The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 61. Sunset Heights

 

Henry C. Trost home, Sunset Heights

As Marci and I had some time to kill before meeting Bobby and Lee, we drove up into Sunset Heights, my old neighborhood, where I reminisced over my former wanderings around this small neighborhood that looks over the chalky calle carved hills of the Fanja Del Rio of Juarez Mexico speckled with turquoise, pink and yellow box houses. 

Sunset Heights, which is shaped like a 45 degree triangle, with legs Schuster Ave and Mesa Street about a mile and half long and I-10 below carving a hypotenuse below the rock edge, is a culturally and economically diversified neighborhood consisting of historic mansions, apartment buildings, and small houses.  It is, in my opinion, one of the most unique neighborhoods in America.   Somehow, despite its spectacular views, its rich history, and its large homes, it has escaped complete gentrification.  It is the model neighborhood cities so desperately try to create and so desperately fail at maintaining.  Lawyers, professors, students, and working class families all live tightly together not only peacefully, but culturally connected.  They even share the same couple of neighborhood markets.

I ended up living there by chance.  It was Thanksgiving break, some friends and I were camping in the Guadalupe Mountains, and I only had one day to find an apartment before heading back to Dallas.  I didn't know the city at all, and just started searching neighborhoods around UTEP.  As I'd been falsely led to believe El Paso was an incredibly dangerous place to live, I was most concerned about security.  I looked at a couple of places that didn't meet my standard in that regard, and then I found a great old apartment building that had recently been remodeled.  There was a studio apartment available.  Although only a second-floor apartment, it had an amazing view of downtown due to the steep slope it was built into.  I was a couple of blocks from downtown and a few more from the university.  I could walk everywhere I needed to go.  It was perfect.

I loved that place.  As you walked in at street level, it was split-level.  One staircase led down to the basement laundry room.  There was a Coke machine and a pay phone there.  I don't think I ever purchased a phone in that apartment because I remember sitting on a plastic chair by the pay phone for hours trying to register for classes, having to stop and feed it coins over and over again.  Going up, half way, there was a little landing where the mailboxes were.  I'd stop and pick up the mail before making the turn and heading up the rest of the way up to the second floor which consisted of a long hall with apartments on both sides.  Each apartment had a iron gate door that had to be opened with a key both from the inside and outside.  I never understood how they got away with that with the fire martial.  Misplace your key inside and you'd be trapped banging frantically on the cage door as your apartment burned around you.  As I misplace everything, this was a very real threat to me. I constantly checked to see if I knew where my keys were.  I was on the second floor, but because of the terraced hillside, it was at least three floors down to the parking lot next door.

Inside, the apartment was small but freshly renovated with new charcoal gray industrial carpet.  You walked into what was designed as the bedroom, but as I wanted a living room, I made the walk-in closet off to the side my bedroom instead.    There wasn't room for a bedstead, and so I just put a foam mattress on the floor.  For the living room, I bought a bunch of black, plastic crates and turned them on their side for my small, but growing book collection that included Le Corbusier's Creation Is a Patient Search, Dostoyevsky's Idiot, Marguerite Duras's The Lover, Jean Dubeffet: A Retrospective, Zora Neal Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and Alice Walker's The Color Purple.  On top the crates, I placed my portable boom box.  And that was it--the only thing on that wall other than the window, which was glorious.  The skyline of downtown glistened day and night.  The only other things I had in that room was the TV, which was set on some particleboard crates that I'd painted black and a black cloth and natural wood director's chair to sit on.  On the walls hung several of my brother's charcoal city and landscape drawings placed in white matboard and framed with natural wood that matched wood of the director's chair, as well as some black and white photographs by my friend Marsh framed the same way.  That was it.  Simple.  Gray carpet.  Black book cases, a single black chair, natural wood.  The only color in the whole apartment was the framed vinyl disc of McCartney's "No More Lonely Nights" which pictured McCartney in 1950's glam with a pink background.  My brother had shadow-box framed it with a mirror behind the floating record and lined the inside edges with matching pink fabric.  The whole thing was framed in a dark, polished wood.  It was quite stunning.  Unfortunately, I left it behind in one of my moves.  My brother had made it for my birthday without me knowing, and I still feel its absence today.

