We got there at 2 p.m. The sun’s dry heat clung to everything—sharp, unflinching, the kind of desert warmth that doesn’t smother but toasts you slowly from the outside in. The sky above was an unbroken sheet of blue, too vast to belong to just one country. Even the breeze felt baked—barely moving, more memory than motion.
Tom Lea Park sat high above El Paso, carved like a secret into the ridge, modest in size but rich with perspective. It doesn’t boast fountains or playgrounds. It doesn’t need to. It simply offers a view—one that silences conversation and narrows the soul to a single point of stillness.
From this ledge, the city sprawled below us in all directions, stitched together with power lines, highways, and heatwaves. Juárez sat just beyond the border wall, its buildings and boulevards as clear as if they belonged to the same city—because, in some deeper way, they still do. The wall itself zigzagged through the distance like a scar that hadn’t healed quite right. Geography, at least, remains more honest than politics.
The Franklin Mountains rose behind us—jagged, scorched, ancient. We were standing at their end, the southernmost reach of the Rockies, where stone gives way to valley and vision. They didn’t ask to be admired; they simply endured. The last breath of an old continent’s spine.
Tom Lea, the man for whom the park is named, was more than a painter. He was a chronicler of this borderland—a writer, a wartime artist, and a native son who saw the fractures and still chose to love the whole. He wrote once, “I live on the east side of the mountain. ... My life crosses the border. It is in my eyes and under my skin.” That quote felt tangible here. Not a metaphor but a fact, etched into the rock and wind.
We weren’t alone—there was a couple holding hands on the bench to our right, a jogger passed behind us, a man in business attire leaned on the railing murmuring into his phone. Life, in its many forms, kept moving. But all of it seemed slowed, muted somehow, against the weight of the view.
I thought of something else Lea wrote: “To see the world clearly, and to say what you see. That is what I try to do.” And maybe that’s why this place matters. Because clarity is hard to come by. Because from up here, above the heat and traffic and argument, a person might briefly see past lines on maps and laws in books—and instead, glimpse the truth that we are all neighbors, no matter how high the wall runs.
We didn’t stay long. The sun was relentless, and the city waited below. But the stillness stayed with me. The sense that something ended here—an old mountain range, maybe, or a way of seeing—and something else began.
We descended, but I know now what Tom Lea meant. To see clearly. To speak plainly. And to love a place—even when it’s complicated.