CHAPTER 21: 1998, SONORAN DESERT
Part IV: America 1990s, Journeys in Flyover Country
At dawn, the desert of Sonora reveals itself. Once the sun is fully risen, its brightness washes out the details of the land, but the day’s first light slicing at an acute angle from the horizon, shows the landscape in all its complexity.
At midday, the mountains seem to be no more than jagged brown humps coming out of the desert floor, but dawn’s light illuminates deep gullies and ravines scarring their sides.
There’s colour in the Sonoran desert at this hour: its floor and the flanks of the mountains have a reddish tinge. Giant Saguaro cactuses, the colour of green melons, are strewn all over the landscape, throwing long black shadows. The horizon is coloured like the inside of a peach.
The little bit of dew clinging to desert shrubs perfumes the air with a smell like thyme. There’s time to draw a few aromatic breaths before the sun bleaches the peach colour from the sky. Because there’s no moisture to diffuse its light, the sunrise seems to happen in an instant. The white disc just pops up over mountain, and all the details disappear.
The landscape is the same in all directions. If you had no map to guide you through this emptiness, you would say Mexico is the dark mountain on the southern horizon. If you did have a map, you would see the legal border is just a few miles south of where I’m watching this sunrise, in the parking lot of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southern Arizona.
The Organ Pipe Cactus—yes, it looks like the pipes of a church organ—is just one of the unique species of this desert, which stretches along the border. On the US side of the border, go West 120 miles from where I’m standing all the way to the Colorado river and there is nothing but desert. Not even a road. The sand, mountains and cactus are owned by two branches of the the US government; the military, which uses the area to train jet pilots for flying desert missions, and the National Parks Service which administers Organ Pipe.
I had come here because I heard this part of the border, with virtually no human habitation, had become a hotbed of that distinctly human activity: crime. But I had no idea just how much crime until I walked into the office of Aniceto Olais, Chief Ranger at Organ Pipe.
It’s a pretty sleepy place, Organ Pipe, and I had just turned up the previous day and asked if the person in charge had time to chat. The walls of Olais’s office were covered in photos of people in desert camouflage and military uniforms. They might have been special operations units in the army. In fact they were graduates of one of ‘Ceto Olais’s special law enforcement courses. For several years, Olais has been organising training for his Park Rangers, as well as the other law enforcement authorities working in the desert along the border.
The men and women were frequently posed in front of black chinook helicopters, the favorite fear of the paranoid survivalists and militia men who live in the many empty quarters of the United States.
“So there really are black helicopters,” I asked.
Olais laughed.
“Is there really enough crime to justify that kind of training?”
‘Ceto, a small moustached man with cheeks reddened by the sun, gave a matter of fact answer: in the last year, this sector of the border alone had seen the seizure of 15,000 pounds of marijuana, and 100 pounds of cocaine being smuggled from Mexico into the US. The drugs were worth $20m on the street. The drug runners were daring and well-organised, they knew the desert and they operated at night. Olais had organised the course because his Park Rangers, and the other law enforcement agents in the region, needed military training to find the drug smugglers and fight them.
I asked if it would be ok to go out on patrol with one of his team. He said sure, if I didn’t mind “humping” a few miles in the back country. Humping, hiking into back country looking for “bad guys”, sounded exciting.
“No problem!”
“Patrol starts at 7am, be in the parking lot then.”
Which explains why I was awake to watch the sunrise.
When I left ‘Ceto’s office, the excitement was replaced by the soft sadness you get when you go to a place where you were happy as a child and find that it has been changed irreversibly for the worse.
The US is a secular society and National Parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite are as close to sacred sites as we get. The most magnificent natural beauty in our ocean-to-ocean land and the most important historical sites, are preserved for Americans by the government, off-limits to commercial exploitation. It is a sin that there is crime in them.
Family visits to the Parks are a routine part of American life. The high priests of these places are the Park Rangers. Wearing their unique peaked hat with circular brim, the Rangers are the omniscient and omnipotent human face of the parks.
If there is any innocence left to children in America, one of its idealized images would be a group of kids around a campfire in a national park listening to a Ranger giving a talk on its wildlife or history which is the shared inheritance of all Americans. So I was more than a little bemused when the next morning the Ranger I was patrolling with began our day together saying,
“No more campfire talks for 8 year olds, we should be bustin’ bad guys.”
