Border Talk (10)
My husband, Ron, and I picked up stakes and moved west from our ranch in New Mexico to Sierra Vista, Arizona. It was a difficult decision, but after I got sick with covid in March 2021, and Ron tore his rotator cuff, it was the right one. Sierra Vista is a town of 44,000 residents and home to Fort Huachuca, a U.S. Army installation, which butts up against the Huachuca Mountains. We are fifteen miles from the United States-Mexico border. Because of the army base, it feels more like a suburb of Tucson, which is an hour northwest, than it does other border towns in Arizona where cultures from both countries have melded after sharing a border for nearly 170 years thanks to the Gadsden Purchase.
I had lived most of my adult life in the country and was hesitant to move to the city. Now that we’re here, I appreciate the convenience of having grocery stores and healthcare nearby. It didn’t take me long to become spoiled and to forget the struggles and back-breaking work we incurred on the ranch. It also didn’t take me long to forget that I live along the border and what that means.
On the ranch we were often startled by migrants who appeared in our orchard as apparitions, looking for water and a place to rest and regroup. We knew it was illegal to help them, but never learned how illegal. We provided food and water for some and called Border Patrol when someone was injured or too dehydrated to go on.
Here in the city, I stay indoors when it’s too hot or too cold to venture outside. The night sky is dimmed by city lights, and I must walk out into the road in front out our house for a glimpse of the monsoon storms coming up from Mexico over the mountains. I no longer worry if tarantula wasps will sting me while picking peaches or that a rattlesnake will strike when I cross the orchard. I also don’t scan my yard looking for migrants before stepping out my back door.
I live a sanitized life now devoid of much of the work and sacrifices I made while living on the ranch. I don’t have to think about people crossing the border anymore because they are not walking down my street or hiding in my garage to protect themselves from the elements. But I do think of the fifty-three migrants found dead in an abandoned tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas near Lackland Air Force Base on June 27, and I wonder how such a thing could happen here. On American soil.
A flood of news stories broke the day their bodies along with nine survivors were found. Politicians weighed in, fingers were pointed, and celebrity journalists opined on everything from immigration laws to building the wall. Three days later the news dried up, and we all went back to our lives as though this mystifying tragedy never happened. Why aren’t we outraged? This is the question I keep coming back to. How sixty-two people found themselves in the back of a tractor-trailer in Texas with no working air conditioner or water in 100-degree heat is a baffling, complicated, international situation none of us can take on alone. The individual human spirit is unable to digest and act on something so horrific when there is a steady stream of terrible news fed to us via television and social media every day. “Pick your battles”. How are we supposed to do that?
I wish I had an answer. Instead, I can take a moment and share what I know about what migrants encounter as they cross the inhospitable Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts into the United States. The temperatures often soar above 100 degrees in the summer, and in the winter, nighttime temperatures can plummet below zero. Most vegetation is waist heigh and cacti are common. Trees providing shade are rare unless people are traveling along an occasional riverbed or up in the mountains where predators like mountain lions and bears compete with humans for resources. Water is scarce and much of it is found in stagnant stock tanks used for cattle. There are rattlesnakes, scorpions, and disease-carrying tics. So, even if one finds a shade tree, there are critters to contend with.
Border Wall
I for one would never cross the desert in a pair of sneakers carrying a backpack. I have food and shelter, and the resources necessary to provide a comfortable life for my family. It would take something cataclysmic for me to leave my life behind. And it was cataclysmic events in the lives of those sixty-two people that made them leave home and end up in that tractor-trailer in Texas. Migrants are often running from something so horrible they are willing to risk their lives. This is the part I sometimes forget when the news cycle screams by, and I miss the details. I miss the truth.
Two men were indicted for the souls of men, women, and children found in that trailer, and each was charged with the following crimes: one count of conspiracy to transport illegal aliens resulting in death; one count of transportation of illegal aliens resulting in death; one count of conspiracy to transport aliens resulting in serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy; and one count of transportation of illegal aliens resulting in serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy.
Illegal aliens? Both words vilify the victims, making their deaths and these crimes somehow less tragic and urgent. And maybe that’s the problem. It is easy to cast stones at people we don’t recognize in our image.
Austrian psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and author Victor Frankl wrote, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” This quote has confounded me since I read his book Man’s Search for Meaning in college. That was years ago, yet it remains a conundrum, a puzzle I haven’t quite solved. I’m not sure how to change myself, certainly not for the better, when I’m outraged or paralyzed by a situation.
In the early morning, when the air is still and cool and void of human interference, I pray for the victims who perished and the survivors whose lives were forever altered that terrible day in San Antonio. In the earthly quiet, I am reminded that I live along the border and that I have a voice, no matter how small, to effect change in both the situation and in myself.
