Can you remember where you were twenty years ago today? Well neither can I, but according to a dusty old travel diary, I spent a wild night in Ciudad Acuna, Mexico.
Fast-forward to 2011 and those words would likely carry a postscript like “…and lived to tell the tale”, but in 1991 Acuna seemed like a sleepy Mexican border town, more concerned with Coke than cocaine. The only worrying moment I can recall was the long return walk over the US border bridge at 2am. Apart from the fact that my companions and I were fabulously drunk, we saw many dark shadows in the bushes below, moving stealthily from South to North. Or maybe it was the Tequila blurring our vision.
If you’ve seen the Coen Brother’s dastardly good movie “No Country for Old Men”, you will have seen this exact location depicted in an eerily atmospheric scene in which the (bleeding) protagonist struggles over the border, and barters for a jacket and t-shirt with some young punk college kids.
I’ve changed plenty in those twenty years, but I don’t think that long walk, the bridge or the moving shadows have.