There’s a single building on the side of the highway outside Langtry, Texas, that I think started as a gas station, but did hard time as a restaurant, motel, and grocery store before someone finally did the merciful thing and shut the place down for good. I’m not sure I believe in omens, but there’s a stone slab leaned up against the wall, carved with the words “Thou Shalt Not Lie” that encouraged me to keep pedaling.
Langtry itself is a mile off US 90. I’ve been through a lot of small towns in the course of this trip but Langtry is officially the smallest. There’s a small, very nice museum dedicated to this badass old west character, Judge Roy Bean, a small U.S. post office, and a grand total population of 13. Whatever pilot light of hope I was keeping on for a shower and a beer was snuffed as I rolled into town. I saw a woman walking around her front yard with a metal detector and pedaled over to ask if there was a restaurant nearby. Nada. Did the “RV park” (four electrical sockets, a gravel patch, and a single picnic table) have a shower? No, but they were thinking about installing some in the future. And no, she did not want my help installing them immediately, that very minute.
I leaned my bike up against the picnic table and walked over to the museum, which had closed hours ago. Judge Roy Bean, I later learned, was as colorful a character as you can imagine. He held court in his own saloon. When a jury was needed, Bean assembled the bar’s best customers and expected them to buy a drink whenever the court took a recess.
But Bean’s saloon was long gone and his museum was no use to me. I had biked 60 miles in the hot sun, nearly without stopping, and had naively promised myself that Langtry was some kind of desert oasis.
I was headed back toward my bike, staring down the barrel of an early Pop Tart dinner and bedding down in my sleeping bag, still sticky with sweat and sunscreen, when someone drove down the street in an antique Jeep. The driver, a lovely woman named E.J. Billings, asked if I wanted a ride to the river.
“Why would I want to go to the river?” I asked, thinking she was commenting on my stench. “I just thought you might want to go and see it,” she said, not answering my question, but still charming me into the passenger seat. She reminded me of the Bush family’s brand of Texas manners, sweet, motherly, and unperturbed by my sass.
The Jeep, she said, was built in 1971. She’d just had it repaired and enjoyed driving it around town in the evenings. She proved her expertise with the clutch as we bounced our way along a dirt road with deep tire grooves, over rocks, and past thorn bushes aimed at my face, leading us to a high bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. The sun was setting, and the river, deeper and wider than when I’d last seen it in Big Bend, was stunningly beautiful. E.J. and I walked to the edge of the cliff. She was telling me about some of the people who live in Langtry, including her son who works for Border Patrol. She also mentioned a retired professor who wrote a book called The Tecate Journals.
My ears perked up at that. The Tecate Journals? I asked, “That guy is here in Langtry?” She was a little surprised that I knew the name, but asked if I wanted to meet him. Keith Bowden, who taught English at the Laredo Junior College for nearly three decades, wrote The Tecate Journals about his canoe trip along the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico, an epic voyage that took 70 days. “Actually, he’s kind of my hero,” I admitted. In researching my own trip along the border, Keith’s book was a source of inspiration and a standard for excellence. He’s content to be a minor celebrity to the rest of the world, but to me he’s a Zen master. Finding him in this little town was too good to believe.
E.J. and I rumbled back into town and pulled up outside a small white house the size of most suburban garages. Keith is tall, lean, and walks around when he talks to you like an academic used to a lecture hall. He took an interest in the trip, and even offered to let me stay in a house he was watching in town. I.e., I found my shower and beer—Tecate, of course. We swapped stories about the border, but Keith did most of the talking: He’s lived in different places on the U.S. Mexico border for more than 30 years now.
Even after decades on the river, Keith still finds it a fascinating place of extremes. “This is unique in the sense that you have the first-world and the third-world on either side of this river. Different languages, different customs, different laws, different purposes,” Keith explained. “And for me and the way I’ve lived my life, it’s almost like I was made for here.”
Keith spent a lot of time moving around when he was a kid, whether it was for his father’s work, or because he was regularly hitchhiking hundreds of miles across the country. It started out as a way to get to and from college in Pennsylvania, but he soon started thumbing lifts for the fun of it. He could have followed his two brothers into professional baseball but didn’t want to be tied to the sport for his entire life. His brothers played ball and made a lot of money, but then found themselves in their mid-thirties retired and at a loss of what to do next. Keith, meanwhile, had gone to graduate school and played baseball for a fabulously well-funded cartel team in Mexico.
When it comes to politics, Keith talks about normally divisive issues with the clear-eyed manner of someone with real expertise. As a new comer to the border, I wanted to know what I and everyone else back in Washington was getting wrong. What are we missing here?
“I can answer that one pretty quick,” Keith said, draining his can. “The border is not just a line in the middle of the river, it’s a region.” So Laredo, for example, the city where he spent his teaching career, has much more in common with the corresponding city on the Mexican side, Nuevo Laredo, than anywhere else in America, and vice versa. Legally speaking, the border is precisely defined. But in terms of people and culture, the border towns are an ambivalent no-man’s land.
Keith warned me to be especially careful on the roads around here, because “border people aren’t absolute rigid rule-followers.” That includes traffic laws like traveling at the speed limit, wearing seat belts, and using turn signals. Older people on the border are especially notorious for driving on the shoulder to let faster vehicles pass, which is especially dangerous to cyclists.
Before saying goodnight, we plotted out a route that would let me bypass the notoriously dangerous oilfield highway between Del Rio and Laredo. Instead, I would take an old gravel mining road and camp along the Rio Grande, putting me right in the path of border patrol and illegal immigrants, giving me a chance to see “what all the fuss is about.”
