The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 57. El Paso/Juarez: A Prelude

The apartment building in El Paso
where I became a writer.

Although I haven't had anything published since something like 2002, I am a writer.  I have been well-trained by master writers; I usually get up at 5:00 a.m. to practice my art; and most importantly, sometimes along the way I discover I have something to say and manage to express it somewhat well. That defines a writer:  yearning, training, persistence, something said well.  The rest is all the side-business of the craft, which admittedly I have failed royally at.  One can't get published if one doesn't send work to publishers.

Yet, from the standpoint of the text, I have been true to my art.  I have a fairly solid record of my interior life recorded through words put to paper.  I have discovered who I am and who I want to become through my writing.  Here's an example:

The Question

I think normal people just go to sleep,
which isn't a bad idea, and I used to.
Nine o'clock always as a kid, and looking forward to it,
that cold blue room in the lean-to add-on.
I plugged in the electric blanket and cuddled up
after a good firm talk with God
about how if I did this, he'd do that,
and I'd grow up happy, successful and loyal,
with a wife, five kids,
an architectural firm and a house,
a great space of light and body
headed by me, Patriarch,
like God headed the Church,
the building, the body, the light.

But, then I don't know, something happened.
Oh, I know it happens to all of us,
and few of us really sleep,
with houses balanced on loans,
beds suspended over arguments with elastic smiles,
marriages held together with kids as tape,
marriages not held together,
kids torn like tape, a piece on each flap,
flapping in the wind,
the guilt of having torn such a little body.
But how do you live in a house so small,
and with her?
And how does she stand you,
both of you growing,
swallowing space?
All healthy things get bigger,
more complex,
cells and histories of cells,
whole cities wiped out within
with new information and cable TV.
The cage can only make you rabid,
the things she says ticking off in your head.

Okay, so I don't have it so bad;
I have none of this.
I have one single question
that keeps me up at night:
How do I make it mine?

I wrote that poem one night sitting at my desk in my fifth floor apartment looking over Mesa Street and downtown El Paso.  At the time I was a creative writing major at UTEP; I worked for the publisher Cinco Puntos Press; and I'd started a literary magazine with my friend George Shimshock called Sell-Outs Literary Magazine, which we'd designed to be a flashy, high-quality magazine that poked fun of the literary community for taking itself too seriously.  It seemed like I was on track to be part of that world.  Yet, my writing knew before I did that I wanted something different.  I ended up in the same town in which I grew up, talking once again to the same God I talked to regularly as a child, only now less demanding.  I didn't end up with five kids, but I do have four.  Marci and I have a great marriage, and so the kids never had to be used as tape to keep it all together, and thankfully the marriage never came apart, kids flapping helplessly in the wind.  Yet, even if that had been the case, I believe I would have still deemed it all worth it.  I have the life my poem knew I wanted before I did.

I did not have that same drive to make it as a writer.  Perhaps I still don't.  I will always choose doing the dishes or watching an episode of NCIS with Marci over completing that next thought in whatever I'm writing because I know just how good I've got it, and I don't want to screw things up.  Yet writing is still a part of me.  It is part of my daily practice.  And because what we do daily becomes who we are, I am a writer.  I learned my craft in El Paso, and because of that, El Paso and Juarez are forever linked to my soul.  There is no me without that great city spread across three states and two nations, divided by a narrow, concrete-channeled river constantly dying of thirst but never quite fully evaporating under that intense sun.  I am every bit as much a product of El Paso as my hometown, where I write this now.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 56. The Davis Mountains, No. 2

View from our campsite at Davis Mountains State Park

I woke up before the sun, a bit chilled, but mainly exasperated with the limited sleeping positions available on a folding cot.  I stirred for half an hour or so, and finally decided I'd rather deal with cold than body aches.  So I did the hard act of getting out of bed.  That is the single most difficult moment of the day when removed from the comforts of home.  Not only is the air cold, but everything you must slide that body of yours into is cold also.  But, it's either face the biting air or lie there in that mummified position for what seems like forever.  So, I did it.  The odd thing is getting up always remains difficult even though history teaches the camper that life is indeed much better once you get out of bed and start the morning fire.

I started the propane stove first to heat water.  Then I looked around for firewood as we only had a couple of small split juniper pieces from the bundle we brought with us.  I couldn't find much, but it was fun scampering around the gray predawn landscape looking for every little dry twig.  I finally gathered enough to fuel a small flame, and then I set off for more wood.  I had to return quickly though, over and over again, for none of my findings were fatter than my thumb.  About the time the sun pinked the low ridge west of the campsite, the fire was large enough that I was able to throw on the two small split juniper logs left over from the previous night.  That provided enough time to move the kettle from propane burner to the fire and fry up some bacon on the stove.

By the time Marci crawled out from the tent, the sun was up, the hills were golden, and the air was much, much warmer.  The bacon was also done.  We sat at the table slightly shivering, eating our bacon, yogurt and fruit, and downing it down with hot chocolate, while staring at the low golden hills.  

And then we packed up camp.  The day was warming fast, and by the time we had camp cleared, sweaters were off and shade was more pleasant than sunlight.

