Editor’s Note: An account of the day of the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash after it went down and what happened afterwards.
Amazing.
Listen to 11:05 thru 18:25.
DOG ON THE RUN
I-10 Dog, El Paso, Texas, 2011
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPH BY BRUCE BERMAN
When I first got to El Paso, I ran into a guy and he told me, “El Paso is just a truck stop on I-10.”
He didn’t mention the desert, the border, the mountains, the river, Juárez, etc.
I’ve lived in El Paso for almost 45 years. It’s all those things I mentioned but, it’s also “… just a truck stop on I-10.”
It’s been fancied up lately. I’ve seen it here, before. Somebody makes out, but the fact is, if you want to be hip there’s hipper places. If you’re hip here, you really aren’t. Sorry.
But this faux hipness, which will inevitably lead to another failure, sandpapers over the very thing that is actually the cool thing about El Paso: it’s not “hip” at all! That’s its charm. That’s not pathetic. That’s genuine.
Mediocre hipness? Not cool. Genuine ruin and authenticity?
Seductive.
That allure is gone from here now. It’s crowded. The border is a mess. The hipsters are stunningly ordinary. The old folks are not of this land. They’re like the new highways, faster, less fun. Generations have passed. People that were of this land, that left, that came back, have now packaged the cultural past and have covered themselves in a cultural identity that is but a fabrication, an identity that was their grandparents, without the sweat and sabrosa.
Development. What a euphemism. [Hit there CONTINUE READING tab, below]
LANGE AND HER TRANSCRIBED TEXT
“Toward Los Angeles.”California,
March 1937 by Dorothea Lange for FSA
“Next Time Try The Train– Relax.”
Lange captioned this with the walkers own words: “Well– give me the fare and I will, buddy. We ain’t walkin’ for our health…”
MIGRATION 30s STYLE
Ten Children, March 1937, by Dorothea Lange,
for the RA (courtesy of OMCA)
Text by Bruce Berman
Migrants looking for work goes back the very beginning of America, from the English/Europeans at Jamestown and beyond. One could arguably say that “Native Americans” descended from migrants from China, coming across the Bering land bridge.
In Lange’s era, as the economic Depression of the 1930s deepened and the ecological disasters of drought and erosion progressed there was a massive infra-country migration, primarily from the Great Plains and Texas/Oklahoma, mostly heading west to California.
This migration was heavily documented by the FSA and by others.
PAUL SALOPEK THREE YEARS INTO FOREVER
Watch this six minute video from Paul Salopek giving an update on his Out Of Eden Walk, presented to the Pulitzer Center for the 100th birthday of the Pulitzer Prize.
VIEW HERE: