Day 7: Sunday, April 19, 2020

Back in the day when I had an income, I used to play Texas Hold ‘Em, not particularly well, but I was an almost decent recreational player. Aside from the obvious benefit of occasionally winning money, I learned a lot from the game which I have applied to my life as a humanitarian aid worker.

Texas Hold ‘Em is, according to Annie Duke, and I concur, a game of “decision making under conditions of incomplete information.” What counts is the quality of the decision regardless of its outcome. It also requires you to take the long view, to accept that the universe owes you nothing, just because you have patiently folded bad starting cards for hours does not mean that you now deserve to get dealt pocket Aces. Poker teaches you to maintain a zen state of detachment, to hold the outcome you are looking for lightly and accept that it may or may not come.

All of these lessons apply to doing humanitarian aid work in the Ajo corridor. Not that people’s lives in the desert are a “game” in the frivolous sense of the word. Clearly there is nothing frivolous in the disappearance of thousands of mothers, fathers, sons and daughters as a result of Prevention through Deterrence. It is a “game” in the sense that to recover the disappeared and deliver supplies to help people keep themselves alive requires strategy, adapting to change and trying to think as both your allies and your opponents might think, to aid the former and outsmart the later.

Our SAR this past weekend required using all of my poker skills.

We began the search with a waypoint. That may seem like a lot of information on which to base a decision. But in the context of the desert it is really very little. With no corroboratory information, such as the starting location of the group, their destination, how long they had been walking before they left the man behind, which mountains they had passed or were headed towards, a waypoint is almost no information at all. In this situation of incomplete information, the first decision is, “do we go out and look for this person at all?”

In this case the answer to that question was “yes.” It was “yes” for some practical reasons. First, we had the capacity in terms of people ready, willing and able to mount a search. We also had a bigger picture motive of exploring an area, the Bryan Mountains, that none of us had ever been to before. It was also “yes” for existential reasons, even if we did not find him, the very fact of looking demonstrated that this man was a person worth looking for. That seven people hiked 22 miles to look for him, hopefully went out into the universe and even though we do not know his name or his family, he and they got a moment of a sense that some people cared.

As we got closer to the waypoint the sense of expectation grew. It is human nature to get excited when you feel you are close to achieving your goal, especially one that has required the exertion of a great deal of physical and mental effort. Here is where poker comes in again. The fact of expending the effort does not equate to deserving the expected outcome. The person we were looking for was not at the waypoint. That does not invalidate the decision to come and look for him. It does not invalidate the effort expended. It is simply the unexpected result of a good decision.

We continued our search in a grid, now a zen poker mindset is most needed and hardest to maintain. You have been sitting at the table for hours, you have been getting Q3 off suit for hours, you want something to happen, you envision Aces or Kings coming your way as the cards are dealt and you peek at the corner of the cards...Q3 again. This happens to me a lot on searches, I have been walking for hours, looking under trees for hours and I want to find the person. I start to imagine finding them under the next tree, in the next wash, over the next saddle. And I look, and there is still just the desert. I tell myself to let go, to hold the thought of the person lightly, to think about something else. Sometimes that works after a fashion. Sometimes I become so focused on trying to hold the person lightly that I end up clinging to them tighter than ever.

At night, looking at the stars, I remember that this is a “long game.” I believe that the universe knows we looked for this man, and I believe that one day, if we all hold him lightly and constantly enough, he will be found.

Now, say his name aloud: “Desconocido.” “Presente!”

Day 6: Saturday, April 18, 2020

This morning we woke up to a beautiful desert sunrise, but there was little time to enjoy it, we had a long hike and the heat of the day was coming. We loaded our packs, wolfed down some breakfast and set off across the San Cristobal valley towards the Bryan Mountains.

Normally on a Search and Recovery (SAR) we would walk in a line, each person spaced 50 feet apart. We would have a left and right line anchor on either end and a line manager in the middle making sure that we are all walking at the same pace and that everyone is accounted for when we go through washes or thick desert brush. Today, because we have such a great distance to travel just to get to the search area we used a restricted administrative road as the fastest way to travel across the valley so we would have time to do a proper search once we got to the Bryans.

And we walked, and walked and it got hotter and hotter, and we walked some more. And we stopped chatting and kept walking. After about 5 hours of walking we hunted for lunchtime shade and ate and then started walking again. Finally, at about 2pm (after 7 hours of walking) we arrived at the waypoint we had been given where the man we were looking for had been left behind. And there was nothing but desert. We did not find any sign of the man, or any sign of his group.

Like the desert itself, information for SAR can be an illusion, time, space and distance look different from different places. A slight rise in the terrain or a wash with tall trees can make a mountain look closer or a valley look narrower than it really is. Also with SAR, one piece of information, such as a waypoint, can seem larger and more important than it is. Another piece of information that might seem small and insignificant can lead the search team to the correct place.

Just because we found nothing at the waypoint we were not going to decide that there was no-one or nothing to be found.

