Calexico - Hard Hat

There was a day in mid-August 2006 when I had a chance to venture out on I-8 opposite El-Centro into the desert. On my way to Tempe, AZ, I ran into an ecotone, a geographical anomaly where two different landscapes collide, right outside San Diego. Within five minutes of drive time into the twisting, turning mountains, the road entered into a vast expanse of yellow sand floor. That's where I saw the unsuspicious traffic-sign pointing at Calexico on the right of I-8. To drive in that desert among rocky hills looking at you sideways is to disturb the stasis, the radio dial whispering long faded out signals hovering above the summits and the sandstorms. The intrusion, the spirits dwelling in the air, silent evenings descending, shadows of crumbling walls, forgotten alleys exposing everything exposing you, that queasy feeling one associate with travel exhaustion.

The Savage Detectives - pg. 303

Cuban took his poems and thanked him, and then right away he and Rafael got up, as if in slow motion, like a flash of lightning, or twin flashes, or a flash and its shadow, but in slow motion, and in that fraction of a second I thought: everything is all right, I hope everything will be all right, and I saw myself swimming on a Havanna beach and I saw Rafael by my side, a little distance away, talking to some American journalists, people from New York, from San Francisco, talking about LITERATURE, talking about POLITICS, at the gates of paradise.

Barbara Patterson, in her kitchen, Jackson Street, San Diego, California, March 1981