EL PASO – Peaking at the Most Dangerous City in the World

Juarez, the most dangerous city in the world, is but a stone’s through across the Rio Grande from El Paso. The Rio Grande is such a skinny river, that Luis Camacho, one of a handful of locals who hosted me here in EP, told me a person could easily wade across it. This past weekend, I was at the banks of the Rio Grande, looking straight across, seeing the people and reading the street signs of neighboring Juarez, where murder, police corruption, and grave fear amongst the innocents are part of the local daily reality in the virtual anarchic/mob-ocratic metropolis. Of course, I was reading the street signs from the safe side, El Paso, the second safest large city in America. The contrast seemed to tear at me from within: we’re in a safe zone, El Paso, where even the mayor of Juarez lives, and there were all of these people living in chaos just across the Rio Grande– a river far more narrow than almost any neighborhood street. The grave injustice to the overabundance of innocents is just not right. The narrow line is bordered by a high wall, and countless Border Patrol, a very prison-like environment, where the most serious crime that condemns you into the anarchy of the prison is to simply be born on the wrong side of the fence.
“El Paso is America’s best kept secret,” says Celia Pechak, professor of University of Texas – El Paso’s graduate physical therapy program. Professor Pechak has lived in many parts of the country (including Seattle) as well as other parts of the world, and has been in El Paso just a couple of years now. She explains that the winter weather is superb, the mountains are in their backyard (causing El Paso to horseshoe its way around them), El Paso is very close to White Sands, snowy mountains in New Mexico, and more. Summers can get a little hot, but the dry heat is vastly preferable to east coast humidity, and generous winds will often mitigate the powerful sun’s punishing summer impact. Indeed, having spent some two weeks now in the El Paso-Las Cruces corridor, I completely comprehend Celia’s points.
Locals easily rank among the friendliest people I’ve come across so far. The majority of the population is Hispanic, and many of the second and third generation children and grandchildren born here, on the safe side of the fence, still maintain the strong tie to the Spanish language. There are parts of the El Paso area which are so Hispanic, that I’m spoken to in Spanish when entering a store. I actually really like this– as I often think of the extended periods of times I’ve spent in Latin America, and am very optimistic about my next opportunity to return.
Though I’ve stayed with a variety of hosts here in El Paso, I’ve received more hospitable invitations here than I’ve been able to accept. Having arrived here just as the weather was reaching triple digits, with long, lonely, often waterless stretches ahead of me, I’ve decided that El Paso is the place from which I’ll be returning home for the summer– something I’ve felt called to do for the past thousand miles. I’ve left off on the southern end of Dyer Street, near Fort Bliss, and I will continue my Walk of Inspiration Across America from this exact point when I return to El Paso. For now, feeling the calling to return home, I’ll soon be accepting a series of rides which will bring me back home, to my family.
Intuition has worked in some most fascinating ways for me: I followed the “God Compass” within me to leave my job of seven years in 2007; to spend eight months traveling and volunteering through Latin America; to meditate deeply and do much volunteer work back home; to plan, prepare, and embark on a Walk of Inspiration Across America in 2009; to return home to visit my grandfather after reaching California’s central coast, this past fall; and now– to return home again, where my family awaits me. We’ll see what comes to pass…

El Paso & Juarez