More information, photos &
links can be found at
the bottom of this entry.
Summers are hot in South Texas.
Unthinkably hot. Impossibly hot. Your skin starts to sting the minute you step
outside. In the hottest part of the day, everything stops. Insects crawl
underground. Animals run and hide. Mosquitoes go wherever it is they go when
they're not making us miserable. The sun throbs and shimmers. It is so bright
that your pupils squeeze shut and all the colors of the earth fade into olives,
browns and burnt khakis. Cicadas hang upside down in the trees and emit a
continuous buzzing noise that sounds too artificial to come from a living
creature. It sounds like a broken smoke alarm that won't shut off no matter how
many times you punch it with a broom handle. It's almost as if the heat has a
sound of its own.
South Texas heat deserves an
exotic label. The Spanish word caliente works well, I think. If you blow your
exhaustion into the penultimate syllable and say it with some attitude, you get
a sense of what it's like here in August.
CaliENte!...
Click here to read the rest of this essay at
The Christian Century online.
Archive of Christian Century Articles by Gordon Atkinson
a
Christian Magazine
Christian Writing
More Information & Pictures
About South Texas and Illegal Immigration:
Note: I wrote this essay some weeks ago because the story behind it is a
personal one for me. I was surprised to find that by some coincidence, the
issue of illegal immigrants is very much in
the news right now.
Information about and stories of undocumented immigrants
Border patrol statistics for 2000-2004
The Victoria incident
GREAT pictures of the brush country and some animals of
South Texas
News story - Illegal immigrants found dead on a ranch.
A GREAT Documentary about the
journey of illegal immigrants -
Mojados: Through The Night (Available at Netflix)
I took these picture at a friend's
ranch. This will give you a feel for the country described in the essay.The name
of his ranch is "Con Safo."
Click images to enlarge
rlp
