In 1994 Becky and I drove a long, dusty road through the Sonoran Desert, to a spring-fed pond fringed with tules and cottonwoods. It was January, and so the air was cool, a mere 80 degrees or so. I had watched the dashboard temperature gauge all day. Becky’s little yellow Corolla had a bad head gasket, and we moistened the desert with tailpipe steam.
The pond was still in the afternoon sun, its birds silent. If there were birds. There must have been! That much water in the desert, there were almost certainly dozens of birds snoozing in each tree. Coyotes likely lurked in the shade of ironwoods, perhaps pumas. The wildlife had made itself scarce and silent as we walked, but they were certainly there.
When the National Park Service took over what became Organ Pipe National Monument, they evicted all the residents. The land had belonged to the Tohono O’odham and Hia-ced O’odham people, then called “Papagos” and “Sand Papagos,” respectively, after a Pima word meaning roughly “bean eater.” The O’odham (which word means, basically, “people") did eat beans. They grew — they still grow — tepary beans on fields made of flash flood debris, irrigated by winter rains and summer monsoon runoff and not much else, ten inches or so of precipitation annually. And they tended the plants around that pond as well, the wild amaranths and fruiting vines and trees. Similar oases still in O’odham hands boast a remarkable diversity of plant and animal life. The pond we visited that day is depauperate by comparison.
But it was peaceful, and cool after miles of sun-baked dust two-rut, and we walked around the little lake taking deep draughts of water-scented air. It was all the respite we needed, and we drove on refreshed to a little valley filled with senita cacti, the northernmost population of their species. At roadside I saw an “elephant tree,” Bursera microphylla, the first I’d seen after reading about them for years. I pulled the little car over to the shoulder, walked to the tree, touched it gently.
The border paralleled the road we drove, and trucks roared past on Mexico’s Route 2 less than a quarter mile away. At the pond I walked to the frontier: two flimsy strands of barbed wire strung between wildly canted metal posts, and a stone monument just beyond, one point on the line defined under the terms of the Gadsden Purchase. I slipped between the strands, walked to the carved stone on the border, walked past it, an illegal immigrant into the state of Sonora, Mexico. I turned back to Becky, who was standing there still in el Norte, and I waved foolishly.
In a grove of trees that straddled the fence, the top strand of barbed wire had been cut. A sheet of cardboard from a refrigerator box covered the bottom strand. A path led to the pond, and across the desert. A jornada, a hundred miles of bone-dry desert, with water handy for those who know where to look in hidden rock tanks with only a day or two of walking between them. and then, if you survive, your reward? Picking lettuce for $5,000 a year.
That was the year of the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. That was the year of NAFTA. That was the last time I visited Organ Pipe. Since then, one in six Mexicans has lost his or her home. That border fence, hardly a deterrent to foot traffic, was useless against the coyotes and the smugglers who drove trucks right across it and into the desert. 300 miles of illegal roads were gouged into the fragile soil of the National Monument between 2000 and 2004. When a ranger was killed by pot smugglers there in 2002, the monument finally won the funds for a vehicle barrier — and the damage moved to the adjacent Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, which has had almost 200 miles of illegal roads created since 2004. Not a square mile of Cabeza Prieta is unscarred.
It’s not the migrants themselves doing the damage, really. Oh, they leave cumulative tons of trash, plastic water jugs and diapers and clothing and their personal possessions and on startlingly frequent occasions, in addition to the trash, they leave their corpses. They drink the smaller water holes dry and spook the pronghorn. Still, the damage they cause is negligible compared to that caused by the tires of the coyotes and the smugglers.
And now Bush’s border fence is going up between Yuma and Lukeville. It will be all but impassable to vehicular traffic, and harder for solo hikers to cross. The illegal crossings will be shunted to a less-defended section of border: the Big Bend country, perhaps, or the stretch between the Chiricahuas and Deming. And the Sonoran pronghorn will suffer one more insult, unable to migrate or mate across the border fence, one more injury to a species on the brink. Likewise the bighorn and the jaguar.
And all of it, the whole deadly, desert-destroying problem created because we have made the natural points of entry to the US impassable. What migrant wouldn’t rather come up Interstate Five to the San Joaquin Valley, or I-17 from Nogales, than struggle across days of searing desert, watching his friends die one by one? Let them come and work, I say. The old bracero abuses can be avoided. A guest worker program need not be exploitative. Protect their rights not to be abused once here, pay them a fair wage and charge us more for a tomato to pay for it if you have to, and then let them go home and come back again freely. If people know they can come back without risking death one more time, they are far more likely to go home, which is where most of them want to be anyway. Those ignorants who gripe about swelling numbers of illegal immigrants miss the point. Open the border to them and they will go home.
You cannot drive to Quitobaquito anymore, as Becky and I did twelve years ago. Two thirds of Organ Pipe is closed. Travel there is too dangerous. The stray immigrants might steal your water in desperation. The coyotes might carjack you twenty miles from the nearest phone, in mid-day, in July, and they probably won’t think to toss you a canteen as they drive off.
I have been speaking on the phone the last few days with the Border Patrol, the National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife.
I’m going in two weeks. I’d like to see Quitobaquito again. Turns out that might be doable.
