El Paso lies in the westernmost corner of Texas, wedged between Mexico and New Mexico. It's closer to San Diego than Houston, both geographically and culturally. The city’s elevation is about 4,000 feet, and the wild and rugged Franklin Mountains rise to over 7,000 feet inside the city limits. The mountains bisect the city into its East and West sides, squeezing downtown into the area between the slopes and the Rio Grande. El Paso is one of the safest cities in the U.S., second only to San Jose, CA. It's also one of the poorest.
I tend to forget the desolation of the surrounding area. El Paso is a spread-out city, and one has to make a concerted effort to leave its boundaries. Indeed, my daily life is largely spent in a relatively small part of West El Paso that encompasses the university and our adjacent neighborhood of Spanish Revival houses set amid trees and lawns. As soon as you get outside of town, though, the immensity and raw beauty of the desert quickly assert themselves. I've put pictures of hikes and excursions in and around El Paso on a page on my Web site.
El Paso made national news recently, when endless downpours flooded our desert city, filling some houses with mud, cracking a Blockbuster video store in two, delaying motorists for hours, and causing the Rio Grande to overflow its banks and levees. The river also flooded up-river towns to the north, like Hatch, NM, which was struggling to hold its annual chile festival. Our arid climate doesn't demand particularly strong skills in roofing, so when serious rains do come, most roofs leak. People all over El Paso reported leaks. At our house, half our kitchen cabinets were drying out in the garage for a month, with two other minor areas of ceiling damage to repair. Many people were much, much worse off than Susie and I, having to take refuge in the Convention Center or even losing their homes. In all, in the five weeks from July 28 to September 5, over 12 inches of rain fell at the El Paso airport, and some neighborhoods received much more than that. Our average annual rainfall is only 8 inches.
The aftermath of the rain was both physical and political. Physically, the effects involved mosquitoes and plants, and lots of both. Winters are dry here, so mosquitoes are a summer phenomenon, and generally limited to the area directly around the Rio Grande. Those who live in the Upper Valley, with big irrigated lawns and room for horses, have to accept mosquitoes as part of their quality-of-life bargain. With the rain, the rest of us--higher and once drier--have been fighting off swarms. In Santa Teresa, NM, well west of the river and right up against the desert, the organizers of a professional golf tournament found to their dismay that the course had plenty of mosquitoes and, because everyone else had them too, local stores had run out of insect repellant. In the event, the exposure turned out to be limited because the recurring rain compelled replacing the tournament's final day with a championship "round" of one hole of golf. The other physical aftermath was the phenomenal growth of plant life. Desert expanses in the distance now look like pastures, the mountains are unusually green, and weeds are shoulder high in yards and parks across the city. Homeowners have been surprised to be notified that they have to get weeds down to one foot tall; it's normally simply not an issue here. The mountain is so green and lush that when low clouds spilled over the ridge the other day I could have been looking at slopes in Puerto Rico.
Politically, the patterns of flooding have led to increased pressure to preserve El Paso's arroyos from becoming housing developments. In the last year, a UTEP professor contributed his inheritance to buy an arroyo and donate it to the city, thus saving it from development. Another arroyo was bought by an association of neighbors. But other arroyos have already been developed or are currently being bulldozed, in a counterpoint to the up-slope encroachment of up-scale houses ever higher on our mountain. These areas, which held much of El Paso's appeal, have been changed from desert to development. The force of the water cascading down from the mountainsides, channeling into and down the arroyos, has spurred greater efforts to save them. The local newspaper has published many letters along these lines, with the occasional rebuttal from a developer. The outcome of this fight is far from clear, as funds to save the arroyos remain scarce.
Another dispute about development involves downtown El Paso, which is a fascinating place that combines lots of smaller stores catering to shoppers from Mexico, many charming buildings surviving from a high-culture architecture of the early Twentieth Century, several large buildings that have remained derelict for years, brick tenements of the Segundo Barrio, and a growing number of cultural facilities. (Pictures here.) Many in El Paso are backing a plan to redevelop downtown; many others oppose the plan. The backers want to make downtown a more attractive destination, particularly for high-end consumers. The opponents fear the destruction of thriving businesses serving Mexican shoppers and the loss of historic neighborhoods.
Even in their awful consequences, the rains caused us to see El Paso in a different way. How odd then and normal now to see a front-page headline in two-inch letters exclaiming "Two dry days forecast for El Paso" Even just driving around, Susie and I noticed novel sights, like water streaming in falls over the rocky hillsides along the freeway. After things had dried off, we drove out into the New Mexico desert to visit some lava fields, only to find that the dirt roads had been washed away enough to make them impassable, even for a four-wheel-drive vehicle. Much of the acrimony about downtown development faded as El Pasoans faced the rains and floods. While the debate is heating up again as the city dries out, all that water here in the desert certainly caught our attention for a while.
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DGN, October 4, 2006