You come over a hill and there's Old Bisbee, houses seemingly placed at random on a mountain side. One day we drove around there. Terrifying one-lane-but-two-way streets at 70 degree angles lead from old colorful house to old colorful house. Bisbee has burned to the ground 3 or 4 times in its history, and it's no wonder. Not only would fire just work its way right up the mountain from the floor to the highest house very quickly, but there's no way a fire truck could make it around these hairpin turns at these angles. All you could really do would be stand back and watch until everything was gone, then rebuild.
Bisbee is an artist colony now, and artists are fucking weird. Houses are brightly colored and "interestingly" decorated. There are "art cars" (maybe you've heard of this, but I hadn't) that are basically old junkers with all kinds of shit glued to them. one had the Arizona desertscape "painted" on the side in differently colored bottlecaps, and lots of figurines glued to the top. One is a lion, one is a shark, one is Hillary Clinton. You'd think these cars would sit at a visible juncture as a testament to the artist's creativity, but these people actually DRIVE these things around. Artists are fucking weird.
The border to Mexico is pretty much what you'd expect, except that it cuts the town of Naco in half. There is Naco, AZ and Naco, Mexico, and the only difference you can see is the border guard station right there making sure you're not taking things into or out of either country. I did notice the people coming from Mexico into the US were detained longer than people headed into Mexico. Mexican school children were walking from their school in the US to their homes in Mexico. I wanted to walk into Mexico but I was told either I would be killed in drug violence immediately upon exiting the station, or I wouldn't be let back into the US because I didn't have I passport. I decided staring longingly into Mexico would do for now.
My hotel sits about 5 miles from the border. If you look out the window at night you can see the border wall all lit up. The wall is six miles long. Past the wall on either side is barbed wire, easy enough to cut through. Then there is miles of desert. Bushes to hide in. The border patrol is everywhere in southeast AZ, but it's easy with such a vast expanse of land to see how a lot of people could sneak by. Or die in the desert. Hundreds of people die out there each year. A couple of nights there were ferocious lightning storms behind a mountain miles into Mexico. It seems a world away, impossible to ever reach or see. I stare at it for minutes at a time and wonder what is happening there, only miles form here but another universe entirely.
The last morning in my hotel sink there is a scorpion. I scream like a little girl and run out. I don't shower. I'm sitting in the Tucson airport feeling pretty dirty and pretty wussy, but a two inch scorpion is basically the single scariest thing I've ever seen. I stared at it for a few minutes and could feel its beady eyes staring back at me, sizing me up. It was not as scared of me as I was of it.
Ev is a fascinating man. He worked for NASA for a while and let me hold a piece of the space shuttle's heat shield. It's surprisingly light and feels like a harder version of styrofoam. You can hold your hand under it while a blowtorch heats it until it turns bright read and you won't feel anything. It's about an inch thick.
I had several awesome meals. The best Italian food I've ever had was at Rosa's, a restaurant that' open when it feels like it and requires reservations - a strange combination. What wasn't a strange combination was the chicken and what seemed to be pounds of cheese. The next night we ate at a place called the Outside Inn, which, aside form its stupid name, was an awesome meal of veal and shrimp in sauce made from what I can only assume was God's blood. Well, back to Denver. Adios.
So that's the end. Pardon the changes in tense, as I wrote it at several different times and couldn't remember what I'd been doing. I am not a good writer. Also, please forgive the formatting. I give up.
No comments:
Post a Comment