After a whirlwind visit to Casas Grandes and Colonia Juarez on the Mexican side I crossed back into El Paso late Friday night to pick up my bike from the mechanic. I still had a few hours of daylight, so I set off immediately for Clint, Texas, a small farming town 20 miles outside El Paso. It was nerve-wracking to get back on the bike, five weeks after I fractured my elbow. Wounded stallions such as myself rarely make it off the racetrack, much less back to the starting gate for a second attempt.
Biking through half of El Paso, I thought for sure I would find the city’s ugly side. But in two hours pedaling through residential neighborhoods and strip malls, I couldn’t find it. El Paso has to be the cleanest city in America. There’s not a bit of litter or rust to be found. Being on a bike, I pay a lot of attention to the road shoulders and medians and after a few miles I realized that I wasn’t steering to avoid the usual piles of gravel and smashed glass, or high-stepping over weeds trying to cross the street. The mayor of El Paso, Dee Margo, likes to remind people that his city is one of the safest large cities in America. With Juarez attached at the hip, Margo knows he’s fighting all the negative stereotypes connected to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Visitors to El Paso (e.g. me) are surprised to find that Spanish is the city’s first language. According to the 2016 American Community Survey, an estimated 29.7 percent of residents reported speaking “only English”; 68 percent reported speaking Spanish. The cities of El Paso, Ciudad Juarez, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, an hour’s drive north of the border, work seamlessly together and are in such close proximity that they are often treated as a single metropolitan area, referred to as Paso del Norte or the Borderplex. 2.7 million people live in the region, making it the largest bilingual and binational work force in the Western Hemisphere. All three cities are connected by the Rio Grande river, known as the Rio Bravo on the Mexican side. Satellite images of the border show a swath of green following the river’s path, divided and subdivided for agriculture. Clint is one of several small towns east of El Paso, including Fabens, Tornillo, and Fort Hancock.
As the river winds its way through the mountains, the surrounding agriculture disappears. The ever-present border wall swings away from the road as well. But all the way to Clint and most of the way to Van Horn there were orchards on both sides of the road, irrigated by long trenches filled with water, operated by hand-operated doors. I was reminded of The Milagros Bean Field War, a movie in the magical-realism genre, which tells the story of a small town in New Mexico bitterly divided over who gets to control the water. Biking past fields of cotton and rows of pecan trees, it’s easy to see why water means everything out here.
I’m happy to report that Texas starts living up to itself immediately. A huge American flag made out of stacked red, white, and blue beer cans in front of the entrance to a cattle ranch was present and accounted for. The sundried leathery old cowboy with jeans, Stetson, and black eye patch played his part perfectly. I promise readers I won’t let another Marlboro man walk past me without getting his picture. Johnny Cash actually mentioned Clint (pop. 1,133 as of 2016) in his song “Please Don’t Play Red River Valley” as the place where he bought his first harmonica for $2.98. And what could be more authentic than that?
After a night in Clint I biked 101 miles to Van Horn. I have no idea why I thought this was a good idea. If the road had been a little less flat or the wind blowing in another direction, I’d still be out there, a corpse for some poor unsuspecting county worker to find. One thing that kept me going was a chance meeting with Matt and Zoey, two bikers from England making their way from Orlando to Tijuana and then the tip of Baja California. Normally I hate meeting other bikers for that reason: Inevitably you compare the length of your trips and if the other guy’s is longer you’re stuck pedaling the rest of the day mentally defeated. Matt and Zoey made up for this by telling me that there was an Adventure Cycling tour further up the road, headed in the same direction as me. “They’re moving pretty slow. And they have a van.” Hooray, I thought, people to mooch off.
In the world of bicycle tourism, traveling with a van and full-time support staff is pretty plush. In Texas terms, it’s the poorly guarded stagecoach carrying the Army’s payroll. I spent the rest of the day and the next morning tracking these suckers and finally caught up to the stragglers just outside Van Horn. There were 10 or so members of the group making their way along the southern tier. They started in San Diego several weeks ago with the goal of reaching St. Augustine, Florida, 3,000 miles away. I biked with at least six different people throughout the day and got a chance to hear what made them want to tackle such a trip. Most of them had just retired or had saved their vacation days for years to take the nine weeks off. It’s a badass A Team, for sure.
The most memorable story, however, has to be Bill and Barb’s. The two met 40 years ago on the Bikecentennial, a bike ride across the country in 1976. People have been traveling on bicycles as long as bicycles have been around. In fact, when three riders set off to pedal from Liverpool to London in the late-1800s few people recognized the two-wheeled contraptions and had to ask what the “queer horses” where called, according to the London Times. Others simply threw rocks. Bicycle touring in America, however, didn’t take off until National Geographic featured Dan and Lys Burden and Greg and June Siple’s “Hemistour” from Alaska to Argentina in their May 1973 issue. That trip spawned what would later become the Adventure Cycling Association, which organized the Bikecentennial. Bill, Barb, and 4,100 other riders took part in the event, which kicked off a wave of interest in long-distance biking.
Like all adorable couples named Bill and Barb, the two met on the trip, reconnected a year later in Hawaii, and “just knew” they were going to get married. They had to put biking and running marathons together aside for the most part while raising kids, but are now back in the saddle, biking across the country again for their 40th wedding anniversary.
