THERE IS NO ONE else at breakfast, which is a find-it-yourself flotsam of plastic knives and forks, Styrofoam plates and cups, plastic containers of sweet substances, preheated coffee, and a waffle iron in the shape of Texas. Over toast and coffee, I search through Ian Frazier’s Great Plains and find what I’m looking for:
A person can be amazingly happy on the Great Plains... Joy seems to be a product of the geography, just as deserts can produce mystical ecstasy and English moors produce gloom. Once happiness gets rolling in this open place, not much stops it.
Perhaps Robert was right, and it was the Great Plains themselves that brought about all that bonhomie in Lee’s Steak House.
Last night, Ed warned that 83 might be closed farther south; there are floods down there, particularly in Laredo, where the Rio Grande hasn’t been so high since 1965. This morning, the receptionist tells me to avoid Laredo. She has seen people being evacuated from their flooded homes on television, and it’s still raining there. For that matter, it’s raining here too, quite hard. She suggests that halfway to Laredo, about forty miles south, I leave 83 and turn east on to Route 44.
I make no decision about this—I’ll see what happens—and drive off into the deluge. Here 83 is two-lane and the land, what I can see of it, is flat and empty but for a few shrubs and some low trees that I manage to identify as mesquite; I learned on Carol’s ranch that from a distance mesquite trees look a little like olive trees, but close up, their leaves are more like willow.
Excitement this morning comes from driving through the rain, somehow passing a couple of tractors, and being rocked and sprayed by fast-moving trucks and SUVs. Meanwhile I play Geraint Watkins’s CD In a Bad Mood, which was given to me by my wife and is a lot more fun than it sounds.
I slow at the junction with Route 44, see no Diversion or Road Closed signs and keep going. Twenty miles on, 83 arrives at a multilane junction and I find that, while I’m still on my road, I’m also on Interstate 35, a dual carriageway with entry and exit lanes and nothing much to look at. My take on this, of course, is that I-35 has joined 83 for a short distance—fourteen miles—which will take me into central Laredo. In effect, though, I have to drive those miles on an interstate—which isn’t so bad, given the weather and that I soon come to a parking place where I can take a break and eat some apricots.
As I get out of the car, a wave of spray hits me in the face and soaks the seat and the steering wheel. When I get back, I sit in the passenger seat, fiddle with the radio, and find an English-language station broadcasting flood warnings, but also reporting that the water level in the Rio Grande is now subsiding.
83 and I-35 are soon belting through low-rise suburbia, and exits to districts with Spanish names are signed every few hundred yards. I stay in the slow lane, hoping for a sign to downtown while being aware that, if I go too far, I will reach a bridge and the border with Mexico.
This is the biggest city on 83; it has almost twice the population of the next biggest, Abilene, yet from this elevated road I can see no soaring skyscrapers. A church spire and a couple of small office blocks stick up above a sea of single- and two-story buildings. A brown sign appears: Historic District. I turn off and find myself in a grid of narrow streets packed with small shops. Signs are in Spanish, except for Duty Free, which is everywhere, and it seems you can buy almost anything—from watches to satsumas, socks to cigars. There aren’t many people around, but I feel as if I have arrived in another country, which perhaps isn’t surprising since 96 percent of the population is Hispanic.
The rain has stopped but the streets still shine with water. Is this the center of Laredo? I’m not sure and, what’s more, I’m lost in one-way streets that are clogged with roadworks.
I pull into a filling station and buy a ham and cheese sandwich sealed in plastic. As I give my money to the young woman behind the till, I ask for directions to the town center. She calls an elderly bearded man and they have a long discussion in Spanish, during which they keep glancing at me. After a while a younger man turns up and asks me in English what I want.
“The town center?—The city center?”
He turns to the others, says something in Spanish and suddenly all three understand. They confer with much pointing and arm-waving, and then the younger man gives me an answer which, for simplicity and rigor, is worthy of Einstein: “Straight on to Lincoln. Turn left. Straight on to Flores. Turn right. Keep going. And you will be there, in a square with a church.”
He says this twice with hand gestures. I thank all three profusely, and as I walk back to the car the old man walks with me, smiling, and speaking in Spanish.
“Gracias. Adiós,” I say, and climb into Prius.