McCartney hung in the kitchen over a built-in white-wood breakfast nook, but was clearly visible from the living room.  I used the nook as my office and a hand-me-down Apple IIC computer sat permanently on the table.  The kitchen was small and dated with 1950s sink, faucet and appliances, but I liked it.  It matched the McCartney record well.

As much as I liked my apartment, I actually spent very little time in it.  I remember watching the first Gulf War unfold with horror on that TV.  It wasn't the war itself that bothered me so.  I actually thought we should help Kuwait.  No, it was the endless propaganda surrounding it--that somehow by getting involved we were saving democracy, which as an institution, would collapse all over the world if we did not go to war.  Never mind that Kuwait wasn't a democracy.  I protested once at the university, and then went back to quietly watching the propaganda machines spew lies covered by the nightly news but not really questioned by the media.

Other than that, I don't remember being in the apartment much.  I was in El Paso to learn to write, and in my mind, that meant being on the streets, taking in life, even if it was only as an observer.  Although I had a car at the time, I seldom used it.  I walked everywhere, and I mean everywhere, especially in Juarez.  If I wasn't in class or at work, I was walking.  Then I'd come home late at night and write.  I didn't have a plan.  I wasn't creating anything in particular.  I was just observing and putting into text the best I could at the time what I'd observed.

Border Storm, June 28, 1991

 

The whole night is thick

and unreadable.

 

Trees are dust clouds,

Dust Clouds trees.

 

I wonder what my amigos do

when dunes attack their plywood huts

And grains race through the cracks

Like water under pressure?

I also took pictures, lots and lots of pictures, and video.  For a while at least, it seemed I was quite satisfied simply to become the transparent eyeball Emerson describes in Nature.  I wasn't always content with that role though.  Today, in looking through writing from that time period, I came across the following: 

I want love

and I want it now.

Where in the hell is she?

and where in the hell am I?

I must be in here somewhere

buried below the photographs

and lengthy paragraphs.

It's a hell of a life 

being a great American chronicler.

 * * * * *

As Marci and I continued up through Sunset Heights, I had to stop and take a picture of one home in particular.  It always drew my attention on my walks to campus.  Although there are multiple large homes in the neighborhood, this one was clearly special--not by accident, as is sometimes the case, but by design.  I started out my undergraduate studies as an architecture major, and I knew from first glance the home was significant.  An extensive gently-sloped cantilevered roof floated over heavy, soaring brick columns and an oriental-detailed frieze.  It turned out that it had once been the personal home of Henry C. Trost, the same architect who designed the Bassett Tower where Marci and I were currently staying.  Completed in 1909, it is a masterpiece.  After a couple of years of walking by stunned by the subtle beauty, I would coincidently became friends with the son of the owner.  I always secretly wished to be invited for a look inside, but that chance never came until this trip.  Robert had inherited his father's home and I finally got to see inside.   It did not disappoint, but I'll get to that later.

Technically, other than for a couple of months when I stayed with my friend George, I lived all four years in El Paso in Sunset Heights.  However, as Mesa Street is on the other side of the hill, facing away from Mexico and the sunset, although views were still spectacular, it never quite felt like I was still in that historic neighborhood known for its large mansions, views into Mexico, and famous residents such as Pancho Villa.  Rather, it felt like I lived adjacent to the neighborhood and could still easily venture into its magic.

Whereas in that first apartment I felt I was there in the center of it all.  Across the street was an empty lot.  Concrete steps led up to a rock outcropping covered with broken glass.  There must have been a house there at one time.  Sometimes, in my mind, I'm still standing there.  It's sunset.  The sky behind the Juarez Mountains is tinged tangerine.  The dusty hills of Fanja Del Rio are muted to a soft, gray-blue and speckled with the first few luminated lights of evening.  A thin horizontal cloud of smoke spreads out from a dump above the houses.  The smokestack of ASARCO is silhouetted against a reddening sky, and the river blazes back a golden reflection.  Directly below me, I-10 hums with fervent activity, white lights in one direction, red in the other, as a train rattles just beyond it, between the freeway and the river.  I stand amazed.  

Sometimes, after all these years, in my mind I find myself still standing there, taking it all in, wondering what it all means to me--this line between two nations.  I wonder how to get it all down into words.  I never quite figure it out, but I also never quite give up either.

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 60. A Dog Barks, an Old Man Sings "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"

I still remember the day that launched me towards El Paso.  It was late afternoon.  I remember it being in the summer, but it could have been spring.  In Texas heat hits early.  I sat on a picnic bench near a pond at the apartment complex of one of my professors.  There was a weeping willow down by the water, and its leaves glistened in the late afternoon sunlight as its long stringy arms swayed in the warm breeze. 

