Like most people from the North who haven’t traveled farther south than Virginia (maybe that’s just me?), everything here feels foreign (except the feeling of not speaking the correct language. I don’t really speak French OR Spanish, so I’m used to being confused by background conversations). The farther west we traveled, the more the landscape became dry and flat, its only punctuation the mountain ranges dotting the horizon. Fences penned in flocks of animals everywhere, though they hardly seemed in a hurry to leave with way. There was a strange slow feeling that overcame everything, the only movement from the dust clouds.
Goats in the Texas plains....
New Mexico from a car
The native plants will kill you
The plants, unless they are cacti, are browns, despite it being summer weather, signs on the road warn against dust storms, and, oh yea, border patrol sets up random check points within the US. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that, when their version of “checking” the cars consists of glancing at the inhabitant, they’re just looking for anyone who looks a little too “Mexican”. At first I was shocked, then I remembered that Arizona had set the trend for personally violating laws based mostly on race, so I shouldn’t be terribly shocked New Mexico was on that ball. Seriously, though, it felt like every 10 cars on the highway was a border patrol SUV, just….patroling. Or on the way to patrol.
This is the closest I’ve been to Mexico, and I have to admit I had no real concept of how long the US hugs the Mexican border. You can, at parts, actually see THE FENCE they built. It’s a pretty serious fence, too. The amount of money they spend on building fences and patrolling the borders and convincing people that Mexico is the cause of all economic woe could be used on….well, just about anything else.
Not much else can really be said about Arizona. There are some amazing mountains surrounding some towns that I can only imagine vacationing in. There is a lot to be said about amazing topography, but maybe they could have created towns that weren’t sprawling strip malls. The gallery we played at, Solar Culture, has such an amazing vibe to it. It’s at one calm and energized, and it was the perfect place to begin our tour with Sharon Von Ettan, who has a voice that can break hearts.
Phoenix was basically another sprawling mass. The palm trees, at least, were greener. But good god, what a sprawling, lame town.
On the way we hit not one but TWO different check points. The US is serious about Mexican border patrol, my god.
But there were sand dunes. It was like crawling through a Mojave, but outside of Yuma, Arizona.
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