East of El Paso thunderheads tower ominously as they threaten the vast west Texas landscape. The clerk in the gas station says they haven't had any rain, but everywhere else has. I get on interstate 20 and hit the storm. Long standing oil now hovers over the newly monsoon soaked desert roads. I hit a string of pot holes and my truck fishtails out behind me. I wonder what the hell I'm going to do after I crash in the wet desert. I down shift into fourth gear and right myself and continue on into the heart of the storm. Lightning strikes close by, and as the storm subsides dust covers the odd earth. The sun doesn't set until nine thirty. The land starts getting green and the weather more humid. I cross all of Texas. Louisiana. Mississippi. Alabama. I reach the Appalachian piedmont in Birmingham and start to feel closer to home than I have felt in a long time. In between Birmingham and Atlanta I receive a phone call from a number I don't recognize...
"Soy yo! Soy yo, Ignacio."
"Ignacio, que hay, como andas?"
"Pues, bien. Cuando vas a regresar aqui a Agua Prieta?"
"No se, hombre. Ya estoy en mi tierra..."
The conversation continues with pleasantries until Ignacio tells me the purpose of his call. He is a man from Guerrero that I met my last month of the border. He's wondering if I can make a delivery to his mother in Richmond, Virginia. Ignacio cannot see his mother because he lacks the proper piece of paper required to visit the woman who raised him.
This situation will forever be with me. I will not be able to shake it. I won't be able to forget the faces of Ignacio and the perhaps thousands of other men, women, and children I have met and served in a year.
I arrive home. I meet a church member who hears I spent a year in Mexico and promptly asks me what my favorite tequila is. "You must like that Jose Cuervo stuff." Middle aged awkward man-language designed to throw some humorous facade over his own discomfort on the subject. I eventually find myself sitting in the ocean alone, chest deep in salt water that looks something like sun tea. My mind wonders back to Baboquivari. Looking at the sacred mountain from the north end of the valley we just walked up. One hundred and sixty years ago the surrounding desert was Mexico. Then the United States fought Mexico after a conflict in the borderlands of Texas and Tamaulipas. Mexico lost more than half of its country in the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, for a price of 15 million dollars. Thats Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, Nevada, and parts of Wyoming. Then the United States purchased most of Southern Arizona for 10 million dollars. This includes Tucson, and almost all the way up to Phoenix. 215 years ago the land belonged to Spain. 600 years ago, it was land that no European man had laid eyes on. Baboquivari is a sacred sight for the O'odham people, who were in what we now know as Arizona long before Joe Arpaio's parents immigrated (yep, immigrated) to the United States. Baboquivari watched over us as we walked the seventy five miles from Sasabe to Tucson.
Now remembering the walk its difficult to focus on what it really means, as I sit in a comfortable house with air conditioning and soft couches and cable television and a safe place to sleep. In the desert my hips were bruised from sleeping on hard, rocky, and earthen floor. Now I am consumed by comfort and its a strange relationship. Its easy not to worry. Its easy to be ignorant. But I fear for myself that I will forever fall into that abyss of non-knowing. A place where curiosity does not exist and where nothing that is heard is questioned. This is a dangerous place, but it is not a place dependent upon geography. This place can be anywhere.
The south is hot. It is unrelenting. The humidity is like a wet wool blanket. I can feel it in my shoes and on my skin and I can hear it in the woods. At night sleeping benevolent tree-giants throw shadows on the dark earth. The smell of the night reminds me of memories that I have long forgotten. The smell reaches some where in the caverns of my mind that have been archived for decades now. My mind still wonders in this night how I will bear my burden. How I will shoulder this weight of my brothers and sisters who crossed in a much harsher night; who perhaps crossed successfully to reunite with family members or to work, who perhaps died on a lonely mountain top or in a dry river bed. I musn't forget. I must never forget the comfort and privilege I have simply because of where I was born. Comfort and privilege that others lack and seek, knowingly risking their lives.
Question. Question everything. Question like an inquisitive child and don't settle for bullshit in your answers.
The walk through the desert and my home five miles from the coast now seem like different worlds. I sometimes feel like I am back behind a wall. I want to merge the worlds and smash the wall down to sand.
