I woke up Sunday morning and pedaled to the nearest church in Sanderson, Texas. I wasn’t hung over, but like Johnny Cash, I found my cleanest dirty shirt, washed my face, combed my hair, and stumbled down to meet the day.
I’d much rather have spent one of my few off-days in a famous border town like Laredo, but I wasn’t about to skip Easter services. In front of a beautiful stone Methodist church, I met the preacher man. He was just getting out of his red pickup truck and seemed surprised to see me. “Will you be joining us?” he asked. Yes, I said, and apologized for my generally gross appearance. He was well-positioned to judge—in dark creased blue jeans, sports jacket, purple shirt, and meticulously knotted purple tie—but he brushed this aside and told me church started at 11:00, Sunday school at 10:30.
Sanderson deserved a second look, so I went to get breakfast at the only joint in town, Stripes gas station, and wound my way through the town streets. There’s a large, white water tower labeled “Sanderson” in large black letters on the ridge that surrounds the town. US 90 takes the shortest route through the mountains and forms the town’s main street. Most of the residential homes are dilapidated in some way, and many are being slowly reclaimed by the desert. The train track runs parallel to the highway and is lined by warehouses and industrial sheds no longer in use. All the freight cars in the siding are covered by graffiti. There are a few businesses in downtown Sanderson, including a trading post-sized grocery store and a beautiful garden center housed in a large brick factory, but everything else is shuttered and fading. In several small towns the only franchise I’ve seen is Dairy Queen, but there isn’t one in Sanderson. It looks like there was a knockoff version at one point called the Dairy King, but that too has failed.
I returned to church early thinking I’d be able to slip quietly into Sunday school. At my home church, the Falls Church Anglican, Easter is a pews-packed, standing-room-only event. Even here in Sanderson I thought there would be enough sheep in the flock to blend in somewhat.
I walked through the church doors and up a short flight of stairs to find three people sitting around a folding plastic table. Dick Vimmer, the pastor, introduced me to Eric Cooksey and Nancy Henderson. I definitely interrupted whatever preparations they were making for the service, but they insisted on hearing about my trip and feeding. I didn’t know it then, but I had just met all but one member of the church advisory council. Dick is a retired Methodist pastor who has performed weddings midstream in the Rio Grande, but he commutes from Alpine every Sunday to put on a service at Sanderson. Dozens of bikers must pass through town every year, since it’s situated on the Southern Tier, but they were fascinated, or politely pretended to be, by a trip along the U.S.-Mexico border. They said what I was seeing in Sanderson was pretty typical of small west Texas towns, which were universally struggling to hold together.
After gulping down muffins and guzzling most of their coffee, it was time to start the service. While we’d been talking, the congregation had started to trickle in. The 13 white-haired ladies that showed up for worship and I each got a row of pews to ourselves. There’s beautiful stained glass windows at the front of the church behind a lovely alter and pulpit. It’s hard to stand on ceremony, though, when the biggest service of the year brings in a baker’s dozen. Pastor Vimmer spoke from the middle of the room and started with a request for prayers and praises.
In addition to the usual aches, pains, and operations, the church was grateful for the two inches of rain recently sent from the heavens. All of the land surrounding Sanderson is premium west Texas ranch land, but cows have to be sold off if the rain doesn’t fall. The tiny church is secure enough to laugh at itself. When the year 2029 was mentioned Pastor Vimmer broke from the script to laugh at the idea any of them would still be alive. He sold me out and said he was grateful to have a visitor: “Grant, can you stand up and tell us about your trip?” After the service he explained to me that many of the women I had met were lifelong members of the church and were determined to “stick it out to the very end.”
Walking out (very slowly) with everyone through the church doors, the invitations started pouring in. In a minute I had an invitation to lunch at Granny’s Kitchen, a low-key B&B that doesn’t appear online, a cell phone number to call if I was interested in buying two unused custom Italian bikes from the last century, and a job fixing somebody’s flat bike tire, something I’ve practiced a lot recently.
Granny’s Kitchen turned out to be a ranch-style family home in the middle of town, with a wide porch, huge windows designed to let in a cross-breeze, and blonde hardwood floors. Christine and Glenn Bob Hinkle welcomed me in. They told me the house belonged to his parents, Mary Nell Hinkle and Leboy Hinkle, both in their 90s, who would be joining us shortly for a lunch of enchiladas, tamales, rice, refried beans, and spice cake.
Mary and Glenn Bob were both born and raised in Sanderson. Mary spent a brief amount of time out of town, but otherwise both had spent their entire life there. Like all the previous generations, they were cattle ranchers. I asked Mary how many acres she owned, but she told me that’s not a topic people in west Texas find polite. It’s like bragging about your salary.
Glenn Bob told me over lunch that he used to hire workers from Mexico back in the 80s, “before it was illegal.” Today he can’t find Americans or Mexicans who want the work for a price he can afford. Those from Mexico won’t take the work unless the ranch will go through the process of sponsoring them for a visa. Sanderson is 20 miles from the border, but US 90 stretching east and west essentially functions as the border patrol’s line in the sand. At one point, 70 border patrol families were living in town, but many of them have been re-stationed. The border patrol has a good relationship with the ranchers in Sanderson, but the challenge of finding cost-effective labor has made the cattle business here more difficult. Ironically, it’s hard to imagine businesses further from the border thinking twice about hiring illegal workers.
Sanderson is a conservative town. Almost two-thirds of Terrell County voters went for Donald Trump. Still, I haven’t managed to find someone who is excited about Trump’s wall or increased border security. Texas is mostly blue along the border, but not in the rural counties where I’ve done most of my biking so far.
The Hinkles sent me back to my motel with best wishes and an enormous slice of cake. That evening I was sitting in front of my room with my laptop when I met Kenneth, a trapper for Wildlife Management working on the surrounding ranches. Kenneth has a slow Texas drawl and the cowboy look to match. He was wearing boots, a wide-brimmed hat, and firing tobacco juice from under his white mustache when we shook hands outside the Desert Air motel, which is owned by his family.
It’s difficult to imagine a more politically incorrect individual than Kenneth. But I felt like I could trust whatever he told me about the border, considering how much time he spends in the desert and his take-it or leave-it willingness to tell me exactly what he thought. I asked him what most people thought about Trump. He didn’t vote for either candidate himself, but he feels like he has a good understanding of the average Sanderson voter. “I don’t think it was because he [Trump] was saying, you know, I’m putting up a wall. I don’t think that made a difference to people down here because they think it’s a joke,” he said.
“I think more people voted for him because he wants to help the littler guy instead of the big multi billionaires.”
Kenneth has seen illegal immigration change shape in his lifetime but says people will always find a way to cross, wall or no wall. If Sanderson is going to survive as a town, another industry needs to come along that will provide jobs. Rumors of oil under the town have circulated for years but never amounted to anything. As a way of explaining Trump, Kenneth simply pointed to the town itself: “Look at Sanderson, there ain’t nothing down here.” He says that his family’s motel would most likely be closing sometime in the next month and a half.
