Borderlands.
I was following my own advice, and glancing back over my shoulder to see some of the places I’ve been. Seems like I’ve spent a lot of time in borderlands. Mexican, “La Frontera,” I believe is how it’s said. Birthday, and I’m what? About 40 miles from the border? I think this dude ranch actually backs up to the Rio Grande. It’s not the first place I’ve stayed that shares the border with Mexico.
In that history book I was reading, maybe it was Santa Anna, or one of his generals, but whomever referred to the distance from the Rio Grande to Bexar (San Antonio) as the desert of bones, or some similar title. J. Frank calls it the Brush Country. Get out just a little further west? I call it all magical.
I was winding up the road from Balmorhea, which, in and of its own is pretty special. I stopped to take a leak and a picture. Don’t think they turned out too well, but it was worth an effort. I sure felt better after a leak, anyway.
Balmorhea, the spring fed water is cold in the summer, but with the recent batch of chilly weather? The rent car’s thermometer was indicating 32 degrees, conditions known as “icy.” So those constant-temperature springs had steam rising up in thin tendrils from the surface.
Rose (something) Pass was next, up and over. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, perhaps it was the settling sun, not visible behind a heavy layer of fog. Or rain clouds, I guess, it depends on the perspective, but the light washed out over the landscape, giving the high fields a truly lunar look.
Makes my blood sing. I was tired, been on the road for several hours, but coming up 17 into the Davis Mountains just make my blood run quicker in a happy way.
It’s different every time, it’s not like I get out here too often. But the way the volcano flows look, after they’ve been etched out by eons of rain and wear, then set this against a backdrop of the that “lunar light,” it just adds to the surreal experience.