It was the beginning of a long monologue about life, liberty and the pursuit of villains. The Ranger’s name was Steve Ganic, a stocky man of medium height with an impressive red handlebar moustache. We climbed into his 4-wheel drive Ford to go looking for bad guys. There are plenty of them.
There are two basic groups of villains working the border area: smugglers from Mexico and local poachers. Steve listed the former.
“You got your drug smugglers and your illegal aliens being smuggled in, and rare tropical birds being brought up from Central America.”
Among the poachers there were snake thieves. There are 6 distinct varieties of poisonouss rattlesnakes in the Sonoran desert and, believe it or not, there’s a market for them as pets. Steve added,
“People even steal the cactuses.”
“What?”
“You get landscape architects designing a house or courtyard for a restaurant, they want a full grown Saguaro. They don’t ask too many questions about where it came from.”
How people can dig up a fully grown Saguaro—some are 50 feet high—and then transport it out of the park on the one road that runs through it, Steve couldn’t say. But it had been done, he assured me.
Organ Pipe National Monument abuts the border for 32 miles, and we headed out towards a section. The road we were on was no more than a rutted track through the desert. Steve kept up a running commentary as the 4 wheel drive bounced and fish-tailed over the track. The actual border was simply 4 strands of barbed wire. At night it would take less than a minute to cut through. We periodically stopped and Steve showed me where the fence had been cut and mended.
He pointed out smugglers’ tracks. They drive distinctive 6-wheeled vans, two wheels on each side in the back to give extra traction in the sand. The desert holds their imprint almost forever, or at least between the infrequent rains. Each set inspired Steve to tell a war story: a chase through the desert at night, van turning over, illegal aliens scattering through the darkness. Long nights bivouacked on a hill, overlooking the barbed wire … waiting. He pointed to another hill on the other side of the border.
“Drug smugglers have electronic equipment set up there. They eavesdrop on our communications.”
From time to time as we traveled along the park’s southern perimeter, we’d pass tourists. Seeing Steve in his peaked hat they would wave and smile, a salute to the Ranger image. Steve waved back while his lawman’s eye gave their cars the once-over, looking for signs that the vehicle was not carrying anything illegal.
“You’d be amazed who’s involved in smuggling. You get grandma and grandpa, retirees, they’re looking for one big score to see them through. They pick up drugs in Mexico - who’s gonna think they’re smugglers? We bust them over here.”
In the bright daylight we weren’t likely to encounter much criminal activity, so Steve narrated the story of his life, and an interesting life it was.
Even though he had spent most of his professional life in law enforcement, he called himself a cowboy, and I was inclined to believe him. There was something very Old West cowboy about the way he crouched over the tyre marks and cut for sign, reading in the tracks information about who left them, when, and where they were headed.
Steve had been brought up in New Mexico, where his father was also a cowboy. His existence seemed to be a struggle between wanting the freedom of the cowboy life and the discipline of a military structure. He spent almost two decades in the army as a military policeman. During that time he acquired a wife and two daughters. When he mustered out he tried to return to the cowboy life, but it’s a financially precarious existence. It cost him his marriage. After years of fits and starts as a freelance cowboy, he returned to a military structure and joined the National Parks Service as a law enforcement ranger. He had volunteered for duty at Organ Pipe because it got him back to a landscape he knew well. When he has vacation time, he drives a few hours over to New Mexico and works as a cowboy.
It had reached noon, and other than a fairly thorough rousting of an old timer from Arkansas who was mooching along the barbed wire just across from a small Mexican homestead, a place Steve suspected was a safe house for smugglers, nothing much had happened. Suddenly the radio crackled: a crash had been reported on the highway north of the park entrance. We were closest to the scene, so Steve threw the Ford into gear and away we went. We drove up and down the highway for half an hour but never found an accident.
“It was probably a decoy; get everyone out here looking and then drive something through the desert.”
Lunchtime came and went and we still hadn’t gone on back country patrol. Wanting to show I was keen, I asked him “We gonna hump this afternoon?” “Oh yeah,” he assured me. But it wasn’t quite what I expected or what he wanted to do.
We were going out to do a bit of maintenance. There’s an abandoned silver mine a few miles’ walk past the Visitor’s Centre. The information plaque had fallen over and we had to go put it back in place. I slung a shovel over my shoulder and we humped out though the Saguaro cactus towards the mine.