His last name was Cohen.  I don't remember his first.  After I'd requested to see him, he asked me to drop by and talk about an assignment I'd written for his modern poetry class.  He'd given me a choice: redo it or fail the class.  I was hoping for a third option, and that is why I was there.

The class had been given an assignment to write a one page definition of modern poetry.  Instead, I'd written an eight-page fictional account that began like this:  

As an experiment in aesthetic, I hammered myself down to my hometown.  My goal was to understand effect, what makes grade grade--you know--the texture of a line lick-able.

In the exposition of the narrative, I (the protagonist) went to the library and dug up some quotes about modernism, including, "The world in which modern poetry grew up in was neither Christian nor moral; and poetry in our age has felt little able to rely on any structure of belief outside itself" (Hough).

Not willing to equate modern poetry as simply a mirror of the banality of life, I set off on an adventure to prove that modernism is "a way of seeing, a way of making words lick-able, touch-able".  I wondered, "What makes a word so hard you can kill with it?  What makes a word nibble so softly, it tickles you like cold cream on hot skin?"  And then I set off for my hometown where, in the dead of winter, I nailed myself to the gravel road that leads to the cemetery.  

From the eight-foot-tall plate-glass windows of my parents home, I watched the snow cake on the hills above.  I turned inside, anticipating my mother's reaction when I told here I was going to nail myself to Cemetery Road.  

 "What?  Why?  You'll get a cold.  No, you'll die of cold!"

Determined, I went ahead with my plan, riding an ATV over to the cemetery in the dead of winter:

Then, just before the city limits, where the ice-packed road ends and the salted, black one begins, at first grainy like pepper, then slick like obsidian, I stopped cold.  I got off, walked to the back of the ATV, it's cherry red metal blue, reflecting the winter sky.  I attempted to unlatch the black rubber straps on the glove box without taking off my gloves.  It didn't work.  My skin was exposed as I drew out a steel hammer, metallic blue in in the winter light, along with two large tent stakes and two leather bands with silver rings attached.

Next, I walked to the center of the road, my big black boots sounding like slowed-down jackhammers on the metal ice.  I crouched down, so as not to slide and break my back, and laid myself down on the frozen road, hammer in one hand, straps and tent stakes in the other.  I slid the glove on the left hand, wrapped it in the leather strap, and turning on my side, hammered the stake through the attached silver ring.  I decided one secure arm was enough for effect, put the hammer down, and relaxed.

Looking up, the sky was so gray it was blue, and so cold,  it seemed to crack.  Bits of glassy ice fell to the earth and pelted me in the face, scarring it hot.  A quotation from Dickinson came to mind:

"If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.  If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.  These are the only ways, I know it.  Is there any other way? (Dickinson).

I'm glad to say that I'm not that intense, and that after five minutes of being strapped to an ice sheet, I quickly decided I could sit by a fire and enjoy poetry that didn't make me "feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off".  But, I did learn that modern poetry, is for me, undefinable.  It just is.  Some words grab, some don't, and it's not the word itself, but the surroundings, the words that neighbor the word, and the relationship between them.  Beyond that, I can't define modernism.

Professor Cohen had written something like, "Very amusing and well-written; now do the assignment as assigned or fail the class."

I, so stubborn back then, sat, watching sunlight glaze a weeping willow as I waited to make my argument against redoing the assignment.

He came down the grassy hill wearing Bermuda shorts and a dark green t-shirt.  He had dark wavy hair, glasses, and a thick, well-trimmed mustache.  I normally notice things, not people, so I'm not sure why this memory is so vivid.  Perhaps some part of me knew my life was about to change. Perhaps without me knowing it, my mind was savoring this volta in my life.  It has remained the pivotal moment between yearning to be a writer and becoming one.

He sat down on the picnic table and we talked.

Basically, it came down to this.  He saw that it was his job was to teach me to write literary criticism well.  I, on the other hand, saw that it was my job to learn to be a writer, not a critic.  He said I was probably at the wrong school then.  

And then he did the most amazing thing.  He said, "Drop my class, and go chase your dream."  He even provided me a route forward, suggesting the writing program at the University of Texas at El Paso as my entry into that world.

