I love when we get rain in this little dust bowl on the western edge of West Texas, a place the city natives can’t leave and the non-natives can’t wait to escape. Like I tell my homies, the only time we get real rain is when something terrible happens and people end up paying the price. We got so much rain that there were a few casualties here and many more where the hurricane hit the hardest. El Paso went from a brown, dusty landscape to a beautiful green mountain scene, all because of that chaos.
Of course, not all our rain comes from chaos down south, but because of storms like that, Elephant Butte rose closer to its former glory, and the Rio Grande nearly overflowed into the Lower Valley.
On one of my days off, I was driving the Mamalona with a recovery strap in the back, ready to help anyone whose little car got stuck. That’s when I noticed the chaos under my own hood. The transfer case had decided to leak every bit of its gooey, expensive nougat.
Was it worth it? I don’t know.
But I kind of had fun.
Well… except for the time I hit a flooded stretch a little too fast in the old G35 and turned the air filter into a sponge full of nothing but the sky’s tears.
Being the chaotic-neutral kind of guy I am, I yanked the filter out and drove it that way for a while. Slowly, of course. No sense letting the engine chug dirty agua.
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