El Paso Escapades

Officers quarters with magnificent Davis Mountain scenery

Morning came quickly to Fort Davis, the rugged cliffs emerging from the darkness to shine in the Easter sunrise. They had an unexpected brilliance.

With a quick breakfast at the Fort Davis Soda Shoppe, we skipped ahead to one more site in Fort Davis –the military outpost that gave the town its name. Fort Davis National Historic Site sits in the shadow of several crappy outcroppings.

Fort Davis buildings are quite photogenic

Once an outpost on the San Antonio-El Paso Road that many took to California, it was abandoned during the Civil War then reoccupied to protect homesteaders from raids during the Indian Wars. One of the most intact forts of its day, many rooms had been restored to their post-Civil War looks.

The remnants of the San Antonio-El Paso Road crossed the park as a wide dirt path. Four hundred miles from San Antonio and 200 from El Paso, it was hard to imagine the conditions under which people traveled this road. The stagecoaches were at risk from Indian attack at any time.

I suppose that is why the U.S. Army built a fort every 100 miles along the road. For a wagon train, it might not be that far. But I could only imagine the tense days between forts.

Many of the buildings had their interiors restored, including a commissary, officer and enlisted quarters. The officers lived quite well out here, with porches opening onto the mountains and spacious rooms. The white-railed officer quarters were the centerpiece of the preserved fort.
At regular intervals a PA system blasted the horns calling soldiers to various morning duties.

Jeff Davis County Courthouse

Near the dry Limpia Creek, massive cottonwoods drooped dangerously and could lose giant branches or topple at any time; they had been roped off to keep people away. We only spent an hour at Fort Davis but could have spent much more exploring its preserved structures and hills (there would be no hiking since we were only 48 hours from Guadalupe Peak).

 Bidding a quick goodbye to Fort Davis and a number of sites we should have taken in (Overland Museum, we’ll come back just for skipping you), we followed Route 17 out of town to Marfa.
Essentially, we hopped from one county seat to the next. In both Fort Davis and Marfa, courthouse domes towered above everything but the water towers.

Presidio County Courthouse, Marfa

Because of the noontime sun, we would not be able to taken in the legendary Marfa Lights. Hopefully whoever generates the lights had the common sense to stay indoors the night before.

Marfa ran in a different direction than the rest of West Texas towns we visited. Boutiques advertised designer wares and art galleries touted major artists, including an Andy Warhol exhibit.  Not bad for a town of 2,000 people in the desert.

The upscale Hotel Paisano played on its connections to Giant; Rock Hudson, James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor stayed at the hotel during filming.

Full of marble, stained glass, fountains and mounted animal heads in the lobby, the hotel was a must-see. It was also the only thing open in Marfa on Easter Sunday. All the boutiques and galleries were shuttered, if only for Easter morning.

Hotel Paisano's Giant display

West of Marfa we entered a 70-mile zone of no services, just a few lanes in the desert and random business, like a zeppelin moored at an Air Force facility and hundreds of thousands of fruit-bearing trees south of Van Horn that we could not identify. Valentine contained the wreckage of a gas station and other retail stores, but its Catholic church was a hive of activity, unsurprising given the day.

Picking up I-10 at Van Horn, we followed the interstate straight into El Paso. The border was not as we envisioned. The green ribbon of Rio Grande broke across a broad plain that ended suddenly at soaring mountains not far into Mexico.

At the exit for Fort Hancock, Nancy reminded me of the town’s Shawshank Redemption connection. I stamped a few postcards, dashed off addresses and wrote nothing else. Who knows if they will ever arrive. We laughed about act for the next 30 miles of highway.

 The mountains I pegged as the Franklin Mountains that guarded El Paso were actually the range overlooking Juarez. Old but renovated and still glamorous, the hotel was just what we needed for a night in the city. When we started walking south on El Paso Street past an informal bazaar of street vendors and shops, neither of us anticipated crossing the border. Then the street ended at a bridge, the southern terminus of U. S. Route 62, which ran near my parents’ house in New Albany.

