Words    Words    Words

Too many roadtrips, too little sleep. Our reserves haven’t recharged so what we think will be 10 hours straight through divided between two reasonably well-rested drivers becomes a struggle for both to keep eyes open throughout the night.

We pulled over at a couple of points last night to doze for a few minutes, but decided that we would need a few hours of shut-eye on a non-moving horizontal surface before completing our journey. Not a big deal, we’ll just find the next available hotel…

Two hundred miles later, we’re starting to suspect vast governmental insomnia conspiracies and we still have no hotel room. Every little town we come to has “no vacancy”. This starts to become infuriating when the parking lots are visibly half empty and there is no way (unless Texans suddenly got a LOT better about carpooling) that all the rooms are in use. The desk clerk answer we’ve gotten so far is “just a bunch of hard-workin’ folks needin’ some rest” (um, as opposed to us? Heh). We finally get to Ft. Stockton, where they still have no vacancies in town, but a nice lady who agrees to let us use one of their rooms for a four hour nap. Cue darkness.

We’re packing up and about to finish the last leg of the first driving part of our Mexican adventure! El paso, here we come, groggy but with doughnuts.

Edit: We did finally discover that the no-vacancy corridor was due to renewed oil drilling in the area and the oil companies buying up most of the rooms for their employees. No conspiracy against us *this* time.

*****

The West Texas scrubland is gorgeous, though it’s hard to imagine anyone surviving for long among the gravelly soil and stunted shrubs. The few irrigated patches we pass are an ode to water profligacy and a jarring mismatch of greens that don’t harmonize at all with the adjacent landscape. The clouds put on a show as fabulous as only big-sky land can display: layers and pockets of smooth and fluffy, bright and rainy, surround our path.

For most of the circumference around us everything appears quite real; in front of us, thanks to a trick of sunlight, appears to be nothing more than a large, finely-crafted painting. We joke about driving through the “4^th wall” into the other side of the Story, though getting closer we can’t quite tell when (or if) we pass through the haze separating our reality from the painted view. Perhaps on the drive back…

El Paso is larger than expected, though not nearly as large as the 1.3 million inhabitants of Juarez just across the border. We are picked up at the El Paso airport by a nice couple who are relatives of the assistant of the doctor assigned to Steve’s surgery. They drive us across the border, and let me say that this is probably one of the best parts of the “included services” of the surgery package. I would not have wanted the extra stress of trying to both drive and find my way along Mexican streets.

The best bit of local color observed so far was the street corner man who took up a car’s worth of space in the middle lane while we were stopped at a light. He spread out a broad cloth filled with several large pieces of broken glass, and proceeded to demonstrate his carnival abilities by lying down on his back on the glass and rolling back and forth for several seconds. He finished by sitting up and shrugging off the few pieces stuck to his skin, then calmly drew up the corners of his cloth into a makeshift sack and walked off to the median, all before the light changed to green. I would definitely tip more panhandlers if they performed tricks like these.

We are now finally settled into a hotel across from a shopping mall and right down the street from the hospital, and after recovering a bit we will be off in search of a tasty last-meal-before-surgery for Steve. The hospital is the newest-looking building around, so if money is any indicator of safety Mr. Brust should be in fine hands for tomorrow.

EDIT 2: Steve asks me to let everyone know that he will NOT be going under general anesthetic, only a local one and sedation. He says sedation is especially pleasant for him as it’s been something he’s been looking forward to for years.