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| In the middle of the day, El Paso is very bright. It's an intense, piercing kind of light and it feels like two very different worlds are butted against each other like sleeping drunks. In short, it seems like a place where you'd want to be very careful where you exit after the sun goes down. We've heard of people collecting cardboard boxes from department stores on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande to build houses on the Mexican side. They coat the finished structure with weather-proof paint to make it rain-proof and presumably to give it armor for the unrelenting Tex-Mex sun. We're not saying that's a bad thing. Just a sad thing since the folks in the cardboard houses probably work longer hours and do just as good of work as those on this side of the river. To the south the land is empty, rugged, and deceptively vast. There are huge open spaces and indifferent but forbidding ridges and mountains that would dehaydrate you before you reached their bases from navigable roads. For true war stories of the surreal west-Texas experience, write the Ranger himself, the veteran of a thousand psychic wars. |