And that was that.  From that moment forward, I was no longer a literature major.  I was a writer.  I was no longer living in Dallas (at least not mentally).  Instead, I was headed for El Paso, right across the river from the corner of Calle 16 de Septembre and Ugarte which had so awakened my senses on a trip to Juarez not long before.  Sitting there, it seemed so right.  

The other night I had a dream.   I don't remember all of it, but in it, Marci and I lived in an apartment complex.  Our dog barked each morning and woke me up.  It aggravated the hell out of me, but when I got up to let him outside, I'd hear the most amazing rendition of George Harrison's "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".  I'd look outside, and there on a balcony across the road, in the blue light of early dawn, was this old man with his guitar serenading the sleeping city.  His voice was thin, crackly, almost broken.  But the emotion it carried was thick, black and full-bodied.  It was so serenely beautiful.  On mornings our dog didn't bark, I'd sleep in and miss it altogether.

The artist's job is to be awake, to be singing, no matter what the world is doing.  I knew that well when I roamed the streets and calles of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico.  I'm not sure I always know it now.  But with this book, I'm at least sliding the glass door open and walking out onto the balcony.

References

Dickension, Emily. Selected Letters. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

 

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 59. To Touch Ground Again in a Place I Spent So Much Time as an Outsider Looking In

Plaza Hotel from San Jacinto Plaza, Downtown El Paso

Travel Date:  September 13, 2018

The road into El Paso this time was much less bedazzling.  We entered the valley around 3:00, not a spectacular time of the day as far as light goes.  We stopped at a rest area just east of Fabens, and I got out to stretch in an unwelcoming heat.  Texas this trip had been unusually green, even the desert areas, such as the Davis Mountains.  However, we'd crossed some magic line and were now in the drought-ravished West we'd left behind in Utah and Colorado.  The creosote bushes had thin, waxy leaves that seemed curled in on themselves.  I was hot, tired, and as excited as I was to see El Paso once again, part of me wanted to turn back and head towards the verdant, cicada-humming Hill Country.  All summer long we'd experienced excruciating drought and raging forest fires that created smoke filled skies.  I wasn't sure I wanted to leave the almost tropical green of Texas this year behind.  However, one thing you always do on vacation is move forward.  You have to.  There are set start and end dates, and on my road trips anyway, there's a lot of ground to cover.  Reluctantly, I got back into the car and we headed into the West, that part of the country I once bragged about so often.  I eagerly agreed with Jim Morrison's stupid rhyme:  "The West / is the best."   It's harder to say that now.  Climate change is so blatantly real in the West.  It's impossible to pretend things are as they once were.  In a place where distance once took on so much meaning--mountain ranges often clearly visible eighty to one hundred miles away--it is incredibly disheartening to view that same world through smokey, dusty skies in the summer and smog in the winter.  I think I almost prefer to be east of the Rockies now, where the environmental devastation isn't as routinely obvious. I stay where I'm at because I have land and trees, and I'm determined to do my best to make my inheritance support as much wildlife as possible in these times of shrinking natural habitat, even through my efforts feel painstakingly futile during the long, unnaturally hot summers.

This trip had been a great escape from being a caretaker of 90 acres.  Now, we'd entered drought again, and I had this feeling similar to returning home to a house full of disease.  It may bring sadness being there, but it's still home, filled with ones you love.  You accept the love and the sadness as one.  That is how it is living out West in these latter days.  Sorrow, love and loss all mixed together--as you cling to memories of alpine summer days in cool, green forests while in reality viewing acres and acres of drought-ravished, bark-beetle devastated spruce dying before your eyes.

I got back in the car, grudgingly accepting the new reality, and off we went to visit my past.

. . . . .

My mood picked up as we entered the city and passed sights once so familiar to me.  El Paso is an amazingly unique city even discounting its location across the boarder from Juarez, Mexico.  It was built at the south end of the Franklin Mountains, and as the city grew, it wrapped itself around both ends, so now there are two branches, like butterfly wings, spreading out from the southern tip of the range.  It's a lopsided butterfly to be sure, as the eastern sprawl is far more expansive, but it's a butterfly all the same.  I lived on the west side of the range while my friend George lived on the east.  I spent a lot of hours driving back and fourth along I-10 passing the same street names and sites we passed now:  George Dieter, Lee Trevino, Yarbrough, and Cielo Vista Mall.  I was amazed the mall still stood and looked very busy as malls most places are now empty shells ready to be demolished or already wiped out for shopping centers or high rise office complexes.  Little did I know I was flying past the soon-to-be memorial sight of a mass shooting created by the hateful, divisive rhetoric of our president.  I was just glad to see the mall still there because when you return home to a place you always desire it to be exactly as you left it, for it to match the nostalgic views in your mind.  So far, El Paso had that wonderful glow of yesteryear, and I was quite enjoying myself.