He waves and gets into an ancient, beaten-up Cadillac—the kind of car that thirty years ago was commonplace and called a gas-guzzler—with a rear-end like the wings of a seagull and a two-tone paint job in colors that, if the car were new, would be called cappuccino. It’s full of stuff, cushions and bedding in particular, and looks as if the old man lives in it. Perhaps he does.
For once I remember the directions, and in about five minutes arrive in an old square filled with trees and benches. There’s a church in one corner, a smart colonial-style hotel, a small museum which is closed, and expensive-looking cars parked at the curb. I squeeze Prius between them and wander around the square. It’s warm; the sun is out, throwing shadows under the trees; and the red-brick road is already dry.
Glancing between two buildings, I see a vast gray river. I am one steep block away from the Rio Grande, and there, not far off, is Mexico! The trees and buildings beyond the river are in Nuevo Laredo, a city with a population even larger than old, American, Laredo.
I can’t get closer to the river. All but one of the streets that go that way are closed with tall steel fences. The one that’s open slopes down to a fortified customs point. There, in front of yellow-painted barriers, a gang of policemen and soldiers loiters, hands resting on guns. A group of workmen digs up the road. A couple of cars cook in the dust by the curb. Small groups of onlookers stand a little way off—waiting, perhaps, for friends or relatives to arrive from Mexico. I walk downhill, stand close to them, and wait a while to see who or what might emerge...
And nothing does. Perhaps there’s a traffic jam on the other side. Or a drug bust on this side.
Four road bridges link the two Laredos. This one, Gateway to the Americas International Bridge, joins their main streets. Eleven thousand pedestrians and numerous private cars cross it daily, while many of the five thousand trucks that come through every day from Nueva Laredo use it too.
Forty percent of the goods imported into the U.S. from Mexico and Central and South America go through Laredo—as does a large proportion of imports to the U.S. from China, after shipping to the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas. The U.S. depends on this trade, which seems to include almost everything—and certainly, for example, car parts, clothing, chili peppers, computers, and oil. Ninety-seven percent of these imports—including the produce of the maquiladoras, the sweatshops strung along the Mexican side of the border—are legal. The remaining 3 percent are drugs. In the other direction the same percentages apply: cash and guns are smuggled south in payment for cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana.
In his excellent and eye-opening book Amexica: War along the Borderline, the war correspondent Ed Vulliamy describes a visit on a Sunday afternoon to a gun show in Pharr, Texas, six miles from the Mexican border. There he watches one part of an insane trade that happens all along the border on a terrifying scale: “Americans selling guns that arm the cartels that kill each other so as to peddle the drugs that kill Americans.”
I GO BACK to the square—it’s called San Agustin—and go into the church, which has the same name. It turns out to be a cathedral, parts of which date from the founding of the city in 1755. Inside it’s cool and Catholic with bright hyper-real paintings, sculptures, and stained glass. I sit down and enjoy the silence, alone and away from the world—and am startled when two women loom out of a side chapel. When they’ve gone, I stand and look into the chapel. A woman is sitting, gazing down at a painted plaster cast of a recumbent Christ, pale and naked but for a loincloth. She seems rapt, perhaps in tears.
Somehow it’s already three o’clock. I fetch the ham and cheese sandwich from the car, take it to a bench under a tree, and realize that I bought this brand once before. The sandwich itself was just about all right, but the packaging—bendy but extremely thick plastic—impossible to open with mere human hands. On that occasion, much exasperated and not having a chainsaw or even a knife, I used the only sharp implement I do have, nail clippers. Now, carrying the sandwich and feeling a bit of an idiot and hoping no one is watching, I go back to the car, rummage through my luggage, find the clippers, and clip my way through to the clammy bread that surrounds the ham and cheese. By the time I’ve achieved this, rain is falling again. None the less, I return to the bench, determined to enjoy the darned sandwich.
I WANDER THE shiny, slippery streets looking into shop windows. This famous old city seems very quiet. There are very few people around now. Well, it’s siesta time on the day after the Rio Grande rose to its highest level since 1965.
Out of curiosity, I go into a small snack bar. At the back of the shop there’s a glass cabinet filled with cold drinks. I pull out a bottle of pineapple juice and take it to the counter. The proprietor asks me something, but I don’t understand. There are four other people in there. I have almost no Spanish and none of them understands me. Why should they?
