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My Better Border CHUCK TAYLOR This is the way the border transfigures greed, shapes it into something holy. Sheryl Luna, “Fence on the Border”* And by “My Better Border,” I mean the border between Texas and Mexico, the border made by a long, thin river, the Rio Grande, in a place of no name in the desert, about fifty miles east of El Paso. We were zipping along in Courtney’s Volkswagen, headed from El Paso to Indian Hot Springs, on a road that runs mostly along the northern border of the river. Before the dark settled in to relieve us from the July sun, we’d seen lovely rock formations and cliffs—nothing to rival the Grand Canyon yet still starkly beautiful in the heat—and a couple of large hawks circling and dipping down in the relentless blue above. How do the hawks handle the direct heat? The wind must cool them. Later, when the dark settled in and the earth started cooling, we slowed down the car. It was a gravel road we were traveling so our speed had never reached, in the old Volkswagen, above fifty miles per hour. Now we moved along in a deep dark—no streetlights or gas stations or even signs of habitation by humans in this part of the desert—at about thirty miles an hour. I came around a curve in the road and the headlights caught a 1960s model station wagon parked on the road up ahead. I came to a stop about fifteen feet behind the station wagon. The gravel road was narrow, but I could have probably worried my way around—but what was the hurry? Instead we idled the car, watched and waited. The year was 1975. Courtney and I were in our early thirties. We were excited—the desert always hones the senses—but we were no way timid about traveling at night in this remote area. The Volkswagen was a reliable clunker. I can speculate now we might have been a bit naïve. We were urban souls and didn’t have the sense to carry a few extra blankets and a few gallons of water. In 1975 no one dreamed that Juárez would become the capital of murders that it seems to be now—if one can believe what one reads in the newspapers or sees on television. We’d driven this road many times. We had been at Indian Hot Springs and ♦ ♦ ♦ 250 ♦ Chuck Taylor crossed a rocking rope bridge over the Rio Grande into the small Mexican village of Ojo Caliente. We were interested in hot springs and their healing properties , and especially in this little known one—once owned by HL Hunt—that is the largest in Texas. There was a lodge built of adobe, and before World War II, many came to be treated by the hot waters. Knowing little Spanish, we did our best at ordering beers from the cantina in Ojo Caliente and sat in the shade of the building on folding chairs looking across the gravel road at the town’s elementary school, wondering what the children were doing for the summer. ♦ ♦ ♦ Let me tell you, it’s 2010 as I write—thirty-five years later—and I can still feel the heat and the breeze on my face, and I can still feel my tennis shoes placing themselves carefully on the rope as it swayed slightly and we crossed the Rio Grande on that rope bridge. I imagine today that no one is allowed to cross the bridge either way, if the bridge is still there. I know that some of the twenty-three or so hot springs at Indian Hot Springs—so named because it was a place of peace for Indians to meet and trade and enjoy the waters—have sadly dried up. I still get a sense of wonder as I recall staring down and down into holes in the earth, some six feet wide at the surface. How deep did the hot spring go? Not that far I would imagine, but far enough for cool water to trickle down deep to be heated to hot by the earth’s core. It all seemed a wonder then along the border. It all seemed a miracle. I had grown up in the forties and fifties in the Midwest, contorting my child body under my desk during air raid drills, gripped in the fear of atomic bombs frying us to carbon, and hearing...

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