Unique to the Sonoran desert, Saguaros are weird and slightly awe-inspiring. In the movies you don’t get a sense of just how tall they are—30 or 40 feet high—or how many there are in this desert. If they had leaves and gave shade, you’d think you were in a forest. We wandered past them, turned sharply at a Saguaro that reminded me of Winston Churchill—its two arms formed Churchill’s ‘V for Victory’ salute—and walked through a gulley up a hill, and eventually came to the mine.
Replacing the sign took all of five minutes. The sign briefly told the story of mine owner Mikul Levy, who pulled silver up from under the desert floor at the beginning of the twentieth century. All that remains of the mining site is a small stone building—the encampment’s general store—and a huge iron wheel which was part of the mine’s machine works. How it got there, neither of us could figure out. There are no roads into the area now, there certainly weren’t any then.
Steve started another monologue. This one was about the kind of men who made their lives here in the old days. They were straight, fair and tough. They had to be to last in this hot, empty place. We both shared a nostalgia for a world with such men. They were the source of the Western myths we had grown up with from TV and the movies. We agreed that, to a degree, our own sense of right and wrong had been formed watching those stories set in an historic past. Steve wondered out loud about his kids. Westerns don’t form a part of their cultural life. The stories that influence their moral code come from violent futuristic fantasy films, not films based in history. What could they possibly learn about how to live from them?
In his rare visits with his daughters—he sees them twice a year—Steve tries to compensate for the gap in their learning because they don’t watch westerns. He takes them to the ranch where he holidays as a cowboy. They saddle up, and join in.
It was late afternoon. The sun was low in the sky. Canyons and gullies were again being revealed in the sides of the mountains. We humped back past the Winston Churchill cactus towards the parking lot. I had forgotten about smugglers and was lost in wonder at the landscape, and daydreams about who Mikul Levy might have been and how on earth he got that giant metal wheel to the mine, the kind of thoughts National Parks are meant to create.
Steve was clearly in a different head space. As we got to the parking lot, I noticed him eyeballing the vehicles for telltale signs of criminal activity.
Before there was a United States, before there was a Mexico, before there was a border between them, there was just the land, and the desert people lived on it. The desert people, in their language, Tohonno Odom, have been living here for many thousands of years, but today the border between the United States and Mexico runs through the Tohonno Odom nation, and it is creating serious problems.
I didn’t know about this as I drove into Sells, Arizona, the main town of the Tohonno Odom nation. I had come here because the first east-west road north of the border runs through the area, and because on the map, the outline of the nation was another set of borders along the border I was travelling. It seemed like a good place to stop and talk about what “borders” mean in a philosophical sense. Given their history, Native Americans were likely to have interesting ideas about them.
The indigenous people of North America never really got around to a culture where land was legally defined by lines on a map, but after Europeans—the English, French and Spanish—began their colonisation of the continent, the Indians were forced to learn what borders mean.
In the US, tribes were uprooted, force-marched, east-west-north-south around the country and penned inside the first real borders they had ever known: the reservations. The reservations were not happy places.
You enter the Tohonno Odom reservation by turning east in the desert hamlet of Why. Good question. You drive up a long incline onto a plateau. On the horizon is a mountain shaped like a Bishop’s mitre. In a landscape of scrub and low razorback ridges, the Bishop’s mountain is a majestic landmark, and the road was taking me right to it.
The political activism of the ‘60s taught Indians a new assertiveness and confidence about themselves and their culture. It also taught them how to use the legislative and legal systems to their advantage for a change. Among the things the various tribes learned was that ordinary state laws restricting gambling don’t apply on their reservations. Many tribes have opened profitable casinos on their land, as have the Tohonno Odom. The profits have not made members of the nation rich, but have certainly ameliorated poverty on the reservation.
That was my impression as I drove into town. The streets were still dusty but many of the buildings were new. There was even a small shopping centre. The Odom administration building was a visible symbol of the changed Native American world: more prosperous, more culturally aware. The building, recently constructed, was tangible evidence of the tribe’s casino-enhanced finances. Painted on its side was a cultural symbol—an I’itoi. The I’itoi depicts a man at the beginning of a circular maze. At the centre of the maze is a dark disc which represents death, but before stepping into the black disc, there is one final turn in the maze, where the man can look back on the way he has come before taking the final step into darkness.