The proprietor goes into the street and returns a minute later with a young girl who speaks English.
Speaking slowly and enunciating thoroughly, she says, “Do you want to drink it in, or take it out?”
“Drink it in, please.”
This is relayed in Spanish to everyone present. They all smile and nod. The proprietor leads me back to the drinks cabinet and points to a bottle opener screwed on the wall next to it. She watches as I remove the lid, smiles, and returns to her station at the counter.
I sit on a high stool by a shelf against the wall. It’s a small, knocked-together kind of place, paneled with white Formica. The menu is behind the counter written with plastic letters pressed into plastic boards. Most, but not all of it, is in Spanish. “Pechuga Rellena de Jamon o Broccoli—$5.75” is followed by “Buffalo Wings—$5.75,” “Flautas de Pollo o Carne—$4.99,” and “Club Sandwich—$4.50.” A few people come and go, most of them women, smallish and olive skinned, wearing tight jeans.
These people, like more than four million other Texans, are Tejanos, Texans of Mexican descent, which means ultimately of Spanish or Native American descent, and probably both, because the two races began to get together when Spain, represented by Hernán Cortés, conquered the Aztec Empire in the 1520s. (Texas was essentially ungoverned land until Mexico formally claimed it in 1710. From then until the Battle of San Jacinto in 1836, Texas was part of Mexico. After that astonishing victory, it was independent until 1845 when it was admitted to the United States as the twenty-eighth state.) A few Mexicans settled in Texas soon after the Spanish conquest—so there have been Tejanos since then—and more and more arrived over the centuries; certainly some Tejanos died at the Alamo fighting for Texas against Mexico.
AS I DRIVE out of Laredo, I’m caught in a three-lane traffic jam. Inching forward, I see a flooded underpass and water deep enough for swimming.
A little way out of the city and 83 is on its own again, a four-lane highway with diagonal, don’t-drive-here stripes in the middle. T-shaped telegraph poles stretch away on the left and, once more, shrubs and small trees fill a flat landscape that reaches a distant place where the earth seems to end. Yet I’m no longer on the plains, no longer—after all these miles—traveling south. 83 points southeast now, and will veer more and more to the east, following the Rio Grande. There is no rain, and the gray-white wash of the sky is streaked with blue.
The town of Zapata rambles along the highway and is duller than a town named after a Mexican revolutionary hero ought to be. I stop at a gas station and come away with coffee in a Styrofoam cup. Beyond the town, at a picnic place on a low pimple of a hill, I drink the coffee and gaze across the Rio Grande. I can see the river widening into Falcon Reservoir, a twenty-five-mile-long lake, created by a dam in the south.
The sky clears. The sun is hot on my back. I move to the shade of a canopy set above a concrete picnic table, and stay there for half an hour, sitting, staring.
“That road goes to Mexico.” Not far now.
83 IS TWO-LANE again and straight. Twice it becomes a causeway, barely above the water, as it crosses spurs of the Falcon Reservoir. Otherwise the terrain is dull, level, low-growing green. After Roma, where there are old colonial buildings, trees, and shade, 83 widens to four lanes again and is filled with evening traffic.
Rio Grande City spreads along the highway for miles, spoiling the view of the sky. A clump of old, balconied buildings with the word “Hotel” hanging from one of them, makes me stop and turn back. I find a yellow-brick house with a paved courtyard and geraniums, like an old inn in Spain. But it has just three rooms and they are taken.
The rest of Rio Grande City seems to have been built recently out of concrete and red brick. With a silent sigh, I check into Best Western. And it’s fine—mainly because of an unusual receptionist whose eyebrows are plucked, angled, and painted brown so perfectly and with such mesmeric symmetry that I have to look away for fear of being caught and suspected of ogling. I fill in a form, push it toward her, and manage to look into her eyes while ignoring what is above them.
She smiles and comments on my accent, and I tell her where I’m from.
“What in the world are you doing in Texas?”
I tell her that I have driven slowly down 83 from Canada.
“Cool!” she says. “Wow!” And gives me a suite with sofas, armchairs, a big television, and a functioning remote, at no extra cost. It even has a kitchen and a trouser press. And not far away is a machine that dispenses cold beer. And I’ve been avoiding Best Westerns all the way, just because there are some in England.