Laredo and Langtry

Pictures soon...

It’s 7am and the thermometer says it’s 20 degrees. There is nothing between me and the horizon to block the view of the warming. Even in these few seconds the color has changed, but the sun has not appeared yet, just the prelude. It can’t be more than 55 degrees inside our Cottage. This little traveling convenience is certainly not designed to be used in this kind of weather. It doesn’t take an open candle flame to tell you the wind is blowing through here as if it were a screened porch. We’re in Del Rio, TX. 7:11, and there’s the sun.

Brownsville looked, smelled and felt like a different place from here, and all the places we’ve passed getting here from there are different, too. The land is much more open, more cattle and junk cars. ‘Going to town’ means an hour’s drive from any ranch. I wonder about kids and getting to school; all these ranchers can’t possibly home school. Besides, I’m not sure if anyone actually lives on the ranches. About three times an hour I see a fancy entrance, with the name of the ranch shaped in the wrought iron arches overhead, always a Spanish title, gates firmly locked. There is no sign of a house, but it could be hidden behind the low-growing mesquite trees. We passed through Carrizo Springs, with a large pecan grove, a tiny town hall, some chained dogs and more junk cars, but I saw no people. I did see a small store/gas station, a couple of trucks parked outside, so there is life here.

This is serious Border Patrol territory, beginning at Boca Chica in Brownsville. We’re following the Rio Grande, but we can’t see it. There must be some law that says the highway has to be a certain distance from the border. There is a cattle fence on both sides of the highway, many days worth of fencing. This is not the Big Serious Fence we saw outside Brownsville, but a minor nuisance to people trying to cross. It might actually be a cattle fence. I saw a Border Patrol SUV driving beside the fence, dragging tractor tires chained together. Then, later I saw another, on the opposite side of the road, both driving along the cattle fence. Erasing foot prints? Shrub control? We’ve been stopped several times, but they haven’t asked for our passport. Guess with our accents, and dragging the Cottage, we’re not suspected of being illegal or hauling something illegal. One agent even laughed. Once. These folks are serious. I hope they were out in force last night, just in case The Illegals were out there. Anyone caught in last night’s temps would be dead without proper clothes.

There are many more old mobile homes now, and a few tarpaper shacks, but the surprise is a few white brick McMansions scattered in the hills. The McMansions are all on the border side of the road, set far back from the asphalt strip. There is no view, only a slight elevation now. The map shows just a few roads, mostly the black and gray ones, and the smallest town size symbols mark a few crossroads. Counties with names like Zavala, Maverick, Zapata that are half the size of a small state. Road rules are easy here: whatever you do is OK. A few big trucks are heading to this outback area, and they pass with ease, there is so little traffic. I’m watching; other drivers just drive on the shoulder of the road to allow faster movers to get by them more easily. The road surface is good, no disjointed bouncing like I-10 causes. Little taco stands appear anywhere there might be people around, some shuttered , and some looking like an oasis in the desert, with trucks pointed in to them from all directions. We have stopped at a few, to have a quick lunch. A carne asada taco stand will always make a good lunch, and if we are in luck, there will be caldo de res (beef soup), too. The tortillas are all good, and some are even made by hand.

There are two places to buy groceries in TX: WalMart and HEB. There is no other grocery store, even in the cities. The HEB owner is also the owner of the lighthouse at Port Aransas, infamous for keeping it completely private. The HEB is a big, nice store, with lots of produce, some of the citrus is local. I still haven’t seen the citrus orchards reputed to be in the RGV, they must be closer to the river.

