Saturday (April 12) I finished polishing blog entries and saddled up Nell for the ride into El Paso. I didn’t quite have enough juice to comfortably make it to El Paso so after 74 miles, I stopped in Van Horn to refuel. I managed to disconnect before my free 30 minutes was up so this charge didn’t cost me a dime. Had I paid out of pocket, it would have cost me $23.36 or $17.52 with an EA Plus membership.

The chargers were in a Days Inn parking lot. This Days Inn was not yet defunct, but judging from the deferred maintenance and the rusting fixtures in the bathroom, it’s days were coming to an end. After topping up my snack supply, it was back on the road. I called up Marty Robbins on iTunes and sang along to his ballad about an interracial love affair at Rosa’s Cantina that ended badly.

My destination was the Cattleman’s Steakhouse at the 32,000 acre Indian Cliffs Ranch about 30 minutes east of El Paso. The Steakhouse is located in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert. There are no buildings and only scrubby desert vegetation for miles around. There is an abundance of gulches, dry arroyos, sand, and rocks though. I suspect that they got into restauranting because ranching here was a pretty marginal business.

I hadn’t realized that El Paso, unlike the rest of Texas is on Mountain Time so instead of being 15 minutes late, I was 45 minutes early. I had time to poke around. The Steakhouse was a popular location for B movie westerns and had the posters, autographs, and letters of thanks to prove it. It also had some exhibits and restored military equipment from the days when the U.S. Cavalry was chasing Pancho Villa around these parts.

Side note: I was once helping a person close to me go through some boxes that included things from a particularly beloved grand-uncle that spent some time in management at a copper mine in southern Arizona during a time that the historical record shows a lot of unlovely things were happening in that industry in that state. There was a shocking photo of a corpse of a Mexican laid out and beside him white men with guns posing as though with a hunting trophy. The photo wasn’t good enough to tell if that was Mr. Villa or if the uncle was one of those posing with the corpse, but I will never forget it. In his later years, the uncle spent many years convalescing in pain, his legs amputated, and his hands contracted into immobile claws. The cause of his symptoms was never diagnosed, but I suspect that he was poisoned by the toxic chemicals used to separate copper from the ore at the mines in Arizona.

I was meeting an old college buddy that I hadn’t seen in 30 years, the last earnest pilgrim, RG. RG was born in El Paso and spent time growing up there. He had the poor luck to have parents who didn’t have it in them to create a nice stable family. So RG spent time here and there being raised by grandparents in El Paso, Virginia, and eventually going to high school in Baltimore.

But RG applied himself. He got into Columbia University. RG spent his college summers working in newly independent Estonia and in South Africa working at the Regional Peace Secretariats in Johannesburg and in Katlehong and Thokoza townships laying a peaceful groundwork for elections.. He thought about seminary, but went to Stanford Law School and then to Oxford to study world religion and Christianity. After five years working on public interest law cases, RG went to Sweden for a masters in European law.

RG could have pursued jobs out of law school that would have put his net worth well into 8 figures by now, but instead RG took a job working for plaintiffs in civil rights and consumer protection cases. He also chaired the International Human Rights Committee of the ABA’s International Law section and taught human rights at two European law schools.

Eventually he moved back to the states and became a class action lawyer. As you might have gathered, RG has a passion for justice. In any fight, he wants to stick up for the little guy who’s getting bullied by those with power and influence. Trial lawyering takes a toll on your health and personal life, but RG soldiers on, undeterred.

Side note No. 2: Class action lawyers are the great unsung heroes of our justice system. Large corporations figured out long ago that if they steal a little bit from a lot of people, it will add up to a lot of money. And while you might object to the $5 or $10 they cheated you out of, it’s hardly worth hiring a lawyer and filing a lawsuit to fight with them about it. People know this and they hate it, but they have to put up with it. So class action lawyers file one big lawsuit on behalf of all the people that were cheated. Eventually a check arrives in the mail and it doesn’t cost the victims a dime.

I have personally benefited from the efforts of class action lawyers several times. Once in Cancun, I rented a car from Hertz for several weeks. The price on the website was in dollars, but the rental agent insisted on converting the dollar price into pesos which was fine and he screwed me on the exchange rate which was not fine, but more or less to be expected. When I returned the car, he insisted on converting the pesos back into a dollars and screwing me again on the exchange rate. This was more screwing than I had signed up for, but I had a plane to catch and he knew it. I wasn’t going to miss the plane for $100 so I signed the receipt. A few years later, I got a check in the mail for $100 from Hertz. A class action lawyer found out what they were doing and hauled them into court and made them make it right.

I pay considerable taxes every year to fund, among other things, some very capable attorneys at the local, state, and federal level all of whom are supposed to catch people who steal and throw them in the poky to deter others from stealing in the future. Why did no one from Hertz go to jail?

A similar thing happened when I bought a diesel Jetta from Volkswagen based on lies they told me about how clean it’s emissions were. They got caught. Class action lawyers got involved and I got a very generous check in the mail with no effort or expense on my part. But the government lawyers whose salaries I actually do pay? They had other priorities. No one from Volkswagen went to jail.

So God bless RG and all the other class action lawyers out there sticking up for the little guy.

Back to our story.