Inside the administration building, a meeting was in progress. Eventually, a bespectacled young man named Alex Ritchie came out and in a business-like manner, asked me what I wanted. I explained I was passing through, on assignment for the BBC exploring issues related to the border.
“You’ve come on a good day. I’ve got a story for you. We’ve just been having a meeting on that subject. Can you wait?”
I assured him I could. After a brief wait, Alex ushered me in to meed Edward Manuel. The pair explained that the Tohonno Odom were preparing to send a delegation to Washington. The tribe want congress to pass legislation allowing tribal members to travel freely back and forth over the Mexican border, which forms the southern boundary of the reservation.
Indians freely crossing borders created by whites is not a new issue in American life. The Jay Treaty, which ended America’s War of Independence from Britain, gave everyone living in British-influenced North America the right to pass freely through the new borders being created. After America’s second war with Britain in 1812, the rights of ordinary citizens to move freely were curtailed. But the rights of Indians to cross borders freely remained, although periodically the issue needed to be clarified in court. One judge wrote of Indians crossing the national borders on the North American continent.
“From the Indian’s view point, he crosses no boundary line. For him, the boundary line does not exist.”
Alex Ritchie and Ed Manuel took turns explaining the particulars of the Tohonno Odom situation. 12,000 people live on the reservation, a massive space the size of the state of Rhode Island. On the Mexican side live 700 members of the nation. If border laws are respected, Tohonno Odom living on the reservation who want to visit tribal members in Mexico have to travel 75 miles east or west to a legal crossing point, then 75 miles back the way they came from, on the Mexican side, to get to their destination. Basically it means a 150 mile trip one-way to visit people who might live no more than 20 miles south.
The border restriction also interferes with the practice of religion. There are sacred sites in Mexico. Pilgrimages to them are made more difficult. Various objects and plants used in traditional medicines and rituals can’t be brought from one side to the other because of restrictions on agricultural imports. Finally the border intersects the traditional route for the run up Baboquivari, a rite of passage for young Odom men. What’s Baboquivari? I asked. Ed and Alex turned towards a painting on the wall. “That mountain”. It was the Bishop’s Mitre mountain, the landmark on the horizon.
But while the border creates limitations for the People, it doesn’t create limitation enough on criminals passing through it from Mexico. Border crime was having a corrupting effect on the community. The border fence, stretching for 150 miles across the reservation, is as porous as it is in Organ Pipe National Monument. Drug smugglers cross through almost at will. In some southern settlements on the reservation, they have intimidated people into letting them use their homes for safehouses and drop points. Manuel admitted that in some cases no intimidation was required. With unemployment among young men high, some Odom youth were happy to join the drug gangs.
Then there’s the problem of illegal aliens. The US govt’s border patrol, in charge of searching for illegal aliens coming from Mexico into the US, frequently stopped and harassed members of the tribe on the reservation. What the Tohonno Odom are looking for is legislation that will give them a specific identification card that will allow them to pass freely into Mexico, and to improve the reservation’s security, they want the right to set up their own border checkpoints.
Now this information was a long way from philosophical dialogues on the metaphysical meanings of borders, but as a journalist I found it compelling, and I asked if I could see the border for myself. Alex said absolutely, and arranged it for the next day. There was no place for an outsider to stay on the “rez”—which is what everybody who lives there calls it—so I had to drive 60 miles to Tucson to sleep. In the morning I drove back and Alex handed me over to Dave Garcia, a member of the tribal council. Garcia a slim man with the round face of the Tohonno Odom comes from the Chukutkuk district, down by the border. In his part of the reservation the roads are no more than rocky tracks, and horseback is still a good way to travel. So he decided to take me down the one good road to the border, to visit his cousin, who had been having trouble with Mexican cattle rustlers.
“Cattle rustlers, you’re joking! That's like out of a western.”
“Still goes on,” Garcia assured me.
We piled into a new pickup truck and headed towards the border.
Garcia didn’t seem like a man who enjoyed talking to strangers, but he eventually got going on the subject of the border. He didn’t think much of it.
“The border was established by the government not by the people,”
He has relatives in Mexico and as a boy he used to take risks to see them, riding his horse down to the border fence at night, cutting through it and going in the dark to their homes. But criminals, not worried about the niceties of legal crossings, are creating dangers for Garcia’s constituents, many of whom live in isolated places. People’s houses are frequently broken into. And it isn’t just drug runners doing this breaking and entering. In his district, folks come back from a day’s work on the range, or up to Sells, to find strangers helping themselves to their food: illegal aliens crossing from Mexico into the US.
