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]
Like it wasn’t “developed” before? Who’s vision are we talking about, a half empty baseball stadium accompanied by a trolley that has no riders, versus, a living and functioning, slightly bruised and weathered town that had no self pretension, was a bit bruised, a town that didn’t need a three year Interstate expansion inviting the urban congestion that surely follows a planned “development?”
Joni Mitchell clearly foretold of this desarollo malo in Big Yellow Taxi:
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
I don’t care to judge. I shouldn’t. The angst isn’t theirs, it’s mine.
I seek the core of things not its overlay.
This is where I became me… or a version of me. I appreciate having had that cushion.
But I’m not of here too much anymore. I have been here, but I am not of here and wherever it is I was heading before the rails got bent, I’m still heading to. I’m not sure I’m looking for an”unpaved paradise,” but I know I didn’t wander in here, all those ago, to find myself in yet another traffic jam (eerily like the one I escaped in 1973 when I booked out of Chicago).
I’ve been here for a long time. Seen ebbs and flows. I didn’t just pass through. I gathered. I stopped. I lived. I worked. Made some images. Sang some songs. Professed some knowledge and passed along some of what I know.
Lately, though, I can’t. My mouth won’t move. The bank is overdrawn. The bag needs new stuff in it. The sandpapering of El Paso has finally got past the clear coat, it’s past the primer, it’s down to the metal and the metal is not sharp and raw nor is it shiny.
It’s time to look at that I-10 thing again.
It wasn’t a destination, it was a path.