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A Postcard from the Homeland

By Michael Wolcott

My friend Chad, an Iraq vet with shaky hands and a gift for the telling phrase, calls the Altar Valley "a sunny place for shady people."

He's right. This 50-mile-long corridor between Mexico and Tucson is a world-class smuggling route, one of those places where Latin America and the United States have stopped remembering their own names. Still, it is a lovely place to backpack.

A visit to the Altar Valley is both mind-bending and heartbreaking. The Sonoran Desert landscape shimmers with natural beauty and bristles with ugly facts: immigration checkpoints, aerial surveillance, and a $500 million-dollar wall; cartels, coyotes, and luckless poor people heading north. Each year, many thousands of economic refugees walk through, abandoning the wreckage of the Third World for the fading promises of the First. For this they must be hunted.

The Border Patrol agents do their jobs, routinely courting drug violence while resolutely smashing migrants' dreams. Meanwhile, other players have their roles: ranchers repair their cut fences and endure incessant traffic on the once-quiet rangeland; local residents worry about knife-toting bandits; "Minutemen" play at being soldiers.

And real people die. Last year the bodies of more than 200 migrants were discovered in the Border Patrol's Tucson sector - most were victims of dehydration or exposure. A few days after I was there last, someone found a corpse so old that it was impossible to be sure of its sex. These deaths go largely un-mourned and unnoticed. Often the victims are not identified (the migrants' main problem, after all, is lack of proper papers).

Appalled by the carnage and suffering caused by our nation's stern border policy, gringo humanitarians walk the migrant trails trying to help. They offer medical aid, feed people, and put out plastic jugs of water. The jugs bear messages scrawled in Spanish with black markers: "Good Luck Amigo!" and "Be Strong!" They are often found empty, slashed with knives.

I am obsessed with this unfolding tragedy. No other sunny place feels right these days.

My last trip was in early spring. Winter had been long and laced with a few personal complaints. My brain chemistry, never trustworthy, had been more treacherous than usual. My body was often in pain. The woman that I wanted did not want me. On the drive down from Flagstaff, I felt lost and lonely.

But springtime in the desert is strong medicine, especially after a wet winter like the one just past. In the low mountains above the valley, every wash held at least a trickle of water. The annual explosion of brittlebush, globe mallow and poppies hadn't started yet, but the hillsides were greening up. Twelve-foot stalks of ocotillo waved in the blue sky. The air was warm and sweet. Whatever else might be wrong in my life, there was no doubt that I was in the right place.

My camp on a slender, agave-studded ridge overlooked a thousand square miles of desert. The night was thick with stars and a palpable sense of movement. (In any desert, most of what happens occurs under cover of darkness; this is even more true along the border.) While I slept, perhaps ten migrants - or maybe a hundred, who the hell knows - passed through on a nearby trail.

For sheer weirdness, there are few places to wake up on the ground that can match the Altar Valley. Morning arrived under a bleeding sky with coyotes howling from three directions. The sound was pure hunger. From my sleeping bag I surveyed the post-modern wilderness and considered the absurdities created by that imaginary line a few miles to the south.

On the next ridge over, one of my countrymen tended a high-tech listening tower manufactured by Boeing and sold for millions in some sweetheart deal cut in the halls of Congress. Below me, on the dirt two-track, three Border Patrol trucks with tinted windows crept by. The sun spilled yellow light on the Baboquivari Mountains, twenty miles across the valley to the west. Four thundering fighter jets suddenly appeared in the brand-new sky, glinting like polished sabers. They played war games while I sipped coffee.

The new day stretched out before me. I would walk the trails and share the shining desert with my neighbors. After all, this is my home.