The illegals pay “guides” to drive them through the desert to the US, and the guides are basically criminals. They take the illegals’ money, then dump them near the border without provisions or water and leave them to fend for themselves. And, as if on cue, as we drove through the settlement of Pisinemo 20 miles north of the border, coming up the road towards us, we saw a man on foot. Nut brown, face gaunt, he looked like an early christian ascetic coming out of the desert after a 40 day fast. He did not look like an Odom, a point quickly noted by Garcia.
“I.A.: illegal alien. Walking in broad daylight towards what?”
We got to a place called Papago Farms—literally just a few farms—where Garcia’s cousin Augustine Toro was waiting for us.
“Hey, did you bring your AK?” he greeted me,
“Man it’s broad daylight nobody’d be shooting now.”
“Are you kidding? You’d make a better target.”
We jumped into Augustine’s truck and we bounced off over an unpaved road the last few miles to the border. We pulled up to 2 swinging metal gates about 15 yards apart. Running either side of the gates were 2 rows of barbed wire going off to the horizon in each direction.
The border.
“This is it,” he pointed, crunching through the hard dirt. “You see the gate is open.” So the three of us walked into Mexico.
The gate on the Mexican side was being held open by a chain locked to the fence. Anyone could come or go as they pleased. Security was clearly impossible. Garcia told me there were ground sensors at regular intervals, that relayed the info the border was being crossed. Presumably somewhere, someone knew we had just crossed over the line. We hung around for a while, but no law enforcement agency turned up.
It was the first time on this trip I had crossed the border, and I suppose the way I was doing it was illegal. It seemed to point out the absurdity of this boundary. The land was the same on either side, no natural demarcation point. By and large the people were the same on either side, members of an ancient group which had been eking out a living from the scrub-covered desert here for many millennia.
Now seemed as good a time as any to ask philosophical questions. I asked Dave Garcia what it was like to live within two sets of borders; this line we had just crossed over, and the border defining the reservation. But I think the question was badly phrased because he didn’t quite understand it. I meant metaphorically, in an abstract way, but Dave Garcia seemed to think it was a literal question. So I fumbled around trying to explain; borders, limitations, definitions of what is yours and what is somebody else’s. I was about to give up trying to explain when the man said
“My borders are inside me. They don’t begin or end when I leave the reservation.”
We walked back to the pickups and headed out. As we came back from Papago Farms to the main road, we saw the illegal alien again. He was crouched by the roadside, in a narrow strip of shade cast by a sign pointing the direction towards Sells.
“Hell of a place to stop,” said Dave. “In broad daylight, where anyone can see ya.”
We turned towards Sells. A few hundred yards down the road, our driver looked into the rear view mirror and said “They got him!” Sure enough the illegal was being put into the back of a border patrol car. The car must have been hiding but just where in the emptiness, I couldn’t say.
This has been the sixth chapter of Part Four of History of a Calamity, the story of how America went from Victory in World War 2 to Donald Trump and Cold Civil War in a single lifetime … Mine, and possibly yours. The next chapter continues my 1998 Border Run. Here’s an extract:
In Nogales Arizona, the border is pink. A wall of cinderblock and metal painted pink, running between two voluptuously rounded hills that define the town. In the flat canyon between the hills, there’s room in the wall for a pair of railroad tracks and a multi-lane road running into a city on the Mexican side. It too is called Nogales. Nogales, Sonora.
The two Nogales have not been around all that long—just since the 1880s when a railroad depot was built here. That was a fact I found out when I wandered into the local historical society building. I was quickly engaged in conversation by a white-haired Anglo woman in her early 70s who wanted to know everything about me. Not being nosy, just being friendly.
I explained I was travelling along the border to see what effect it had on people’s lives.
“Well it didn’t used to mean much; we crossed back and forth all the time. We intermarried. My daughter married a Mexican. Most women my age have Mexican grandchildren.”
She asked,
“Have you been to the Mexican side?”
“No.”
“You should go.”
So I did. On the other side of the wall, the border is not pink. It is the colour of dust. In its shadow, people had set up little encampments of boxes and plastic sheeting from which to launch their attempts at crossing illegally into the US.
And if you need to catch up on previous parts of my book, Part One, Bliss Was It In That Dawn, begins here:
