Life In the Slow Lane

February 28 is the end of Black History Month, which didn't exist "back in the day" when I was in school.  This trip has really taught me a lesson or two. Not just about the mistreatment of Black (and Red) peoples, but also at how distorted and selective was my education.  I just finished an excellent book, Black Indians by William Loren Katz. It covers lives as Black and Red since the beginning of Europeans in the Americas. It is not a replay of the 1619 Project. New to me was the tremendous amount of interbreeding between the groups.  The author claims as much as 50% of Native Americans have some Black ancestry.  Slavery was common in many of the North American tribes; the Seminoles were a distinct minority in not enslaving. White enslavers had a very strong interest in preventing indigenous people from uniting with enslaved Africans, and so  maximised  possibilities of discord between the two grou...

6 am departure from Marfa We left the Union Pacific string of pearls towns (Valentine, Marfa, Alpine, Marathon, Sanderson, and Comstock) and headed northeast to Lake Colorado City State Park (what a mouthful). Our first stop was Fort Stockton, formerly a real cowboy town. Annie Riggs Memorial Hotel Museum preserves some of the more colorful parts. Annie had some experience running a hotel. When the railroad came by, the town boomed and she got financing to build a hotel in 1901. She was a devout Catholic, married, had six kids, but had made a poor choice for a husband. She divorced him (shudders!). After the divorce he got elected sheriff, was abusive to others (not just his ex-wife) and was assassinated in his office. The desk on display still has his blood. Nobody was ever charged. Her second husband had killed somebody in Arizona, was "acquitted", and told to get the hell out of Arizona in case they changed the verdict to guilty. She fell for him and had five more kids, ...

We left the Big Bend Parks and headed north to Marfa . Coming into town, we passed the Marfa Lights Observatory , basically a fancy name for the highway rest stop. Sometimes "mysterious" lights glow on the horizon, "nobody" know what they are. Aliens, ghosts, flashes of natural gas ...? Well, gosh darn those physics students who popped the Chamber of Commerce balloon. The lights were car headlights reflecting off temperature gradients, similar to mirages. We didn't stop. We settled into the "cool" Marfa Yacht Club campground. We were the only non-Airstream, but were accepted because we had a Tesla and a cute trailer. (Cute is the most common compliment we get.) We also had our Starlink antenna up, so we had great telecom. It is a very nice simple campground with only eight sites; we both really liked it.  We tried to figured out how to see the major exhibits of Donald Judd . We weren't particularly aware of him prior to our visit. He bought a...

I don't want to sound like the Rainbow Guy , but "Whoa!" Big Bend NP is stupendous. OK, a million people have said that before me, but it really is spectacular. Left side Mexico. Canyon walls are 1000-1500 feet high The river in the above picture is more "lake" than river. There is a big sand bar about a quarter mile downstream, so the water is backed up. We drove down to Big Bend from Marathon, going by miles and miles of flat, desert lands with very little vegetation. Big sky territory, but not very interesting. A Historical Marker discussed camels. I thought the Alaskan land bridge was a one way path for the early peoples migrating to the Americas from Asia. Apparently camels and horses originated in North America and migrated to Asia. Like many big mammals such as mammoths, they died off thousands of years ago, probably hunted to extinction by humans. Horses were re-introduced to the Americas 500 years ago by the Spanish. The escapees are now an invasive s...

L aredo is the 2nd biggest city along the Rio Grande (population  236,091, bigger than Brownsville). It was the capital of the  Republic of Rio Grande , which may be the shortest lived country in history, only 283 days. While Texas claims 'Six Flags over Texas', Laredo proudly claims Seven Flags over Texas. The Republic of the Rio Grande did not want to be subject to Mexico or to the newly-formed Republic of Texas. Mexican  General Santa Anna ended that idea of independence. Laredo is about the least diverse city in the US (excluding Puerto Rico), over 95% Hispanic. The "old" part of town, immediately adjacent to the international crossing, was sad - block after block of mostly empty buildings, almost a ghost town. Buildings seemed to be built around 1900. Did not look like a slum, no boarded up or broken windows, trash, no visible addicts or homeless, just mostly empty.   Other parts of the city were busy and more modern. We shopped at nice HEB Plus, Walma...