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Lowell Tuttle
Ron, I empathize with you on the Mavs. As to Donsic, it took years for both Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olawjuwon to be on teams which won the NBA title. I wrote here several years ago Dallas had a gem of a player.
My brother, Lawrence was nearby or is nearby sometime this month for a Classic Guitar (?festival/convention) there close to Asheville.
And now, a perspective on immigration.
NATIVE TEXAN
A line at the border doesn’t always divide
JOE HOLLEY
Joe Holley / Contributor
In rugged West Texas, crossing the Rio Grande is a comparatively minor challenge for migrants.
Glance at a map of North America, and you’ll notice a precise dark line designating a nearly 2,000-mile border dividing two nations, Mexico and the United States. Residents in the vicinity of that line, on both sides, know the map misleads. In real life, the demarcation is actually a watercolor stroke smudging into the paper, spreading in both directions. Border life merges, and has for centuries.
I got to thinking about lines and smudges and international borders during a lively conversation a few evenings ago with my friend Lloyd, a third-generation rancher whose 10,000-acre spread borders the Rio Grande between Del Rio and Big Bend National Park. Lloyd — a pseudonym for reasons that will soon become clear — is a living, breathing symbol of the complexities and contradictions of the U.S./Mexico border, complexities and contradictions that rarely make their way into public policy.
A Weller whiskey aficionado and boisterous storyteller, Lloyd is a big, bluff former college football star who scored a tryout with the Houston Oilers in the late 1970s. He’s also a husband and father and a local elected official. A Trump supporter — “Trump made me a lot of money,” he says — he’s fluent in Spanish. Although he knows and respects his neighbors across the river, he supports a border wall, not for the rugged Big Bend region where he’s lived all his life but through flat, easy-to-cross farmland in the Rio Grande Valley and across the New Mexico/ Arizona desert portion of the border.
Like other Big Bend-area ranchers, including his nearest neighbor 20 miles to the east, he’s accustomed to undocumented travelers knocking on his door. He tells me they’ve become even more numerous since Joe Biden was elected president. They have never caused problems.
Lloyd’s clifftop ranch house, built of native stone and commanding stunning mountain views of Mexico’s Maderas del Carmen, is 30 miles off the nearest paved road. To get anywhere near the house and nearby casitas, undocumented immigrants headed north must traverse rugged, rocky peaks and steep-walled gorges. If it’s summer, a relentless Chihuahuan Desert sun is a punishing reminder that if they run out of water, they’re in big trouble. Looking around, they’ll see that every piece of vegetation that has managed to survive in such forbidding terrain is armed with formidable thorns. Almost every creature, no matter how small, either bites or stings.
Still, they come. Not long ago, a half-dozen or so young men showed up. He could tell by their accents they weren’t Mexican. By their clothes, he guessed they were Central American, city-dwellers most likely.
“Can you guys lay tile?” he asked. “Pour concrete? Fix fences?”
Each question elicited a shake of the head. Something about them — maybe their tattoos — made him uneasy. He gave them water and food and sent them along.
A man and woman showed up at Lloyd’s door on a cold, dark night last winter. “My wife is sick,” the man said, a worried look on his face, his voice shaky. “Can you help me get her to a doctor?”
Lloyd could tell she was seriously ill, maybe with COVID-19, maybe something else. He also knew he couldn’t get them to town without passing the Border Patrol checkpoint. He decided to load them into his truck and take them along a gravel road to the crossing at Boquillas, the Mexican village across from the national park. He knew there was a clinic there.
A couple of hours later he dropped off the couple at river’s edge. They waded into the water, cold and waist-deep. Suddenly, a national park ranger — not a Border Patrol officer — popped up from a stand of tall cane where he had been hiding. He called them back and arrested them.
Lloyd was enraged. “You chicken-sh—!” he yelled. “She’s sick. They were headed back!”
Lloyd has cameras situated near the house and at various locations around the sprawling ranch. One day he was in Del Rio when a camera activated a signal on his smartphone. Calling up the camera image, he saw a gray-haired man, shirtless and obviously addled. He was staggering around in circles.
Lloyd called to him on his phone. The man, who must have thought God was speaking to him, looked up toward the sky. “Stay right there,” Lloyd told him. “I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”
His name was Ephraim. He told Lloyd he had been with a group trudging through the desert with a coyote they had paid to guide them. Older than most in the group and out of shape, he fell behind shortly after their guide got them into Texas. He watched Border Patrol agents apprehend them all. Desperate, with no idea where he was, he waved his arms and yelled. He wanted to be arrested too, but no one heard his cries.
Ephraim’s feet were a bubbly mass of painful blisters. Lloyd treated them, found him some clean clothes and told him to stay around the house for a few days until he recuperated.
Ephraim admitted he was returning to the U.S., that he had worked in Atlanta for several years operating a ditch-digging machine for a cable company. He and his wife got into a little argument, he said. The police came. He got deported.
As Lloyd tells the story, he looked Ephraim in the eye and demanded the truth. “If you’re a wife-beater,” he told him, “I’ll find out. The Border Patrol’ll be out here quick as I can call ’em.”
“No, no,” Ephraim pleaded. “It was just an argument, a little misunderstanding. We couldn’t make the police understand.”
He gave Lloyd phone numbers for his now-former wife and their grown daughters. They attested to his good character. Lloyd was satisfied that Ephraim was a good man. Unlike the Central Americans, he could lay tile, pour concrete, repair fences. He ended up staying at the ranch for three months.
On a day when the checkpoint was closed, Ephraim managed to make his way to Austin. Friends drove him to Orlando, Fla., where his daughters lived. He found a job. He’s still there today. He and Lloyd stay in touch.
Borders blend, Lloyd tells me, taking a swig from his nearly empty bottle of Weller’s Special Reserve. So does whiskey. And people.
B B B
Dear Reader
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