There are International Bridges crossing the river at every little town. In Laredo, there are four: one for pedestrians only; one for pedestrian and car traffic; and two for commercial truck traffic. We paid $2 to park in a large gravel lot, and joined the crowds of retired Winter Texans, shopping bags in hand, to cross the border. It cost us a quarter apiece. We walked across the border in Progresso, to Nuevo Progresso, where there is one bridge for all the traffic. This is our third border town experience, and they are all very different from any town further south of the border. And, all three of the border towns have a vastly different personality from each other. Stuart and I agreed that in the Border Town Pleasantness ranking, Nogales is the most pleasant, Nuevo Progresso is nice, and Ciudad Juarez is a farfar third. Nogales is much larger than Nuevo Progresso, part of the ranking relates to the number of restaurants and tourist shops, and includes the cleanliness, feeling of safety and sleaze factor. Juarez is dirty, litter is everywhere. The restaurants are dark and filled with local drunks, the shopping (the reason most Americans go to a border town) is cramped hovels with high pressure men with gold-toothed smiles promising that this is the BEST price. Nuevo Progresso is very clean, no litter at all, the restaurants are small and pleasant with the kitchen right up front, there is some shopping here, and it’s small scale. The street vendors appear to be happy, not high pressuring passers-by to buy pirated dvds. The draw here is apparently dentists, they are probably half the tenants in the two block town.

Nuevo Progresso, for the tourists, is one street wide, and about two blocks long. The very first door inside the Mexico border is a dentist, and almost every other door in that first block is either a dentist or pharmacy. The young men outside are hard-selling cheap Viagra to all the RWT who are shopping with determination. We randomly select a dentist, and Stuart made an appointment for less than an hour later to have his teeth cleaned. $20. We spent the time on the street, being politely assaulted by pirated DVD sellers, silver jewelry salemen and various bag sellers. Typical street scene. After the dentist’s appointment, we strolled beyond the tourist blocks, where Stuart got a haircut ($3) and I had the most wonderful pedicure ($10). Some other RWT happened in, and I found myself in the surprising role of interpreter between the young pedicurist and the tourists from ND. The young women offered us a hot drink while I had my feet in the lovely warm bath. Avena, oatmeal drink. Delicious! Milk, cinnamon, a little sugar and oatmeal, cooked in a crockpot.

Afterwards, we had lunch of sopa de camarones (shrimp soup), and did a little shopping in a big store with lots of brightly painted pottery. I had hoped to find a clay comale, of the sort that is used in the central and southern parts of the country, but no luck. Too far away, and not popular goods. I looked down a side street, to see what the non-tourist section looked like, and it was a typical, poor Mexican town. The streets are not paved, the bicycle cart vendors are stacked beside each other, selling everything from tacos and elotes to oranges and garlic. The tiny old women, in ill-fitting shoes walk silently with their hand out, hoping for a few coins. In other parts of the country, I know the older indigenous people don’t speak Spanish, but the native language. I don’t know anything about the indigenous people here, don’t know what language they might speak. As we crossed the bridge back to the States, bodiless arms appeared through the tiny slits in the concrete rails of the bridge, on the Mexico side, hands out and voices begging for coins. On the Mexican side of the bridge, there is a screen completely blocking both the view and physical access, we can see neither the river bank or the people belonging to the begging hands.

There is such sharp contrast, just 100 yards apart. On the US side of the river, everything is paved and has the air of accomplishment, even if the thing is held together with duct tape and baling wire. A car or truck is a trophy, and is likely to have shiny, pricey rims on the tires, even if the rest of the vehicle is an assemblage of various vehicles. On the Mexican side of the river, there is a feeling of dust, desperation and watered-down shoe polish. The young women all wear shoes that make a noise when they walk, and wear ‘nice’ clothes. The young men are all clean and neat, hair combed back, no bagging britches in sight here. Someone is constantly sweeping the sidewalk, the inside of the open shops are dusty and a forgotten inventory of old shirts, broken brooms and plastic bags filled with who-knows-what.

In the States, you can be sure that the law will take care of you, in Mexico, you can be afraid that you don’t have enough money to pay the law to take care of you. Even a brief study of Mexican history, post-Columbian, will show that bribery is how the government has been run for many generations. Don’t know about now, but there is so much desperation to come across that river, I have to wonder. The Wall here is a hotly discussed topic. I’ll just say that it makes little sense to me to spend millions of dollars to keep people from coming here. There are other ways to help our fellow humans have enough food to eat.

