Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
There are two Thanksgivings in El Paso. The one in November is observed much as it is in the rest of America: turkey, dressing, corn, sweet potatoes, and pumpkin pie, then motor shutdown, a retreat to the couch and TV. Six hundred thousand Pasenos watch the Cowboys play in Texas Stadium six hundred miles east.
The other Thanksgiving is celebrated on the last Sunday in April. It commemorates the day Don Juan de Onate's party of one hundred and thirty families, two hundred and seventy single men, eleven Franciscan friars, eighty-three wagons, and seven thousand cattle discovered El Paso del Norte, the Pass to the North. Previous Spanish explorers had taken the routes along the Conchos River to the Rio Grande, but Onate's colonists had marched from Santa Barbara in New Spain (Mexico) straight up and across the treacherous desert north of Chihuahua city. By the time the advance party of eight horsemen scuffed through brush and cottonwood and finally saw the Rio Grande, they were cotton-mouthed, crazy with thirst. Two horses plunged in and were swept away. Two others drank enough to rupture their stomachs. What Onate had discovered after the fifty-day desert crossing--the last five days with no water at all--was a magnificent valley formed by the Rio Grande as it emerged from the southernmost spurs of the Rockies.
Here, on April 20, 1598, Onate stopped and held a Mass of thanksgiving. He claimed the new territory--New Mexico--in the name of Philip II of Spain a full two decades before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. "I take all jurisdiction, civil as well as criminal, high as well as low, from the edge of the mountains to the stones and sand in the rivers, and the leaves of the trees . . ." This opening into the new territory--el paso--would be the caravan route, the lifeline of New Mexico, the jewel in the Camino Real.
Just as there are two Thanksgivings, there are two El Pasos. One is visible from the highway, an El Paso that a trucker traversing America on Interstate 10 from Jacksonville to Los Angeles might see and find nothing to distinguish it from any other American city but for the way it and the Franklin Mountains spring out of the parched and desolate land. He might catch glimpses of the Rio Grande bordering the freeway and beyond that see houses in Juarez, Mexico, sitting on a rise.
It might seem to such an observer as if a desert wind had gleaned pieces of Sacramento, Hackensack, Des Moines, and Dallas and deposited them here where they have rooted and now sprout Blockbusters, Kmarts, Targets, U-Hauls, and every other franchise flavor, their fluorescent signs beckoning like listless whores from both sides of the freeway. And to the trucker's eyes, what little desert he can see past the strip malls and billboards is occupied by bulldozers and cement mixers that are paving over cactus and creosote with the same abandon they had shown Phoenix only twenty years before. From the cab of the truck, the town's founding father would appear to be Sam Walton, and the Wal-Mart edifice its epicenter. And then, fifteen or so exits later, the vision is gone--a forgettable mirage perhaps.
?Donde esta la estacion del ferrocarril? asked the audio Spanish tape in my car.
"La estacion del ferrocarril esta a la derecha," I replied, though I had no idea where the train station was.
After three days of unpacking boxes in our new El Paso house, I had risen before dawn, dressed for my first day at work, and then joined a wagon train of early risers, speeding in two columns, headlights on, down a looping access road to that same freeway. Fortunately, the sign clearly said I-10 east, because in the limitless desert, without the sun, there was almost no way to tell. When Vasquez de Coronado and his party explored the Southwest in 1541, they used the sunrise as a guide, firing an arrow at the sun, and then, before they overtook the first arrow, letting fly another one and another, following this aerial trail until they came to the Rio Grande.
I sped past a square building, and off to one side I saw into a lighted window. A white-uniformed, dark-haired man hovered over someone else's knees, snowcaps on shapeless thighs. He stood as if picking logs from a woodpile. That's all I saw as I passed by. I swiveled my neck against the edge of the seat belt. I thought I saw a sign for the Coronado Nursing Center.
Then I was on the freeway, racing through the desert, the Franklin Mountains now on my left, the river on my right, that tableau from the nursing home well behind me.
But my mind insisted on lingering there, filling in the blanks. I could see the attendant folding over and wedging the soiled draw sheet under the bottom of a withered woman as she lay on one side. I could see him flip her over, using her knees as a lever. One tug and the bundled-up sheet was free and joined the growing pile in the laundry bag. She looked at his face, unable to speak, a prisoner in her own stroke-ravaged brain. And on his face was the set look of a man finding the necessary distance needed to finish work that was not particularly gratifying.
Alone behind our bedroom windows, alone in our cars, towns give us the necessary illusion that we belong. Until that moment, I had felt camouflaged in this new town, shielded from prying eyes, free in my new job to spin a new persona, to pitch my myth, the African-born-but-of-Indian-parentage-naturalized-American saga and to weave it into all the other dusty histories of The Pass. I loved the role of newcomer to town, relished the contrast between the lands I had left behind and this desert where there were broad spaces even between raindrops.
