New Mexico, Texas

We left Denver and choking traffic and embarked on the longest and most ill-prepared leg of the journey. Unscheduled and shunted into our plans on a whim and a friend’s urge, we shot down to Albuquerque, then onto El Paso, over to Fort Worth and finally up to Memphis and back with our original plans.

We stopped at White Sands deep in southern New Mexico, a couple hundred square kilometres of gypsum dunes next to a missile testing site. Signs for trails warned of dehydration and unexploded ballistics parts. Thanks to a terrific storm that squatted over the mountains nearby we were saved the glare of the sun kicking up too much from the sand so white it looked to be snow at first. When it did finally emerge, the sun blasted down and from beneath, reflecting from the sand so that I did not know whether to shield my eyes or cup them with the backs of my hands.

Every single creature that scuttles, slithers or darts across the soft white sand dunes seems to have blanched to an albino strain to fit the white, white blanket beneath. Yucca grow up and up to escape the piles of sand that gather as dunes shift and threaten to engulf the plants wholesale. As the dunes move on, the plants is too tall to support itself and wilts, bends and dies after all the fight.

That evening we stopped in The Most Wretched City on Earth, also known as El Paso. Straddling the borders of New Mexico, Texas and Mexico, helicopters fly over a ghost town downtown in pairs by night, searchlights ready. We walked 7 blocks or so to find someplace to eat, retired to an old hotel that breathed with giant air con gills clutching the ceilings and got a ticket for speeding the fuck out of there early the next morning.

Across Texas, oil pumps bobbed like mechanical birds pecking the ground and toothpicks lay in gas station restroom sink swill...we ate great steak too. That’s about it for Texas.