It’s a week after I swore up and down that I was going to make a concerted effort to return to blogging on a more regular basis, and this would be my very first post since then.  The irony is so rich that I could serve it with ice cream.

I have a valid excuse: for the past couple of days, I’ve been on the road down in the Rio Grande Valley.  On Monday, we were conducting training in Edinburg, Texas, and on Tuesday, we were in Laredo:

I took my camera with me, convinced that photographic opportunities were going to present themselves.  Unfortunately, save for the cemetery that was overrun with balloons (the one that I drove past at a good sixty miles an hour), not much appeared that was photo worthy.

I’ve always enjoyed traveling down to the Valley.  The people we’re down there to train are always unbelievably savvy and actually interested in what we’re there to do (and turn out in good numbers — our session in Edinburg may well have been the largest one we’ve ever done).  The Valley itself is quite unlike anywhere else in the state of Texas, which is another reason why I like going down there.  You drive and drive across miles of ranching land (which, to the naked eye, would appear to be synonymous with “nothingness”) and then, just as you reach the outskirts of the urban areas on either of the two highways that run down there, a most interesting geographic transformation takes place.  All of a sudden, the scrub land gives way to lush, green fields.  Cactus becomes palm trees.  And suddenly, it feels like you’ve managed to drive through a wormhole into south Florida (senior citizens with RVs included).

We’ve done work in Brownsville, Texas, before, which is absolutely the end of the line.  There’s no part of Texas farther south than Brownsville – from that point forward, it’s all Mexico.  This time, we were in Edinburg, about an hour’s drive west. 

Our local contact in Brownsville, with whom we’ve become friendly over the years, used to take us to a restaurant across the border in Mexico.  This trip, however, we didn’t discuss crossing the border.  For one, the passport requirement for land crossings kicked in last month, and I don’t like using my passport to enter the United States because apparently there’s something on my Customs and Border Patrol record that makes immigration officers frown.  Second, and more critically, the situation on the Mexican side of the border is pretty tense at the moment.  The State Department issued a warning last week for Americans traveling in the border region, and a good number of the bridges were shut down due to citizen protests believed to have been orchestrated by one or another of the drug cartels battling for control of the major cities along the US border.

So, after we completed our session in Edinburg and headed north for our first-ever session in Laredo, we did not cross the border and take the more direct and apparently superior Mexico Highway 2 that runs between Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo.  Instead, we took the main highway on this side, US Highway 83.

I wrote many months ago about a trip in a service taxi in Morocco that we’ve since dubbed the “flying coffin.”  The trek on US 83 kind of reminded me of that trip.  It wasn’t that I was pulling up behind semi-trucks and then pulling out blindly into the opposing lane to execute a passing maneuver, as our insane Moroccan driver had done, but it certainly was interesting in a “Aren’t you glad you have Mutual of Omaha?” sort of way.  Vehicles pulled out onto the road (which becomes two lanes after civilization is left behind — which happens very quickly) apparently without regard or interest to whether there was oncoming traffic and whether or not it would have time to slow down.  More than once, I got sweaty palms noticing large vehicles in my lane that were traveling in the opposite direction, in the midst of trying to pass slower vehicles but in no particular hurry to get back over to their own side.

And then there was the omnipresent border patrol.  At nearly every vista where the mostly flat geography was interrupted by a hill that afforded a view toward the border off to our left, there was an SUV from the border patrol parked on the side of the road, apparently full of officers who were, presumably, less interested in illegal immigrants than drug traffickers.

I won’t say that it wasn’t a great relief that we managed to reach the outskirts of Laredo before the sun went down.

Our contact for the next day was a very excitable lady who, while very nice, was also a level of manic that might require medication.  Within two minutes of her arrival in the morning, we had established where we would be having lunch.  She also gleefully told us that there had been so much interest in our session that she had reopened registration the day before — which would have been fine had this not left us going through all of our things hoping for one or two copies of brochures and worksheets so that we wouldn’t find ourselves in the awkward position of telling people that they had to share.  Fortunately, at the end of the day, we managed to scrape by with nearly no extras, but enough things for everyone in the room.

Over lunch, she regaled us with stories of life on the border.  “I won’t go over there,” she said.  “It’s really bad.  I mean, they kidnap Americans for the ransom.  Even though I’m lower middle class, we’ve already figured out that if one of us gets kidnapped, we can count on our friends to raise thirty, forty thousand dollars for ransom for me.”  (How this situation would present itself in light of her first statement was a question none of us wanted to raise.)  She then went on to tell us, “You know, they harvest organs over there.  The media doesn’t report on this stuff, but I know it’s happening.  I mean, if you’re sick and you can find a rich American than no one’s going to miss, you kidnap them and take them to the black market.  Look at any one of you — I mean, you’re young and fit.  They’d take your kidneys without a second thought.”

She then went on to tell us that she really wanted to get a gun.  “A cousin of mine lives in Houston, and she carries, and this one night she was being followed and the car pulled up next to her at a light.  So she took the gun out and put it on the dashboard, and they drove off in a hurry.  So, I want to get one, too.”  Clearly her kidneys depended on it.

And so it was, when I rolled into my driveway last night, with both of my kidneys still firmly in place, that it occurred to me to wonder whether that was an indication that I’m no longer young and fit, and my kidneys aren’t desirable.  Hey, wait a minute!  How come the Laredo cartel doesn’t want my kidneys?  They’re perfectly good! 

Hmph.

Anyway.  That was my last trip for a while.  I’m looking forward to being able to put my feet up and relax this weekend, free of travel plans and hotel rooms and chain restaurants.  The conspiracy theories do make for good blog fodder, though …