The Pass
The city, upon approach:
North Franklin Peak, reaching towards an expansive sky, pale blue and cloudless. A sky whose hues shift from blue to blazing swaths of watercolor at sunset.
At night it is a canopy of darkness, extending in all directions, constellation adorned, hanging over the nothingness past Odessa. My siblings and I, noses pressed against the windows of my parents’ giant Mercury, waiting impatiently for our first glimpse of the city’s glittering lights. In my mind they were stars below, mirroring the stars above.
As a child I found the city much less attractive by day. Endless concrete and not enough green. Rock gardens. Scrubby clusters of creosote and tar bush that, while beautiful in their way, tended to trap litter. There were some things I liked more than others - cacti gardens and century plants; the long, straight, lines of Italian Cypress that I imagined were soldiers standing guard; a Desert Willow in bloom.
My grandparents’ front yard had neither Italian Cypress nor Desert Willow, but a squat chinaberry tree. One of my first memories is of my father seated beneath that tree. Black hair, like my own, and the same gray-blue eyes, paired with the wiry build of his early adulthood. He sat drinking beers with his best friend, Wesley, while I played nearby. I believe this would have been the summer of ‘83 when he was around twenty-two and I was four.
In the backyard, grapevines snaked in and over various structures: the cages that contained the guinea fowl and koi pond, kennels, school lockers awaiting some future purpose, old dryers my grandfather was welding into dog houses, old shopping carts he was welding into bird houses. He took an early retirement after years spent as a fire captain, and busied himself with these projects. In the carport was a travel trailer he built on the chassis of a 1960 Ford Falcon (a fact I would later commit to memory after I purchased a ‘60 Falcon of my own when I was 19).
My paternal grandmother, our nucleus before the fission, in the kitchen cooking pasta with the thin, strangely sweet sauce, surrounded by the playful banter of my father and his siblings. Blushes and guffaws I didn't fully understand. It was later, in the small sliver of time that we were both adults before her death, that I realized my grandmother had a penchant for bawdy humor.
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Visits with my mother’s family were entirely different, our time spent being shuttled between aunties and great aunties; second and third cousins whose names I still don't remember.
There were visits with my great-grandmother, my abuelita, imbued with a somber sense of importance that I never fully understood. We were coached on our Spanish before meeting with her and tssssked! when we got it wrong. I can still hear my grandmother chastising my mother, Aye, Celia! These kids!. As though my grandmother hadn’t herself grown rusty, intent on assimilating after moving to the States as a child.
Two of my Mexican great aunties were married to Germans they met at Fort Bliss. Holidays were filled with schnitzel, sausages with sauerkraut, real German chocolates with liqueur inside, tamales, menudo, and the sopa with tiny noodles. Fresh chile to be eaten with virtually everything. Then in the evenings we would go back to Dad's side of the family for leftover turkey and dressing at TV trays.
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When I was older I made the trek west for service trips at a foster care facility. These memories are fragmented and hazy. Recollections of days spent hard at work, followed by late nights filled with card games and delirious laughter. It was strange, revisiting the city - my birthplace and such a large part of my childhood - as a sort of a tourist. On our days off we crossed the border to buy striped, woven blankets, leather sandals, and cheap silver jewelry.
This was around the time I started taking pictures compulsively - the restaurant with the giant pastel murals; the boy that was tall, dimpled perfection to my sixteen-year-old self; Lindsay’s broad smile; the scrubby landscape that I would eventually come to appreciate.
I miss what I now regard as its apophatic beauty - a subtraction of the verdant canopies and fields I grew up with; the familiar flora; the lakes and the streams. What is left is minimalism, a stripped-down sort of splendor. Bare but not barren.
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From that furthest point west, it would take us a full day to arrive home; thirteen hours of driving while never leaving the state. The morning of our departure would always find my grandmother, teary-eyed, standing in the driveway and yelling after our car. I wish I’d known the last time I left would be the last time. Neither side of the family lives there now; we've all scattered.
Last week I looked up the Burnham house in an old real estate listing. The chinaberry tree is now gone. So are the grapes and the koi pond, the guinea fowl, and the maze of my grandfather's projects.
So are we.
11:59 a.m. - 2024-01-08
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