Did I tell about our visit to the Resaca de Palma State Park? It’s on Carmen road, on the northwest of Brownsville. Our directions told us to turn on Carmen Road, but what we thought was Carmen road was a very badly rutted dirt road through a field. We passed it twice before driving down it, and sure enough, we ended up at the State Park. We’d come in by the back way. It was a cold day, but we put on our wool hats and gloves and headed out to see some birds. It’s a new park, only two year old, and we were instructed to hop on the open-air wagon towed by a park truck, and were driven to the trail of our choice. We spied several different water birds, and had a nice walk through the Texas Ebony forest before being picked up by the trolley. Our driver stopped a couple of times to point out things of interest: the wild pigs tearing up the roadside and the beetles that chew off limbs of a specific tree in their mating frenzy. Afterwards, chilled thoroughly, we had lunch at Kiki’s Parillada, with enough Mexican barbeque to take home for dinner. Good tortillas, too.

Another day on the road, we spent the night in Laredo, at a pretty state park on Lago Blanco, White Lake. It’s windy and cold, there was a pretty sunset over the lake. The thermometer read 28 degrees at 8am.

We saddled up, headed west, driving through the Rio Grande Valley, or The Valley. We still see nothing of the citrus groves I’d read about, they must be away from the highway. From here, the terrain changed almost imperceptibly, from dense population and heavy Spanish-speaking influence, to ranches with Spanish names, to ranches with no names and no signs of people at all. We spent a veryvery cold night in Del Rio, on the river. Stuart brought our water hose inside. There are no trees here in the high desert to break the wind. For a while we didn’t have any hot water, the wind was strong enough to blow just enough gas into the Cottage to cause the alarm to go off. Today, we drove across the Pecos River, a major tributary of the Rio Grande, and through gently rolling hills of brush and not much else. This is the definition of ‘you can see forever’. From a slight ridge, you can see the same brush and rocks, well, forever in every direction. This is cattle country, and we see a few cattle in the brush. What do they eat, in this dry, rocky country? The ridges got higher, and soon we are in canyon territory, and the view gets more dramatic.

This territory is famous in recent history for being the joining point of the Union Pacific railroad in 1882, connecting New Orleans with California. If you remember your American history, you’ll also remember this is the place of total lawlessness, forced Chinese labor and Judge Roy Bean. Yep, we find ourselves in Langtry, TX, at the Jersey Lilley (sic) saloon and courtroom. The original buildings are lovingly restored and displayed by the TX highway department, free admission. The saloon is much smaller than I imagined it would be. You know, he never met Miss Lily. She finally visited the town about 10 months after the good Judge died. The population of the town is now 29, and if you look carefully in the desert, you can see some stone foundations of the canvas houses from more 150 years ago. Langtry was a railroad sponsored town, and Judge Bean was not really a judge, but he managed to create order. This final section of the railroad was a feat to be admired, this is tough geography for a train to negotiate. The more than 300 foot drop from the top of the cliff to the Pecos River required the tracks to take a circuitous route to cross. The train is still an important mode of transportation, and one that makes far more sense than trucking. Yesterday, we counted 82 cars, containers stacked two high on the cars, just on one train.

Lunch in Sanderson, infamous for being the ‘town too mean for Bean’. This almost-ghost town, population 861, goes down in the history books with the story of the saloon keeper who poisoned Roy Bean’s whiskey barrels with kerosene when he tried to set up shop there. The bank was also robbed by the Wild Bunch, and we saw the photo of the unlucky bandits responsible for the Last Great Train Robbery in the West. In the photo, the dead bandits were being held upright by the men who shot them, sort of trophyish. Sanderson is also the Cactus Capital of Texas. Hey, hold on anyway you can.
We spent the night in Marathon, population 455, one of two who found our way to this tiny crossroads. Marathon is one of the two crossroads that can take you to the Big Bend National Park. This is beautiful country, in a stark, dry way. The mountain ridges are on three sides, and there is nothing between us and them. The train track runs right beside our campsight, but a town could have never been born out here if it were not for the railroad. The sunset gave us nice colors on the hillsides to the east and the temps fall dramatically after dark. The previous night low was 8 degrees, and the little fountain by the office was still frozen at 3pm, when we arrived.

My sinus irritation is showing signs of improving, today I can get a little more air. Stuart’s has moved to a cough, but not too bad. We’re staying put today, my goal is to stretch, write a few postcards and maybe take a walk in the desert. If the temps get a little warmer.