![[Photo: Bhutanesque?]](utep.jpg)
Engineering Geniuses... Cultural Insensitivity... The Accidental Terrorist...
1999.03.18 THU
The next morning, it was raining pretty hard. I packed up my belongings, tore open a plastic bag so that it formed a flat sheet, and lay that sheet on top of my suitcase. My suitcase wasn't waterproof; I was using the sheet as a tarp. As I stepped outside, the wind blew the sheet around, but soon some water landed on it; the water weighted down the sheet, and the sheet lay down flat and acted as a proper cover, all as planned. I was an engineering genius.
It was about a mile from the motel to the bus station, mostly walking alongside the highway in the mud in the rain. Until now, I'd always been impressed with the ancient scientist who'd invented pottery. I'd thought it must have taken a clever person to think of using pieces of dirt to store things.
This walk changed my mind. Every time I picked up my foot, a good portion of dirt came up with it. The dirt was rich in clay and it clung to my shoes. The clay would fall from my foot before the foot again touched earth. Each clod so left behind was in the shape of a bowl or an ashtray. I was no longer so impressed by whoever had invented pottery. In a place like this, one could hardly help inventing pottery. I trudged through the rain, looking at the clumps of dirty snow falling from vehicles fresh down from the mountains.
I'd heard all kinds of horror stories about Greyhound bus rides, but Greyhound was still looking like my most straightforward way of travelling between cities in this region. There were little bus lines like the one I'd used to get to Alamogordo. There were little airlines. But I could spend a lot of time researching these things for very little payoff. I wanted to find out if Greyhound was really that bad.
The bus showed up, mostly empty. Some people trickled out, seizing this opportunity to smoke. They filed back on. I got on. I watched the road roll past. I watched the White Sands go past. I watched desert terrain go past. At Las Cruces, we went past a dry goods store having a liquidation sale. We went past more desert. I wondered what was supposed to be so hard about Greyhound travel.
I had a pretty easy time travelling on TNM&O, a subsidiary of Greyhound that handles lines in the Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma area. (It's called "TNM 'n' O", pronounced as if it were a traffic circle next to Tianamen Square.) Buses were usually less than half-full, and people kept pretty quiet. Still, these were not long cross-country lines, and I was travelling mid-week. Later on, I'd try travelling on a bus which was part of a proper Greyhound line, and it would be much more crowded.
I was hoping to turn my Greyhound rides into a Life Experience, but they were really harmless.
The bus pulled into El Paso station. I hopped out and carried my bus past the San Francisco Grill, through downtown to the TraveLodge (which didn't have good sound insulation and the rumble of the highway was pretty loud the whole time, but that sort of noise helps me sleep), checked in, and headed out in search of dinner.
I'd consulted my travel guide. It said that El Paso was a great place for Mexican food, and listed some Mexican restaurants which it said were the best in town. One of them looked to be within easy walking distance.
I set out walking. I walked past a hospital, noticed a couple of white bike cops hassling a man who looked to be of Mexican descent. As I walked past, I saw the words on the cops' shirts: BORDER PATROL. In one of my less culturally sensitive musings, I wondered how much my health-care costs were being driven up by this hassling of cheap hospital labor.
I walked through the campus of UTEP. I'd read about its Bhutan-inspired architecture, but I didn't know where Bhutan was. Once I was on campus, it was obvious that Bhutan must be in the Himalayas. These distinctively shaped buildings on rocky hills evoked memories of photos of buildings in Nepal.
Photo: A couple of buildings on the UTEP campus, not taken 1999.03.18B
Close to campus, I went to Casa Juranda, the recommended restaurant. I had some bland spinach enchiladas. They were okay. But after all the hype, "okay" was not sufficient.
I'd come hundreds of miles out of my way to try this great Mexican food. And here I was eating bland spinach enchiladas. I'd had better spinach enchiladas in Berkeley. Not just spicier. More flavorful. I was so disappointed that I was starting to think in sentence fragments.
On my way, I'd noticed that restaurants didn't tend to post their menus or hours in a window--you pretty much had to enter and trust that they'd have something that you'd like. Since I was a vegetarian, I was worried that I'd stumble into some steakhouse and have to flee. Maybe coming here for the food hadn't been such a great idea.
1999.03.19 FRI
I had never been to Mexico before. I'd had opportunity to go to Tijuana, but didn't really want to go to a place like Tijuana. I was hoping that Juarez City would be a border town unlike Tijuana, shaped more by NAFTA than by the Navy. There's a strong military presence in Tijuana, but the closest thing to a military base in El Paso, as near as I could tell from my guidebook, was the Fort Bliss Museum Complex, an old army base that had been turned into displays of military history.
Looking at the AAA map of El Paso/Juarez that my dad had procured for me, I noticed that Fort Bliss looked very much like an active army base. The AAA guidebook (thanks, dad!) confirmed this. When I'd first flipped through the AAA guidebook to Texas, I'd snorted and put it aside. It didn't seem nearly as interesting as my West Texas guidebook. Now I was finding out that the West Texas guidebook, while interesting, was misleading.
I'd never been to Mexico. Even if Juarez City was likely to be some typical bordertown, I'd just go there early in the morning before the bars started opening.
When the Santa Fe Street bridge over the Rio Grande (and into Mexico) turned out to be, not on Santa Fe Street, but on El Paso Street, even then my will stayed strong. Even if this entire region was doing its best to misdirect tourists, I could still find my way to Mexico as long as the sun was shining.
And so I was on this USA-Mexico bridge at around 8:00 in the morning. There was plenty of foot and pickup-truck traffic. Most of it was heading into the USA. I wondered if this was why El Paso/Juarez City had a reputation as a border area affected by NAFTA. Were all these people, perhaps, commuters? That was kind of a neat idea.
My tourist instincts kicked in. I shook my camera out of my pocket, uncovered the lens, faced backwards towards the customs/immigration gate for cars.
My eyes nestled in the camera's back, I heard running steps, but couldn't see who was running. I drew my head back away from the camera, looked around. A man of Mexican descent who had been walking a few yards behind me had run forward so that now he was ahead of me. Now he resumed walking. I was puzzled as I watched his receding back.
I once again hoisted the camera, sighted backwards towards the gate. I paused. There was a pickup truck coming between me and the gate, blocking my view. As I looked through the view finder, I could see the driver and passenger in the pickup. The passenger noticed me (I was only a couple of meters away), looked frightened, covered his face.
It was only then that I figured it out. These people had been in the USA illegally. My photos of this area might be incriminating evidence. That guy had run past me so that I couldn't get a photo of his face. This guy was covering his face.
My carefree tourist antics were frightening these people. I felt kind of dizzy as I started to understand how a little camera, a cute little camera covered with penguin stickers, could take away someone's freedom, someone's livelihood.
I let the pickup roll past, quickly snapped a picture of the gate, and put the camera away.
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