Davis Mountains State Park is in a small side canyon over the first, low foothill ridge of the range.  Though still beautiful, it is the least dramatic part of the Davis Mountains.  It is as if Mount Rainier National Park somehow did not include Mount Rainier.  I'm not sure what explains it other than the state simply could not purchase any other acreage in the mostly privately owned range.  Such oddities never occur west of Interstate 25, where public lands comprise most of the states. It baffles me that all those western adventurers, who spend every weekend up in the mountains or out in the desert camping, hunting, fishing or riding ATV's are always griping about all the public BLM and national forest lands.  You can't recreate on other people's private property.  Take away all the public land and you take away your own lifestyle.  It's like Hugh Hefner lobbying for celibacy and stronger censorship of the content of his magazines.  It's as perplexing as people on public assistance watching Fox News and griping about how many people are on welfare.  If you're a thinking man, sometimes you just have to pull out your brain and toss it out the car window to proceed through contemporary America.  We should all be enlightened because everything we encounter these days is a koan.  There just is no way to proceed logically through our times.  It takes some other twisted form of post-modern thinking to navigate through twenty-first century America.  

So too with the Davis Mountains.   Davis Mountains State Park is no more part of the Davis Mountains than Sacramento is a beach city.  It gets you close to the experience, but not close enough.  Still, it's nice that the park is there.  It provides a place to set up your tent the night prior to experiencing the range for real.

McDonald Observatory, on the other hand, is the best place for the public to observe the Davis Mountains.  It provides a real mountain view no matter whether your home perspective is from Kansas or Colorado.  It holds up to even the most snooty of western expectations, like mine.  Unlike so many things in Texas, it is not a tall tale invented in the imagination of a people canned under the pressure of constant heat and humidity, sizzling in a landscape flat as a skillet.  No wonder they see the alps when the they see a knoll west of Austin.  Anything to escape a Houston reality is worth dreaming up--the more far-fetched the better.

Yet the Davis mountains are real.  I had been high in the Colorado Rockies the week before, about as high as one can get on a highway in the continental United States, and still the view from McDonald Observatory was breath-taking.  Standing there, looking over big blotches of shade crawl over pine and oak speckled ridges obliterated any thought of Facebook, TV, or the latest political atrocity.  All one did is look and see what life could be like if we didn't work so damn hard at disconnecting ourselves from all that matters.

One of the many views from McDonald Observatory

And then we did what you always do on vacation.  We got in the car and left paradise behind.  Such an odd,odd thing to do.  What motivates such human folly?  A cat would roll in the gravely sand in the sun and say, "This is fine; I'll just stay here and be".  

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 55. The Davis Mountains, No. 1

View from McDonald Observatory, Davis Mountains, Texas

I fell in love with the Davis Mountains through a brief, rapturous first encounter.  One day in December in 1984 my brother and I headed southwest from Dallas greedily in search of topography similar to that we'd grown up with in Utah.  We'd endured all the flat horizons we could handle and set out in search of real land and real life as we saw it.  We had no camping gear, but we figured the Davis Mountains were far enough south that we could handle a winter night provided we each took extra blankets.  

Luck was both with and against us.  It was cloudy most of the way.  If I remember right, the Premium Basin was clogged with fog, and so we couldn't search those southwestern horizons in anxious anticipation of any slight undulation, that magic moment when a jagged edge of  a mountain range would meet the sky.  As a result of the weather, we were almost in the Davis Mountains before we were aware of them.

Then, setting up camp at Davis Mountains State Park, something glorious happened.  The storm broke right at sunset and hills of golden grass, yucca and oak ignited in a brilliant copper-colored glow below orange-edged clouds.  It was a sight that would have sent Wordsworth into poetic rapture.

And then it was gone.  The clouds moved together and lowered.  Not long after we had our beds spread out on the ground, flakes of snow began to fall.  We gathered up our bedding, preparing for a long, cold night in the front seats of a 1977 Ford Mustang.  (If you know anything about Mustangs, you know that year, Ford basically decided to give Pinto a sportier body and call it a Mustang.  Everything except the shell was Pinto.  I don't think they exploded if you tapped the back bumper, but that was about the only difference.  If they did, we were very lucky, the way we crammed all our belongings into the trunk and beat on it to get it closed when we moved to Dallas.  The car was so full on that move, we literally had to cram clothes below the seats.  Driving down the road, we could not see each other because a few of Lloyd's paintings were stacked between the bucket seats.  As the car had manual transmission, how he shifted, I haven't a clue.  I think I remember some cursing involved in that complicated procedure.)

Anyway, back to the Davis Mountains.  It wasn't near as cold inside the car as we thought it would be.  Not that we slept.  Except for short amounts of time, that was impossible.  Unlike most cars, Pintos and Mustangs didn't have bench seats in the back.  They were low and there was an upholstered hump between the two sunken back seats. Thus, there was no place to stretch out.  We slept in slightly reclined front seats, uncomfortable as hell, but surprisingly warm.  It wasn't until Lloyd opened the driver's door in the morning that we found out why we weren't cold.  The car was insulated by more than a foot of snow, and the instant he opened that door, it was cold, cold, cold!  The inside of the windows immediately froze over with a thick frost as our breath crystallized before our eyes.  We later found out we had woken up to 12 degrees as a rare blue-northerner, as they're called, had swept deep down into Texas almost to Big Bend National Park.