RG and I tucked into our steaks and commenced to catching up as only college buddies who haven’t seen each other for 30 years can. The Cattleman’s Steakhouse is a giant place and it was the middle afternoon so it was hours before the wait staff started getting twitchy. Then we took a stroll around the grounds while talking some more. They have quite a menagerie including a rattlesnake pit (which was not to my liking) and petting goats (which very much were).

Then we settled in on the veranda for drinks and more catching up. The dry desert air and all the talking dried out my vocal cords and caused my voice to go up a notch in pitch. RG laconically observed, “You used to be a baritone in college.” That afternoon and over the weekend we covered most of the eternal mysteries including, but not limited to: God, the fairer sex, and whether we might live in a simulation. A famous car salesman sez yes, but I don’t find Ketamine-addled druggies particularly persuasive on much of anything. Neil DeGrasse Tyson also sez yes. I find him more persuasive on most things, but remain unpersuaded on this topic.

Suppose we do live in a simulation? Would you live your life any differently? The same things that make your life good and worth living in “reality” would also make it good and worth living in a “simulation.” Maybe if I tried Ketamine, I’d be able to understand what it is that I’m missing here. Regardless, it felt good to hearken back to the days of dorm rooms with RG and take big swings and big topics.

Back to El Paso. After leaving the Steakhouse, RG and I headed over to his friend J’s exotic animal preserve. There were Kangaroos, a Zebra, a couple of camels (and a baby camel), lemurs, Blue Hyacinth Macaws (absolutely stunning), a Fennec Fox, and a dog. It seems that care and keeping of exotic animals is a popular pastime in Texas. Molly Ivins once joked about the rather . . . uh . . . expansive claims of membership by some Texas megapastors, “In Texas, there are more Baptists than there are people.” I’m beginning to wonder if in Texas, there might be even more Zebras than there are Baptists.

We settled in around a campfire with cigars, beverages, a couple of animal helpers, J’s wife M, and his two very smart daughters. It turns out that M is one of El Paso’s leading white-collar criminal defense attorneys. She also grew up Urbana and two of her brothers went to the same high school that I did. Her mother had a Texas-size personality and was among the generation of women who ran for local office as Democrats and helped wrest control of Champaign County away from the local Republican machine. Anytime two or more trial lawyers are in proximity, it is not long before war stories commence (always with punctilious observation of the rules on client confidentiality) and moist garrulousness ensued. Eventually, the fire died down and R and I headed back to his comfortable home in Far East El Paso.

We took our time getting started the next morning. After admiring the quail that showed up in RG’s backyard to nosh on bird seed and hydrate, we eventually headed up into New Mexico to White Sands National Park. The “sand” at White Sands is gypsum which has eroded off the mountains surrounding the basin where the park is located. When the gypsum dries out, the wind blows it until it arrives at the park where its hydrophilic nature causes to clump with other particles of gypsum and create the 40-foot dunes.

The dunes move about ten feet a year, but Yucca has evolved a stem that allows it to just grow up through the dunes as they move. Eventually, you have a Yucca plant that is sitting on top of a 40-foot dune and pumping water up through it’s forty foot stem from it’s root system which is still down on the desert floor where it started. As the dune starts to move away, eventually the Yucca, which is now located on a 40-foot “stilt,” topples over and its seeds start the next generation down on the desert floor as the next dune approaches.

All this was explained by a ranger intern as the sun drifted down toward the mountains, the light shifting, and the air cooling over the brilliant sands. It was beautiful and mesmerizing.

With a start, RG and I realized that the hour was growing late and it was Sunday night. By the time, we drove back El Paso, most of the decent restaurants would be closed. I also had hopes of visiting Rosa’s Cantina. Rosa’s would be open until midnight, but their kitchen closed at 9 pm. We would not arrive until 9:15. RG asked if they took “to go” orders over the phone. They did. And so we placed a “to go” order which was waiting for us when we arrived. We opened up the styrofoam boxes and enjoyed some of the best Tex-mex that I’ve had on this trip. The flavors were bright and the salsa was crisp and citrusy.

Rosa’s is still kind of a dive bar. On this night, there were no wicked Felinas with eyes black as the night dancing, but were there were a couple of old white farts playing darts. Being as I’ve never had a hankering for gunplay, I was relieved.

Exhausted, well-fed, and happy, we toddled off to bed.

Day 1: 688 miles traveled. $12.01 Spent on “gas.” $51.08 in “gas” money contributed by Hyundai. Cost of “gas” with an Electrify America membership: $47.32.

Day 2: 377 miles traveled. $9.82 spent on “gas.” $90.82 in “gas” money contributed by Hyundai. Cost of “gas” with an Electrify America membership: $75.48.

Days 3 and 4: All over Austin. Not a penny spent on “gas.”

Day 5: 410 miles traveled. 41 cents spent on “gas.” $73.13 in “gas” money contributed by Hyundai. Cost of “gas” with an Electrify American membership: $55.16.

Day 6: 240 miles traveled. Not a penny spent on “gas.”

Day 7: 28 miles traveled. Not a penny spent on “gas.”

Days 8 and 9: 187 miles traveled and all over El Paso. Not a penny spent on “gas.” $23.36 in “gas money contributed by Hyundai. Cost of “gas” with an Electrify America membership: $17.52.

Trip Total: 1,930 miles traveled and all over Austin and El Paso. $22.24 spent on “gas”. $187.31 in “gas” contributed by Hyundai. Cost of “gas” for a retail customer with an Electrify America membership: $157.16.