The mighty El Paso

We paid our fifty cents each and walked across, the only English-speakers crossing the concrete canal that funneled a mostly dry Rio Grande between El Paso and Juarez. 

Their border guards barely seemed to care. The merchants selling Chiclets and other wares inside the gate cared a lot more.

We spent barely two minutes in Juarez. Instantly targeted as easy marks, the gentlemen would not let up on their desire to take us to the bullfights. Juarez is poor, people struggle and I don't blame them for coming for us. Neither of us enjoyed it, but I tried to remain conscious of the poverty these people faced.

We turned back to the U.S., spending 15 minutes to pass U.S. customs for our 2-minute visit. We got change from a man who probably made more doing that than he could in one of Juarez's factories.

Walking back up to the hotel, we chuckled at our brief Mexican excursion. Really, it could not have been briefer, even if the tension ran thick. 

Downtown El Paso, border bridge in the background

Downtown El Paso grows quiet after 5 p.m. (except for the metal club on El Paso Street), so we had to explore. The only thing that wasn't quiet was the bridge back from Juarez. By 5 pm. traffic backed up and stayed that way until the late hours of Easter, starting again with rush hour at dawn. From our hotel window, the cars never seemed to move.

With downtown options limited, we decided to hit The Hoppy Monk, a beer bar near UTEP (University of Texas-El Paso) or something else fun nearby. 

We passed a bank building with a first-floor and spied a cat standing near the entrance. I insisted on circling to check him out. I shouldn’t have. When we pulled up close, the cat presented a face of urban misery. This went beyond just mangy, matted fur. His face had been striped in fresh gashes, and he moved with the stunned gait of an injured cat.

A fountain of flavors on The Hoppy Monk's patio

Maybe I was emotionally tired after our long days of vacationing, but I could not shake the confused, famished look of that poor beast.

We drove by that garage several times during our 24 hours in El Paso, never spying the cat again. We can hope it found a refuge to mend, but can never know for certain. Everyone loves their cute cat videos, but how easily we ignore the short, harsh outdoor life many cats endure.

The Hoppy Monk proved easy to find on Mesa Street. The beer menu featured a lot of Texas selections. I went with w Berliner Weisse from Houston's St. Arnold Brewery.

We drove a little on I-10 before the sun dipped beneath the mountains, casting some last patches of light on the Franklin Mountains. We ended our night under the dome – Camino Real had a Tiffany glass dome circa 1913 and a large bar beneath it.

The Dome Bar's dome

We set out early to find the H&H Coffee Shop and Car Wash, an El Paso breakfast institution.

Attached to a working car wash that operated since 1958, the 25-seat coffee shop served up some amazing Mexican cuisine. I could not skip one last stab at chorizo and eggs. The ladies behind the counter shredded pork, deep-fried chili peppers and prepared other local cuisine just feet away from us.

The intimacy of a place like H&H cannot be underappreciated. The original owners, the Haddad brothers, both took turns sitting at the counter. It was a neighborhood place first and foremost, with people popping in for breakfast and a group of women eating out near the wash stations. .

A few tourist stops later, El Paso International Airport beckoned. Glass walls in the concourse looked onto the Franklin Mountains, giving visitors one last taste of  West Texas scale.

Turning hard above the city, the aircraft gave those of us on its right side stellar views of the combined El Paso-Juarez region. Skies over the desert cooperated most of the way to San Antonio, which was much greener than anything we crossed in the previous five days.

Not long after takeoff, I used my amateur mapping skills to eyeball our location. With a blue afternoon and relatively no clouds, I could leap between the distant settlements in the Chihuahuan Desert. A good-sized reservoir gave us away.

Two nearby towns confirmed it when I followed them to a patch of adobe buildings with orange tile roofs and a smaller dash of deep blue. Thundering seven miles above the desert, I had found Balmorhea State Park and relished the chance to steal one more moment of bliss from perfect waters.

See you soon, West Texas (the top half or more of the shot is Juarez)