There hasn’t been a drop of rain on this entire trip, but I woke up in Rio Grande City to find sheets of water coming out of the sky. South Texas’s prayers have been answered. Cattle ranches won’t have to sell off cows, and all the onions, cabbage, and corn I’ve passed will make it from farm to fork.
Bags packed, I pedaled 100 yards from my motel to the Denny’s next door. I used to hate Denny’s before taking off on this bike trip, but that was back when I had standards, rules, and best practices concerning the calories I consumed. It’s not a well-advertised deal, but for $4 they will bring you as many buttermilk pancakes as you can eat.
The restaurant was full of other customers—families, mostly, all crammed into the same booth. Mexico, and the border region in general, is extremely family-oriented. Parents and children do everything together, and that’s obvious based on how comfortable they are eating elbow-to-elbow at the same table. My Mexican friend Davi Rivera pointed out to me that people near the border are much quieter in restaurants than most Americans. The conversation in Denny’s carried on steadily at a low level, noticeably few people were distracted by their phone, and the kids behaved perfectly. Family togetherness is an enviable aspect of border culture.
Perhaps an hour into my pancake gorge-fest, I looked up from my trough long enough to realize that all the customers were speaking Spanish. This wouldn’t be that interesting except for the fact that the entire menu was in English. Also, the wait staff spoke English amongst each other in the kitchen. East of Rio Grande City, the border becomes heavily populated, and bigger cities like Mission, McAllen, and Brownsville make equal use of English and Spanish.
The rain finally did stop, and I had to get on the road quickly before the muggy heat set in. Since Laredo I’ve been traveling on US 83, which Road Trip USA memorably refers to as the “Road to Nowhere.” Starting in Brownsville, the highway briefly runs parallel to the border before turning north and running all the way to the Canadian border along the 100th meridian. It was our first border-to-border road, in fact, and “marks the historic divide between the ‘civilized’ eastern United States and the arid Western deserts.”
Civilization comes in the form of a Walmart supercenter, movie theaters, lumber yards, gun stores, and lots of dollar stores. Just as Rio Grande City fades, the next roadside town comes into view. Next comes Alto Bonito, Sullivan City, Havana, and La Joya. US 83 is the closest highway to the border, but dirt roads extend even further south at regular intervals leading to neighborhood-sized towns that reach toward the Rio Grande like taproots. Los Ebanos is one such town, and I biked the extra miles to get a view of the river.
Border Patrol trucks drove slowly through the town streets, making their way to the river before doubling back for another pass. Palm trees and thick brush camouflage the town and give it the feeling of a lost world. A few more turns down jungle roads and gravity led me down to the banks of the river. There, you can find the last ferry in operation on the Rio Grande. It’s large enough to transport two or three cars and is pulled across the water by giant cables. The ferry itself is charmingly simple, but it’s practically hidden behind a mess of newly built towers, fences, bunkers, and intimidating warnings on the U.S. side. In the immediate area around the ferry there are a half-dozen failed, abandoned businesses that once advertised duty-free liquor and other tourist delights.
I biked back to the highway and continued east until I spotted my on-again, off-again travel companion, the border wall. This time it was relatively close to the road, so I pedaled through an onion field so I could bike along Border Patrol’s gravel access road. The wall, at first, doesn’t appear that intimidating. “I could climb over that,” is surely the first thought everyone has when they see the rusting steel beam fence.
Get a little closer though and you realize that you’re dealing with a giant. A 21-foot high, 6-foot deep giant, to be exact. Other than the high levy that the wall itself is built on, the rain had turned all the dirt roads to mud. I pushed on for several miles, enjoying the challenge of the water and the sludge, until I came to a dead stop. Mud and clay had caked itself between my back wheel and the frame. I didn’t really have any appointments or meetings on my schedule, so I got out my knife and started picking at the blockage, thinking dry land couldn’t be too far away.
A three-quarter-ton diesel truck with some kind of pump in the bed bumped and splashed down the road and stopped in front of me. The driver rolled down the window and asked if I needed a lift with the attitude of a man that knows his Christian duty, and will do it, but doesn’t relish the role of Good Samaritan.
We tossed my bike in the back and mud-bogged through deeper and deeper pits of swampy goop. “Gahdam!” the perfectly named Mike Miller cursed when the cab took an especially huge jump.
Miller was born and raised in Brownsville. He works on a farm and never plans to leave the valley, despite the fact that every week he hears gunfire and grenades exploding just on the other side of the U.S.-Mexico border, which his boss’s farm is adjacent to. The cartel controls who is allowed to cross the river, but instead of cash, sometimes they simply force would-be migrants to carry a 35-lb bale of marijuana. Cartel scouts, expertly camouflaged and armed with rifles, move about nearby in the woods on the U.S. side, watching and relaying information to smugglers on the other side of the river. Despite the constant violence and the drugs, Mike plans to stay. “I love it, man,” he told me, and summed everything up for me with: “The valley may suck, but it’s home.”
