Borderlands

Preface:This is not an explicitly political piece though some may take it as so. It is an expression of what I saw and what I know and some contemplation as well.

The sky is a cold blue but here it could never be cold enough.

Here where the sun flares bright most days.

In summer it heats the rock and earth enough to burn flesh. Parched and rocky, the soil really just what is left after the dust has been blown away and sand flushed down a wash. 

Here for ten thousand years has stood a desert as unforgiving as any. The plants strange and alien perhaps thrive or merely survive. The creatures adapted and tough. Adapted from plants that lived in a lusher ice age climate.

The water now scarce until it isn’t. Gentle or violent as the season says. 

And people have lived here and travelled for as long as this place has been desert and perhaps before. Water scarce and known by those who survive. This same desert so harsh 150 years ago is still as harsh though we drive while they walked and some perished in the heat unable to reach water. Or water they knew about had evaporated like a mirage. 

This is a land of harsh beauty, if you have the means to be here to appreciate it.

Today this is border country where there was none for a very long time. Things crossed this land for centuries.Antelope and big horn sheep and rabbits and birds. The Indians too crossed as their habits predated the abstract of borders. The Spanish came and they crossed the land here, settled and had relations across the region. A border started as an arbitrary line and still things crossed.

Some crossed because this is where they always travelled and they could not see a line on a piece of paper. Families and livings incognizant of change. Some crossed to flee an army knowing this line on a paper could stop an army but not them who did not believe in such lines. 

Eventually the line became a fence, the imaginary and arbitrary manifested in posts and barb wire. Now the cattle stopped but the people still crossed. Those with business or tradition or families that predated this line. Those perhaps with criminal intent to evade the government or taxes. Animals like birds antelope and deer and bighorn and coyotes unperturbed by this slender wire line. 

And more people cross, going north, not intending to return. People not from here, they have not business or tradition from this area. Many know nothing of this deadly harsh place. Here they may face trials they never imagined. Many will perish. Two hundred square miles of New Mexico desert with the remains of over 100 women scattered and anonymous. Women lost and never found except what the desert preserves.

And now the border is manifested as a great rusted iron fence, 30 feet high. It rides over the landscape in both directions. It dominates your eye and imagination as you drive the harsh desert roads. Now it stops people, and the bighorn, the deer, the antelope and of course cows. But perhaps not completely. There are lots of men in trucks and on motorcycles here. Lots of them; the outposts have dozens of vehicles sitting in the sun. They are here to work not to play like the rest of us. They have observation towers in the desert. Signs warn visitors of smuggling and other illegal activities here, to call 911, do not stop for strangers. Somebody gets through the wall, frequently enough to warrant patrols and fear and outposts. Tented arches over the highway, slow down, stop waved on, perhaps a half dozen times on this trip.

There are also rescue beacon towers that spin and twinkle in the shimmering hot sunlight and flash blue and white at night high above the desert on a steel pole. They attract attention and the wayward, the lost, the desperate. A red button summons water, help, and perhaps handcuffs for some. 

Some attempt at humanity or perhaps a trap. Like the ones laid for Geronimo or Cochise. How does one know they are at the end of their journey?

Overwhelmed by heat most people plow on, faculties compromised by the heat, in denial until they collapse and then die. Perhaps if the button summoned only aid you would press it before you lost your mind and then your life. But if it meant being returned to where your journey started, would you press the button on the bright blue trailer with words in English, Spanish and Tohono O’odahm? Or would you walk on and trust in god and fate? When do you know your journey is over? If you could choose the ending, which one would you choose? 

And next to this new fence, within sight of it is a modest sunbaked pond fed by a precious small brackish spring. Water that has flowed for 10,000 years since the last ice age. Here small fish live in water too brackish and warm for any other fish. Slowly they have carried on their lives generation after generation unaware of of how precarious their existence has been. Life just being life in this hostile hot world that once was green and verdant and wet.