Prompt entry #1

 The great city of El Paso, Texas, has birthed a number of wonders and curiosities over its more than three-hundred year history: the first Thanksgiving Mass (April 30^th, 1598 – pre-dating those uppity pilgrims back east), the first of Conrad Hilton's highrise hotels (1930), the margarita (allegedly at Tommy's Place Bar on the fourth of July, 1945), the world's largest pecan orchard (Stahman Farms), and the very author of this weblog (relative unknown Dylan Jesse, 1986). If you enjoy hotels, pecans, and booze as much as I do, then perhaps you might want to . . . well, rent a room somewhere else, pick up a bag of Emerald nuts, and go to town on a bottle of Juarez instead. El Paso is a troubled city set in the unfriendly expanse of desert brushland between the Chihuahua desert to the north and the pollution soup of the Rio Grande river to the south, a city built on a history and landscape of hardship, conflict, and rugged determination. I had the pleasure of living in its outskirts on two separate occasions in my early childhood, and what memories I retain of it are of the harsh realities of its natural setting.

My father was stationed at Fort Bliss, seated at the south-eastern end of the city, a sterling cluster of lights visible in the distance from our home to the north. My bedroom window was filled with a view of the Franklin mountains, a southern tendril of the Rockies, a jagged mouth that swallowed the evening sun. We were surrounded by every imaginable shade of brown, interrupted sparsely by the silvery green of sage brush or the heavy jade of barrel cactus. El Paso used to be a hard-scrabble town where the land gave nothing for free and lawlessness was the rule rather than the exception, and in some ways that has not changed. While the city is considered among the safest in the southwest, the there is always violence from the drug cartels pushing north from Ciudad, Juarez. Since Texas was taken as territory for the U.S., the strategic location of El Paso, coupled with the relative scarcity of natural resources like arable land has created conflict and struggle for its inhabitants. Granted, technology and the conveniences of modern living (like central air) have made it easy to live in the desert environment, but that serves to highlight how little life in El Paso has to do with the natural environment these days, how modern it has become.

For me, though, the mountains, the open stretches of rolling hills of cactus and brush, the arroyos were all open spaces for my imagination. As a child, I didn't have much dealing with the city itself, so the surrounding desert was El Paso for me. Having lived farther north in the Rockies, up in the Gallatins and Bridgers in Montana, I remember the sight of the Franklins outside my window when I was a child, and I realize that my fascination with mountains would have started with them. Maybe it is just coincidence that I have such a fondness for rugged terrain, or maybe that fondness comes from my associating that terrain with my own beginnings, my own origins of meaning.