We found our hotel downtown, which was the delightful Aloft located in the renovated Bassett Tower, a historically significant building designed by the notable architect Henry Trost, whose work is often compared to that of Frank Lloyd Wright, although personally, I often find it to be superior.  We are normally Super 8 or Motel 6 travelers.  However, our downtown, sky high room in this trendy chain of the jet-set crowd was only $89, and as Motel 6 was almost as much, it seemed like a good idea to spend the extra $15 and lodge like those-who-matter rather than feel like the poor peons we normally happily settle for because in the big, grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter.  I would never willingly fork out good money for luxury, but if they are going to give it to me for almost the same price as poverty, then, of course, I'd have to be a fool to pass it by. 

After leaving the hotel and driving around, for some reason that I can't remember, I had to have internet to contact Bobby Byrd, a mentor of mine.  The one and only downside to staying at the Aloft is the valet parking, and so I didn't want to head back to the room.  After driving around downtown for a while and seeing that many of the everyday eating establishments, Burger King and the like, no longer existed, I drove over to the library to use the internet and after some difficulties with my laptop starting up, I got Bobby's number.  It would be a while before he and Lee could meet us, and so we had some time to kill.  No problem.  

I once knew downtown El Paso far better than the back of my hand.  I only lived a few blocks away, and I spent every night either in Juarez or here.  For a while I also worked downtown.  It was my home and it was good to be back.  We left the car at the library and walked down to San Jacinto Plaza where long ago I spent many, many hours just sitting in the park, watching the ever-changing light and shadow play with the old masonry buildings as I listened to the preachers predict the fiery end of times.  I'd watch the buses pull in and out around the edges of the plaza and people watch until I started to drift off, and then I'd get up and move to another part of the city to avoid getting pick-pocketed during my slumbers.  Why I never just sat and wrote, I don't know.  I've always been somewhat intimidated with writing about where I currently reside.  I'm afraid I'll get it wrong, bring dishonor to its inhabitants.  Time and distance seems to be a necessary ingredient.  It's not that I'm afraid of getting lynched for something I write or anything like that.  I'm not published enough to worry about such stuff.  No, I worry that in over trying to get down the essence of a place, I'll miss it altogether.  Place matters.  Culture matters.  Visitors and new arrivals see the community through stereotyped eyes.   It takes time not only in the community, but also away from the community, to honor a people and a place the way they should be.  Even then, I'm not sure it can be done well unless you are part of the particular culture you're covering.  At least that is my fear.  So, although I loved Juarez, I have written very little about it.  I'm afraid I'll get far too much wrong.  I also loved living on the Navajo Nation, but as I have the same fears, I've written so little about there also.  You see, being a Mormon, I know just how wrong outsiders looking in on a culture often get it even when they have the best of intentions.  It's just hard to write about something you didn't absorb through your pores growing up.  Hispanic America is best written by Hispanics and the Navajo Nation is best documented by Navajoes.  I don't know why I'm so drawn to places I can't really understand, but it has always been that way.  I have a feeling that if I ever write a book that matters, it will be about here, Dry Creek, this inheritance I know as well as I know my own soul, if not better.  But I'm not ready yet, and so for now I'll travel, and get down as best I can places that I don't really understand.

It felt good to walk the short distance from the library to the plaza, to touch ground again in a place I spent so much time as an outsider looking in on a world I couldn't begin to comprehend.

