In the morning I headed down dirt roads through a desolate canyon towards the Mexican border. It was 114 degrees at the border, bright, dusty and bleak, and I didn’t encounter anyone besides a store clerk who sold me cold Topo Chico mineral water and some spicy peanuts. Driving along the border wall, I was grateful for my four-wheel drive truck, which could take me almost anywhere. Compared to the Best Western motels I often stayed in, or even to my single-person tent with its broken rain flap, I felt at ease, always, in my truck. It was my home, for now. I tried to keep it orderly, with only enough fetishes – a feather hanging from the rearview, a pinecone on the dash – to protect me from evil. But not so many that I became the leader of my own cult.
At one point, I passed two white and green Border Patrol trucks parked on the side of the road. About a mile further down I pulled over to sign in to my weekly group therapy appointment, that had gone online because of the virus. My phone opened to five other people in their various rooms, me in my truck. I turned my camera so they’d see a bit of the barren landscape as we discussed our fears, fantasies and families for an hour and a half. I did this once a week, no matter where I was. Now, I was about 30 miles from the nearest paved road staring at my phone screen when a Border Patrol officer rapped on my window. Fuck! I dropped my phone and fumbled for my mask.
I rolled my window down.
“Where are you headed?” he asked, his deep voice muffled by his own mask.
“El Paso,” I said.
“Where you coming from?”
“Marfa, then the border and now here. I just stopped for a Zoom meeting.”
“A what?
“Work call.”
“Are you an American?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He leaned in my back window and scanned the bags and cooler on the back seat.
“Ok, you’re free to go – or finish your call or whatever.”
Wow, I thought. He didn’t even ask for my ID.
I watched his truck in the rearview mirror as he pulled out. Then I saw my own face – sunburned, white hair, blue eyes, the wizened features of an old white guy. That’s privilege, I thought, pulling back on the highway.
“Gotta sign off,” I said to to the group, as I made my way along the border to El Paso.
I had not been in El Paso since I was 19 years old, but the downtown area didn’t seem to have changed. My room in the Gardner Hotel, built in 1922, right after the last pandemic, reminded me of my great grandmother’s house in Jewel City, Kansas: cast iron bed, ancient empty picture frames on the wall, no TV and no AC. My bed was draped with a brown quilt over brown patterned sheets. The window trim and baseboard also were brown. A noisy 1950s swamp cooler labored in the hallway to push slightly chilled air through the transom left open above my door. The fresh air would help keep the virus at bay. I loved the place.
The hotel’s literature suggested that the dark El Pasoan writer Cormac McCarthy loved it too -- he’d checked in a few times to write his novels. And John Dillinger used one of these rooms as a hide-out from the law. That first day I absentmindedly left my room without a mask and ran into a hotel housekeeper who backed away in fear. On the streets of El Paso, everyone was masked.
Isolation, fear and connection on the southern border, June, 2020