El Paso, Week Three

This week, I learned a lot more about the history of this area, called the Borderland by locals, especially about the invasion of the US by Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. Also, I made my first visit to Mexico.

On Sunday I went to the First Presbyterian Church again. This week, the pastor’s sermon was based on the movie “Bohemian Rhapsody” and the struggles of Queen’s lead singer Freddie Mercury.

At the service, there was a four-piece rock band and four singers who covered several Queen songs. They did a very good job. The pastor talked about Freddie Mercury’s struggles with drugs and his sexual orientation and how it cost him the love of woman he cared a great deal for.

The pastor’s main point was that we spend a lot of time looking for love, but that is around us in the people we meet and the love of God that is everywhere. The service closed with the rock anthem “We Will Rock You” but with the lyric “We Will Bless You.”

It was Super Bowl Sunday, so I stopped at the grocery to get some snacks and it was packed. A lot of people had the same idea.

It was a beautiful, sunny day and I spent a couple of hours outside reading an auto-biography of Mike Love of the Beach Boys that Pam gave me for Christmas. The Beach Boys were a favorite band of mine, especially in my high school years when their songs evoked images of the California beach scene with warm sun, blue ocean, fast cars and California girls in bikinis.

Love’s book provides another insight into the group’s troubles caused by family discord, drugs, alcohol and unscrupulous managers and record companies.

While I was reading, my Airbnb host Adolfo came out of his house with a container of homemade queso dip and nacho chips. He said he and his wife Delia thought I would enjoy a snack during the game. I already planned to have pizza and a salad, so this was a great addition.

I really wasn’t interested in the game until I found out that Rams Coach Sean McVay played football and graduated from my alma mater, Miami University. So, I was rooting for the Rams, but the other team won.

I thought the commercials were just so-so, but my favorite was for Hyundai with Jason Bateman as an elevator operator taking a young couple car shopping on an elevator trip suggestive of Dante’s layers of Hell. The elevator stopped at floors with a number of obnoxious situations including a root canal, jury duty and a vegan dinner party before it stopped at a Hyundai dealership making the couple happy.

This week’s Borderland history class at UTEP focused on the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. On March 9, 1916, Villa and about 500 men attacked the village of Columbus, NM, killing about a dozen residents and a couple of US soldiers who were at nearby Fort Putnam. After the attack, President Woodrow Wilson ordered a US response and several thousand US Army troops under General “Black Jack” Pershing invaded Mexico and spent almost a year trying to capture Villa. In early 1917, Wilson called off the mission and ordered Pershing and the troops to return home because the President knew the US would be entering World War I soon.

Later in the week, I drove to Columbus, NM, and visited two museums dedicated to the history of the attack. One museum is in the original town railroad station and was created by the local historical society. The the other is at Pancho Villa State Park. One artifact I remember is the safe from the Bank of Columbus that had a bullet hole in the front from the raid. The safe was manufactured by Diebold Co. of Canton, Ohio.

The caretaker at the local display said the town was named after Columbus, Ohio, when it was founded as a railroad stop in the late 1800s. Ironically, one the fatalities in the 1916 raid was Dr. Harry Maurice Hart, who had a veterinary medicine degree from Ohio State and was a government livestock inspector. He arrived in Columbus on business the night before the raid and died when Villa’s men set fire to the hotel where he was staying. His remains were returned to Columbus, OH, for burial.

After I visited the two museums, I drove about three miles south and parked my car on the US side of the border with Mexico. I then walked across the border to Puerto Palomas, a small town of several thousand right on the border. The main street was crowded with tourists on a sunny Friday afternoon and there were police and Mexican army personnel around.

I went to a gift shop-restaurant called the Pink House and the it was mobbed with mostly American tourists. There was a Mariachi Band playing and most of the people were drinking beer from bottles or Margaritas out of plastic cups. It was quite a scene seeing silver-haired women trying navigate the racks of souvenirs without spilling their drinks.

I was hoping to get some lunch while there, but to paraphrase baseball great Yogi Berra, it was so crowded I didn’t want to be there. After about 45 minutes, I walked back across the border and stopped for lunch at a small café in Columbus.

On my way home, I was stopped at a Border Patrol checkpoint about 15 miles outside Columbus. Orange cones were set up in the road and all traffic was directed by an electronic sign to pull over. A Border Patrol officer looked inside my car and asked if I was a US citizen and then told me I could leave. The previous week I was stopped at another Border Patrol checkpoint near White Sands National Park.

On Thursday, I went to UTEP to see the Miners play Florida Atlantic University. The Miners aren’t very good and they lost this game by 15 and their record fell to 7-17. But, I got a free, souvenir t-shirt commemorating Texas Western College (UTEP’s former name). In the 1966 NCAA basketball championship they beat heavily-favored Kentucky. I remember watching that game as a high school senior and rooting for Texas Western to pull off the upset. This was years before I attended Kentucky. That accomplishment was a college version of “Hoosiers” with the small, unknown school taking down a giant.

At halftime they introduced the wife of coach Don Haskins and the widow of Bobby Joe Hill, the point guard of the championship team and they received a standing ovation from the crowd.

The weather this week was okay, sunny and upper 50s to low 60s. But, Wednesday was very windy and the dust filled the air, making the surrounding mountains less visible. I had some difficulty breathing as I returned to my car after class. But, I can’t complain with the weather here compared with the blizzards and record low temperatures in other parts of the country.

Until next week…