  

The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 58. On the corner of Calle 16 de Septembre and Ugarte Long Ago

Corner of Calle 16 de Septembre and Ugarte, Juarez Mexico

I first entered the lower valley of El Paso long ago in the predawn.  It was the late 80s, and I was on my way to Copper Canyon or Barrancas del Cobre, Mexico.  I had been dreaming about the trip for months. I had a guidebook, and I had read each page of that section over and over again with a mixture of fear and excitement.  Other than paying 50 cents for a canoe ride to Boquillas from Big Bend National Park, I'd never been to Mexico, and I would be traveling alone.   I wanted it that way.  This would be a new, raw experience, an adventure into the unknown--my walkabout, a term I'd learned about through my favorite band, the Fixx.  I wanted to be able to absorb and write the experience uninterrupted as I encountered it.   What made me think I was qualified for that, I don't know.  I just knew I wanted to enter that rugged, unfamiliar landscape alone:

Walk about the rock
It may give you a few answers
Don't lie about the rock
Walk about the rock
It gives me all the answers
Don't lie about the rock

Rock I knew.  I'm from Utah.  Sandstone monoliths and craggy canyons were not unfamiliar.  But Mexico, that blank space on US maps below Texas, called to me like some uncharted frontier.  Why?  I don't know.  Dream time.  Something unknown that could perhaps provide either escape or answers to that riddle, I why? / Why I? (as one of my professors had worded it).    What Mexico had to do with knowing my place in the universe, I don't know.  I guess it's no different than generations of Americans who have backpacked across Europe in search of who they are.  There is something essential about crossing into the unknown to find ourselves.  At least that is the impulse of youth.  For some, it's Europe.  For others, drugs.  For some, a combination of both.  For me, it seemed glimpsing Barrancas del Cobre might possibly be enough, and certainly not as unnerving as an acid trip.  I've always been driven to experience life, but I've never been driven to dangle a leg over the edge.  I want to experience vertigo, but I want a handrail to hold on to.  This was to be my short, safe, structured journey into the unknown.  

I can't remember if I drove through the night from Dallas or if I camped at Monohans Sand Hills.  I do remember I could see the jagged mountains around Van Horn in the early predawn.  I remember also a jagged outline at Sierra Blanca.  Then there was almost a canyon--the freeway curved a bit, this way and that way--and then the world opened up, the lights of El Paso / Juarez spread across the valley floor like a galaxy.  Near by, a thin arm of scattered stars swept by along the river.  Far up ahead, I could see the hot white core.  The sky behind me lightened, and slowly the Franklin and Juarez mountains were tinged in that predawn pink that occurs right before the sun tops the horizon in the east.  Somewhere around what I think was probably Fabens, I pulled over at a truck stop.  It sat on a slight bluff before the freeway dropped off an alluvial fan into the valley.  I remember I wanted to savor the moment.  I bought a chocolate milk and a doughnut and sat on the trunk of my car and watched the sunlight hit those mountains for the first time.  I even thought I could see the border.  There was a line.  On one side most of the city lights were bright white, and on the other side they were a softer yellow.  The pink climbed down the peaks, moving forward across the valley floor, and then the ranges exploded in a warm golden light as the sun peaked over the horizon behind me.  It was glorious.  There is nothing like seeing a desert range blasted by first sunlight.  Desert landscapes absolutely glisten in the morning.  That I already knew from my trips to the Davis and Guadalupe Mountains.  The Chihuahua desert was built to be viewed at low sun angles.  The golden grasses, cacti and yucca glow; rocky cliffs throw great shadows received by deep canyons.  It is stark.  Bold.  Blazingly beautiful.

In my handy guidebook I'd read that the safest place to leave your car on this side of the border was in the parking garage across the street from the courthouse.  So, that's what I did.  By the time I exited the shade and hit the streets of El Paso, the sun was fierce.  I'd never experienced such intense light.  I later lived in El Paso for four years, but I never did get used to that morning sunlight.  Even in the winter it feels like it will burn your face off.  It must have to do with the dry air, although I spent summers in Reno as a kid, which is just as dry, and I never experienced anything like it there.  I don't know what it is, but it's connected with the angle of the sun because in the winter, if I remember right, it occurs between 9:00 and 10:00.  Summers, it's more like 7:00 to 8:00.  I was in awe, shielding my eyes, as I stumbled through the grid of streets squinting at old brick and brightly painted concrete block buildings, a steeple of an old church sticking up now and then into that hot white sky.

I crossed the border at the Stanton Street bridge.  I still remember the anxious anticipation I felt as I slipped my coins in the slotted window and headed down a concrete sidewalk to a bridge that spanned a river and two nations.  A stream of vehicles ahead shot back intense light.  Just beyond the flags at the border, an abuela leaned against the concrete wall of the bridge, her long dress pooled around her, while her two nietas worked the cars, holding up boxes of gum and yelling, "chicles, chicles," as they moved in and out of the stop and go traffic, smiling grandly, ponytails bouncing behind them.

