SUNSET LIMITED
Alpine with a long honk of its horn.
Yellow hills rumple the horizon, their
slopes scarred by rains and baked iron-
hard by the Texan sun. Telephone wires
and cattle fences zip by. Occasionally,
a trailer park or a gas station flashes past.
Emptiness is everywhere. The sun climbs
higher, and the land bleaches from
sand-yellow to salt-white.
Two hundred miles west near El Paso,
the railroad passes within a few hundred
feet of the Mexican border as it crosses the
Rio Grande. A century ago, this was the
main route followed by prospectors
on their way to California’s goldfields.
Today, it’s a flashpoint for border
troubles; gunboats patrol the banks,
looking for drug traffickers and illegal
immigrants. Dusty yellow banks line either
side of the waterway, and to the south,
across the Mexican border, the grey sprawl
of the city of Ciudad Juárez blurs into
barren desert. The gold prospectors and
gunslingers have faded into history but,
a century on, this remains a wild frontier.Mile 1,493
It’s 6.45pm when the Sunset Limited
arrives in Tucson and there’s just enough
time to make it out to the desert to see the
sun go down. Out on the White Stallion
Ranch, Laura True and her horse Lobo are
watching the show over a sea of prickly
pears and saguaro cactuses. Dust-devil
whirlwinds dance across the ground and
a rumble of thunder signals a distant
storm. As the sun melts below the horizon,
Laura steers Lobo’s reins towards home,
where a cowboy’s supper is waiting:
fried potatoes and beef brisket cooked
slow over a hickory-wood fire.
With her Stetson and leather chaps, Laura
looks like an all-American cowgirl, but
she’s actually an Englishwoman, hailing
from rural Gloucestershire. She came here
as a volunteer 20 years ago, fell in love‘Occasionally
a trailer park
or a gas station
flashes past’
TUCSON,
ARIZONA