It’s been five days since I was on an interstate and it’s taking a while for me to adjust. Trucks thunder past with the hammer down, their chrome exhaust stacks flashing, buffed to a blinding shine by the owner/drivers from Florida, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama; hauling loads to all points west. My compact saloon rocks as the volume of speeding metal and cargo displaces the air like a ship carving a passage through the waters of the ocean and I’m left, tossed aside and wallowing in the wake of these monster roadsters.

If the trucks are the full-ahead battlewagons of the road, then the pickups are the destroyers - the greyhounds. With all the power and weight concentrated upfront, growling under the hood, the Dodge Ram badge acts like a ship's figurehead, butting and battering a way through. Diving from lane to lane, they spare no-one in the ruthless race to the front. Then come the family SUV’s, the occasional sports model, and if I’m lucky a classic Corvette or Mustang, their guttural engine note bringing back the spectre of Steve McQueen, scorching his rear wheels in Bullitt. But these are rare on the interstate, their drivers preferring to stick to the state highways and country roads. Next are saloon cars of all make, shape, size, colour and condition. And bringing up the rear, slow-moving farm wagons, listing crazily on worn-out suspensions, weighed down with produce or machinery. The drivers of these, stoic and resigned, have both hands firmly on the wheel, freebie baseball caps carrying the names of local wholesale suppliers worn high on their round, closely-cropped heads.

I’m on my way up to Silver City in New Mexico, passing El Paso on route. I’m making good time on the I-10, but need a comfort halt at a state truck stop. The facilities are new, kept clean by a uniformed attendant, who is presently sitting on the brick wall of a raised shrubbery while he directs an arcing stream of water from a bright yellow hose. A trucker of oriental origin approaches him and begins to mime the action of taking a drink from the end of the hose. Is this mute manoeuvre due to a lack of English or just an attempt to raise a smile? Whatever the reason, it fails to shift the expression of stony-faced, bored officialdom and the attendant silently points out a standpipe some twenty-five yards away. The driver bows in formal thanks and in a couple of minutes is back with two large plastic water containers that he fills under the tap. Thirsty work, I guess, driving a truck.

The city limits of El Paso start to appear twenty-five miles out from the centre of downtown. The interstate is flanked on both sides by the usual visual chaos of commercialism that marks the boundaries of most towns and cities in the United States. Gas stations, lodgings, retail units, diners, restaurants, bars, liquor stores, drive-in banks, automobile showrooms, truck part pit-stops, lube change and tire sales, thrift stores, souvenir shops, malls, laundromats, firework outlets: all on the strip and all out to grab attention in the cut-throat competition for customers. Although a blight in the urban landscape, with seemingly very few limits applied by local planners and environmentalists, these forests of neon lit shapes and names have come to symbolise this country and much that it stands for: the unabashed and unbridled pursuit of wealth and happiness as laid out in the Bill of Rights.

Forty minutes on and to the left is the centre of El Paso. The main point of entry to Juarez on the other side of the Rio Grande is marked by a giant flag in the green, white and red of Mexico, billowing slow and stately above the rooftops. The traffic has slowed to a crawl as it snakes its way forward on the elevated section of freeway that takes me through this part of the city. I pass massive junctions, roads flying, curving and diving in all directions above and below, like giant unravelled knots of concrete and reinforced steel, somehow managing to be beautiful and brutish at the same time. It takes concentration to drive here, but as I start to climb the slope that marks the northwestern city limits, the local traffic begins to fall away and the lanes become clearer.

Within twenty minutes I cross the state line and after ten days in Texas, the friendship state, I drive into New Mexico, land of enchantment.