” he said. No ifs about it. “Government has never been around here for you. This is the country. If you need help up here, you call your neighbor, but you better not count on the government to be around.”

Abraham, whose family has a 30,000-acre ranch south of Canadian, has been talking to his neighbors a lot lately. He’s working for the AEP power company to sign up landowners to lease land for wind turbines on the high mesas along the southern part of Hemphill County. In some cases, landowners could earn up to 4 percent of the profit on the energy they’re selling.

One of his longtime friends and business partners is getting into wind, too. With a personality and wallet as big as the state, T. Boone Pickens, who launched a $30 million media campaign last week touting the “Pickens Plan” to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil, is a local oil tycoon and rancher. He’s planning a 4,000-megawatt wind ranch in the area. It would be 5 1/2 times larger than the current biggest wind farm in the world, which is 250 miles south of here in Sweetwater, and Pickens has been talking to his fellow ranchers about placing turbines on their properties.

“Boone,” Abraham explained, “knows the landowners out here. They trust him.”

Even Abraham repeatedly reminded us this is still big oil country.  High energy prices have brought an economic boom to the region, and landowners can get many times the payments from an oil well than they can from a wind turbine.

“Ranching is the absolute lowest return from land,” Abraham said, claiming one could earn 10 times more through wind than through ranching. With gas, the difference is even steeper. “One gas well is worth what 60 wind turbines are. Wind is not the answer today, but in 50 to 100 years, oil and gas might be gone, and wind may be the thing down the road that will help make this land worth more.”

Our hotel was filled with oil field workers. And the smell of “minerals” (as these Texans refer to crude oil) filled the air. Wind—even the high-profile Pickens wind ranch—is not on the minds of most of the local people with whom we spoke. While landowners might know Pickens and trust him, skepticism was overwhelming from the citizens of the town of Pampa, just west of Canadian, and where Pickens is headquartering his wind farm operation.

“The way they’re talking, I think it’s great if they do what they say they’re going to do and bring a lot of people into town,” said Danny Martin, the commander of Pampa VFW Post 1657.. “I hope it works out. But I don’t know too much about it, I haven’t talked to them. I don’t feel like I’m ever going to work for them. We don’t talk about it a lot, you know. I work in the oil fields.”

Off camera and privately, people’s impressions of Pickens were far less confident. His history in these parts, especially related to oil company buyouts and the water pipeline project he has planned in the area — which would pump water from the Ogallala aquifer in the Panhandle and transport it to markets in the big cities to the south — make many suspicious.

One woman said the city was excited about the prospects of wind, “but we just don’t trust Pickens.” And it was suggested by another resident that “he’s stealing water from us and selling it to Dallas.”

And so it goes here in the great state. Everything’s big — oil, wind, whatever — and there’s no exception when it comes to Pickens’ plans and the residents’ views of him.