He Might Be Nude

March 7, 2016

It's not the winds of Texas but the demands of work and income tax filing that keep me in Sierra Blanca for one more day. I head to the motel office late in the morning to pay for another night. What I see when I open the door is an older man, at least seventy but maybe eighty. He's definitely shirtless. He might be nude. But his lower half is obscured by the tall countertop that stands between us, so I can't tell for sure. All I know is that I'm very thankful. He on the other hand seems unconcerned. I tell him I want to stay another night, he asks me which room I'm in, and then he swipes my credit card and hands me the receipt to sign, like conducting business while possibly naked is standard stuff around here. And maybe it is. His wife shows up a minute later, asks the man a question, and then disappears without comment.

In the afternoon I walk to the post office to mail a document to the IRS. It takes me down the street that parallels the freeway, the main street of Sierra Blanca. It's a dusty, sagging image of what used to be: two hardware stores, a grocery store, a lumber company, a cafe, an art gallery, an antique store, a gun shop, a movie theater, a railroad depot that had been turned into a museum, and even that motel with the big sign that referred to itself as Texan-owned – all closed.

There are still some restaurants and a bank and a fire station nearby, but the town is an obvious shadow of its former self. I've never before seen a county seat in such a state of collapse. As near as I can tell from the look of the old buildings, the town thrived back in the forties and fifties when U.S. Highway 80 ran through it, when people drove slower, when the journey was as much a part of the trip as the destination. It's not hard to imagine the motel parking lot full, the lights of the theater marquee sparkling, the cafes full of travelers eating chicken fried steak and drinking a Coke made with real sugar and eating chocolate cream pie for dessert.

But it's just as easy to imagine all of that ending in the sixties with the rise of the interstate that lets drivers bypass town at eighty miles per hour. With more fast food joints and trucks stops and cheap motels available in Van Horn to the east and El Paso to the west, Sierra Blanca has become a place to stop only when necessary. It's no longer a destination but a footnote. It could be worse, though. The town could be filled with the smell of human shit. And in fact for nine years, up until 2001, it was.

Following a 1988 decision by the U.S. Congress that banned cities from dumping sewage sludge into the ocean, in 1992 a company with ties to the mafia contracted with the City of New York to bring more than 250 tons of the sludge from New York to Sierra Blanca by train car each week. That company originally wanted to dump the sewage in Oklahoma or Arizona, but both states put legislation into place to prevent it because samples of the sludge showed high levels of both petroleum and infectious diseases. They avoided the same fate in Texas by donating $1.5 million dollars to Texas Tech University to study the beneficial uses of sludge and receiving fast-tracked approval without an environmental impact statement, an open period for public questions, and in fact without any local involvement at all. The result was the spraying of wet sewage sludge onto the surface of more than 75,000 acres of land that led to increased rates of rashes, blisters, flu, colds, asthma, and general sickness downwind in Sierra Blanca.

Despite extensive local outcry, the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission did nothing. A formal complaint filed with the Environmental Protection Agency was dismissed. When the initial five-year permit for the dumping operation came due for renewal, it was not only renewed, but the amount of sewage permitted to be dumped near Sierra Blanca was increased by almost double. When it was discovered that the company managing the operation wasn't treating the sewage properly in line with state and federal requirement to reduce the spread of pathogens, the company was fined less than $13,000. It wasn't until almost a decade after the dumping began that New York City terminated the contract, but only because it was more expensive than the city's other sludge disposal contracts. The negative effects of the dumping on the health and well-being of the people of Sierra Blanca were not a factor.

It's easy to look at the place only through these lenses, or to focus on the fact that it's one of the poorest towns in one of the poorest counties in Texas. But as I stand at its main intersection and look out on the other side of the train tracks I see small and simple homes. There are churches, county office buildings, and a modest courthouse. Looming over all of it is the school, the home of the Vaqueros, where the football field has an old boxcar sitting beyond the end of the east end zone, painted blue, with the words Sierra Blanca FFA splashed across the side in big yellow letters. The local newspaper, the Hudspeth County Herald, reveals more depth. It talks about Hazel Walker's hundredth birthday, upcoming school board meetings, the Junior class basketball tournament where brisket plates will be sold, the outcome of school sports games from throughout the county, and the results of last week's election (147 votes for Hillary Clinton; 97 for Bernie Sanders; 76 for Donald Trump; 71 for Ted Cruz; and 26 for Marco Rubio). Despite all the hardship that comes with being a small town out in the desert lands of West Texas, and despite what it might look like while speeding past on the interstate, there's a small but dedicated community in Sierra Blanca that continues to thrive as best it can.

Thick, dark clouds and strong winds mark the change from afternoon to evening. I watch them from behind the glass of the room's only window, going outside only when hunger calls. I lay around eating, working, writing, talking to Kristen on the phone, and floating in a holding pattern of mild depression. The freeway towns, the howl of traffic, the cheap motels, gas station food for breakfast and dinner, talking to no one – this is not the bicycle touring I love. It's is a slow, boring, unrewarding, kind of expensive way to travel. Using the edge of the nightstand as a table I write out directions for my last four days on the road, where I hope to leave behind all of these things for good.

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