The Mustang decided it was too cold to run the defrost.  I guess the fan froze.  A little bit of heat seeped out of the vent, but not enough to melt more than the bottom few cementers of the inside face of the windshield.  We had to scrape the inside, which, with us breathing, would immediately freeze over again.  Once we got out on the highway, I had to keep scraping as Lloyd drove down the road, him seeing through a tiny hole that half of the time was obscured by a red plastic scraper blade going back and forth as I scraped again and again.

A few hours later, and many miles down the road, the sun came out, and once the sun was doing it's magic and the ice was all melted away, the damn defrost came on, blowing out the hottest air ever--just to mock us!

We never mourned that car when it died.  Not even nostalgia could wake up some sort sentimentality.  We were just glad to move on to slightly better vehicles.  

The trip, however, brings a smile every time it comes up in conversation.  Some difficulty, as I've written earlier in this book, does intensify the experience of camping, and if memories are what one is after, nobody should ever pray for a trouble-free vacation, but of course, I still do.  It is only human nature to want a cushy ride to heaven.       

My next memory of the Davis Mountains is of me camping alone.  I had my blue A-frame tent,  the one I'd set up with no poles in Galveston.  Therefore, we must have returned to Utah sometime in between so that I could retrieve the camping gear that I'd discarded on the move to Texas.

Whatever time of year that second trip was, it was hot.  I decided to hike from the campground at Davis Mountains State Park to the little town of Fort Davis on the other side of ridge.  (There is something in me that always wants to hike over a mountain to get to someplace civilized.  Later, I would hike over the Franklin Mountains in El Paso to get to a girl's house.  I wanted to be able to say to her, "I crossed a mountain range to get to you."  I thought it was terribly romantic.  She thought it was insane.  I'm still glad I did it though.  There is just something magical about crossing a range and showing up in society.  The great trappers and explorers did that frequently, but we just don't do that anymore.  All of our epic journeys are away from civilization as the man-made world now occupies more space than the natural.  These days our pilgrimage memories are away from the comforts of home and society and not towards them.  Civilization is so much a part of our lives, we take vacations from it.  I like to fantasize of a more rustic age.  I just like the idea of showing up in town for a drink and clean shave after living months on-end in the wilderness.  When I first started dating Marci,or rather when she first started dating me, I was living in a tent in the mountains.  It was only for a week.  The semester at college had ended, but my work wanted me to work a week longer, and so I just moved up the canyon.  I was finally living my fantasy.  I lived in the mountains and journeyed into town for a taste of civilization and the company of a lady).

Back to the Davis Mountains. I set out from the campground, hiked the Skyline Drive Trail, and dropped down into Ft. Davis National Historical Site, enjoying the wonderful, historic buildings before walking into town for an ice cold beverage and a meal.  I was sunburned and desperate for some civilized refinement.  The only things that would have made my mountain-man fantasy more real would have been a barber shop for a clean shave and a bordello for some female companionship afterward.  I remember dreading the hike back to camp terribly.  I was sweaty, sunburned and had blisters on my feet.  Romanticism comes at a cost. 

This trip, Marci and I experienced no complications.  Still it was magical.  Though not high by the standards of the west, topping out at 8,383 feet on Baldy Peak atop Mount Livermore, there is something special about the Davis Mountains.  There must be because even coming from a place where I have 10,000 foot mountains out my back door and 12,000 foot mountains less than an hour away, the Davis Mountains still spoke profoundly to me.  I was as enchanted this time as I had been during that first golden glimpse back in the 80s.

Coming from Balmorhea Springs, you ease into the Davis Mountains through narrow valleys between low cliff-lined uplifts.  Trees trail along washes.  Shadows are thrown by the bluffs.  Very western.  Very real.   

We arrived at camp late in the afternoon, just in time to set up camp and have dinner before sunset.  I enjoyed looking at the familiar golden hills as I set up the propane stove to cook.  We simply heated up a can of chili and had Frito pie, but it was marvelous.  My mom used to say, "Everything tastes better when you eat outside," and she was right.  The odd thing is that even with mom's philosophy, we didn't have a barbecue or picnic table in the back yard.  As an adult, I have remedied that.  My back yard is designed as a place to eat and occupy, not just something to look out on from the kitchen window.  A home should only exist to give you easy access to what really matters--outside!  A sliding glass door should be opening and shutting all day long as one moves in and out of the house.  Inside is only a place to grab a drink from the fridge or to watch an episode of NCIS during the hottest part of the day.   

Although my entire life now is pretty much just camping minus the nightly campfire, there is still something extra magical about doing all one's days activities except sleeping and using the restroom outdoors.  A glass house is the next best thing to being there.  Being there, brushing flies away from your food, is where it's at.  I stirred the beans, looked towards a low, golden hill with blobs of oak and juniper and thought, Damn this is the life.  In my mind, if looking at golden hills at sunset is the only reason we experience mortality, well, it is quite enough.