Bill,
next time you're in Arizona, stop by and we'll head for the border! I was
in Douglas this past Monday and Tuesday at some meetings on both sides of the
border. Very fascinating. Here are a couple of funny things I
learned about the border:
1)
actually the fence at the Douglas/Agua Prieta crossing is about two-three
feet inside the United States. If you go westward, the big fence ends,
giving way to a run-down, simple barbed-wire fence with big holes in
it.
2)
every 40 years the two communities have an international horse race. The
US team races down their side of the fence on the border patrol road, while the
Mexican participants race on the dirt road on their side of the fence--the two
tracks being only about 15 feet apart. Unfortunately I didn't know about
this event until two weeks after it was over, and it's not expected to happen
again for another 40 years!!!!!!
3)
there's a special border crossing for cows!!! In fact they have to have
their own passports!!! Ok, not passports per se, but paperwork. It's
down the border about three km from the traffic crossing. The corrals on
the Mexican side are connected to the corrals on the US side by a small corridor
that crosses through the fence. Before, I thought that the cattle were
basically just transported across the main crossing in big trucks, but I learned
different. They actually have their own pedestrian crossing!!!!
Apparently there's one at Nogales and Tijuana too. I think everyone
will get a kick out of the pictures.
Dallen
Fascinating stuff! I've visited
Nogales about a half dozen times. I seem to remember the fence being
fairly accurately lined up with the monuments in the general vicinity of the
port of entry (the fence was probably less than a foot inside US territory),
but I also remember seeing a monument suspended from a rocky outcropping on a
hill a little to the west of the main crossing area. Another interesting
place is Douglas...I think they may have completed the fence construction that
was going on in the last couple of years, but when I was there, the only thing
separating Douglas from Agua Prieta was a big ditch running directly on top of
the border. I had an interesting conversation with a US Border Patrol
officer who was complaining about spending hours just sitting in his car
looking across the ditch with his binoculars. Still, I think I would
have traded jobs!
Bill
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