Transmountain Road, El Paso, Texas
Driving into El Paso was weirdly like coming home--and it is pretty disgusting when my hosts gave me directions like "Turn left where the Pep Boys used to be" and I know what they mean. There had been a lot of construction on the parts of town I drove through in the more than a year since I visited, so it was familiar and weirdly strange at the same time.All the way down I-25 from Colorado, I could see snowstorms marching over the mountains on either side of me, but none right on me (except for a few stray flakes passing through Santa Fe). Then I would come over a hill and see the entire countryside blanketed with snow. Even though we're surrounded by the stuff in the city, it's never the same as seeing fields covered with it all the way to the horizon, against darkening blue or slate-grey skies.
I'm staying with my friends Kate and Bob, who work for the El Paso paper. Kate is taking graduate classes as well, and shared the stunning news that my work is being studied in academia. My article on trials in El Paso came up in someone's googling while they were researching local corruption, and ended up being a topic of discussion in one of her classes.
I feel so...relevant.