And then I was  headed down the other side of the bridge.  Juarez here isn't as immediate as it is crossing the Santa Fe Street bridge.  There is some open space, a few wide sizzling parking lots, and then, after crossing a wide street paralleling the border, you enter blocks of low dentists offices.  It took a few blocks to enter the cozy congested busyness that is Juarez.  I was looking for what I remember now as the Hotel Juarez.  According to my guide book it had the cheap rates ($12, if I remember right), and yet was still reasonably clean.

I'm not sure if I have the name right, but whatever the name, I remember it was a small, two-story motel, and next door was a military institution.  The men in service wore camouflage uniforms and marched up and down the street in groups of around six.  As I'd been told since I was a little kid that in Mexico you are guilty until proven innocent, the military presence made me quite nervous.  In my mind, I was now all alone in some place akin to Nazi Germany.  I entered the hotel as quickly as possible and took the room without any question simply because I wanted to get off the street until the soldiers were gone.

So, I checked in.  I think I remember being taken to my room.  It was on the second floor.  It was small but clean.  I was exhausted from driving most of the night.  The way I remember it, I opened up the window, turned on the ceiling fan and fell asleep on a thin, white bedspread.  Perhaps I dreamed of gas chambers and tall chimneys where ash spewed out and floated across the city, blanketing the roads with a thick, gray silent hush.  Perhaps I did not.  I do know I slept from lack of sleep not from peace of mind.

Towards sunset, I woke up rested, but hot and sweaty.  I decided to take a shower.  The bathroom was small with a white porcelain sink from the 50s.  The toilet had some hard water stains, but other than that seemed clean.  The shower was the first solid sign this room was not rented in the States.  When I turned on the water, the pressure was low, and there was definitely an odor.  Probably just minerals, well water, but still it had a smell other than the normal U.S.A. chlorine.  It was somewhat difficult to wash my hair under such a small stream of water, but I got the job done.

Fresh and clean, I looked out the window at the hard light and deep shadows thrown on the buildings across the street.  I looked down to the sidewalk below; the soldiers were gone, and so I decided it was safe to hit the streets and see just what this other town, this other nation, had to offer.

That this place was nothing like the United States hit me immediately.  As I followed Avenue Lerdo south, the street tightened, the buildings rose from mostly single-story to mostly three and four stories, and the traffic increased.  Although there were no high-rises, it was denser than any city I'd experienced, and I lived in Dallas.  Old Spanish mission-style adobe buildings with peeling pink plaster stood next to bare-bones European modernism with horizontal runs of black ribbon windows, which stood next to cheap concrete-block, build-it-yourself enterprises painted the most fantastic colors--orange, hot pink, bright yellow, and even purple.  Letters were everywhere:  Copias, Fotos, Comidas y Platillos Variados, Caldos Res / Pollo, SALIDAS DIARIAS A.  Amazing.  Bold colors.  Bold print.  Clearly screaming, Come fork out your money! but in a language I could only occasionally understand.

Eventually, I passed Plaza de Torez, the bullfighting ring, a dingy, stained concrete stadium that looked far less stable than the 1,900 year old Colosseum in Rome.  From there I jogged my way over towards where I later learned the cathedral was, and watched a city bus almost disappear before my eyes in the biggest, wettest pot hole I'd ever seen.  I hadn't been aware that it rained, but it must have.  It was an astonishingly busy corner, and this great narrow side street angled off at a 30 degree angle boasting hole in the wall diners with bright signs announcing pollo asado y rostizado or carnes aves y mariscos.  I was dazed and amazed by all the movement and color.  I would later learn that I was on the corner of Calle 16 de Septembre and Ugarte, which would remain my favorite corner in Juarez the four years I lived in El Paso.

I don't remember what all I did.  I do remember I felt oddly at home standing on that corner all alone in a country not my own, completely isolated from the language, the history, the culture.  The next morning, I was supposed to catch a bus to Chihuahua where I'd board the train to Copper Canyon.  I never did.  I felt I was where I needed to be.  I walked many hours that night, and when I returned to the hotel, I booked another night.  The next day, I walked some more.

Later, I moved to El Paso, and walked that great city spread across three states and two nations for four more years.  It's now been 25 years since I left, and yet often in my mind, I'm still walking there.  I don't know why.

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.