Carrying a lot of weight in the hottest part of the day after an 11 mile hike is not the way to do an effective search. We rested, unpacked our packs and set up camp. Then, somewhat refreshed, we set up with only essential items, water, a little food, GPS, marking tape and walkie talkies, for a line search of the area North of the waypoint. We spread out with the West line anchor on the lowest slopes of the Bryans and the East line anchor (me) on the fringe of the San Cristobal valley.

We walked slowly, checking under palo verde and mesquite trees, looking in washes and stopping to investigate items left behind in the desert. Our line moved deliberately and thoroughly North for just over an hour. Then we stopped, the sun was starting to set, and the Bryans threw a big shadow over the valley. It was time to turn back to reach our camp before it got dark. We bumped the line out to the East to continue our search as we went Southward. I moved about a quarter mile out towards the center of the valley and Lia, from the West anchor, moved to about the line that I had taken coming North. We returned in the same methodical way that we had come.

We did not find the person.

Back at our camp, we lit the campfires, cooked our dinners and had a little bit of a birthday celebration. Then I set up my blankets, rolled up in my sleeping bag and starred at the stars.

Days like these in the desert bring up so many questions. There are obvious logistical questions like: Was the waypoint wrong? Did we look in the correct directions? Where should we look tomorrow? How much is it OK to use this opportunity for general exploration to gain information that might be helpful for future SARs? There are also emotional questions: Is it OK if we do not find the person? Is it OK if we laugh, tell stories, celebrate a birthday and generally enjoy each other’s company while we are on a SAR? Is it allowable to love and appreciate the beauty of the desert while looking for someone who has died in it?

These are questions for tomorrow….

Day 5: Friday, April 16th, 2020

Summer is coming! To avoid, or at least kid ourselves that we are going to avoid, the worst of the afternoon heat humanitarian aid starts at some ungodly hour in the morning.

There are two ways to accomplish this. The first way is to get up at 4:30 in the morning, leave Ajo by 5am and drive to the hike starting point with the goal of starting hiking as the sun comes up at around 6:30am. No-one likes getting up while it is still dark, people do it, of course, but no-one actually likes it.

The second option is to drive to the hike starting point the evening before and camp in the desert. This way you get an extra hour or so of sleep, get up with the first sign of the sun at 5:20am and can be ready to go by 6:30 or even 6am if you have a super together crew who can get the morning fire going, make coffee, eat, brush teeth and be packed in 40 minutes.

Neither of these options are particularly appealing to me. I do not like waking up, let alone getting out of bed, while it is still dark outside. I am also not super fond of camping, I much prefer my bed and my pillow and my toaster to the back of the truck, or the ground, and a folded up sweater and slightly burnt, fire smoky tortillas.

However, needs must, and as much as these options suck in the moment, I am grateful for either one when the mercury hits the 90s and we can take a nice siesta between 2 and 4 pm.

Today, knowing that we had an 11.2 mile hike just to get to our search location in the Bryan Mountains, we selected option 2 and accordingly left Ajo in the afternoon for the 50 mile drive to camp in the Agua Dulce Mountains.

Being the time of COVID, everyone who is not already COVID bonded, had to drive their own vehicle. So, we had a crew of 7 people with 5 trucks. Humanitarian aid during COVID is not very environmentally friendly, we emit a lot of fossil fuels.

Humanitarian aid in the time of COVID is very clean. We brought a hand washing station, with a 5-gallon cube of water, hand soap, a bleach water spray bottle, paper towels and Clorox wipes. We had disposable gloves, personal bottles of hand sanitizer and individual dishcloths soaked in bleach in zip lock baggies. We wore a variety of masks from surgical to bandanas to ripped squares of cotton shirt (me) to stylish fabric made by members of the Ajo Samaritans. We also each had an N95 mask for use in medical emergencies and, in addition to our regular medical kit, we had a COVID kit with another hand sanitizer and full PPE (personal protective equipment) complete with instructions for putting it on and taking it off.

By 7pm in the evening, everyone was at the campsite. We ate our individually made, and therefore COVID free, dinners and made a plan for the next day’s search around our 3 campfires (so everyone could sit by a fire and be the COVID required 12 feet apart). We told stories and had a little celebration because it is my birthday tomorrow….

Day 4: Thursday, April 16, 2020

After all the excitement of yesterday, today was a chill day. It was another logistics day because tomorrow we are heading out for the Bryan Mountains on a Search and Recovery for someone who was left behind by his group about a month ago.

None of us have ever been to the Bryans, partly because they are not what you would call accessible. We will have to hike in 11 miles from the nearest road, the Camino del Diablo, just to get to our search area. Therefore, in order to do a thorough search, and to use the opportunity to explore the area to seek to understand how people are travelling through it, we are spending the weekend out there.

I feel that no one is interested in the details of my food preparation, truck check, camping crate or the additional precautions we take to keep our COVIDs, should we have any, to ourselves. So, I am going to take this opportunity to share something I get in my feelings about….

That something is, items left in the desert by people travelling. Generally I believe in the principle of “leave no trace” in the wilderness. I pack out my trash and pick up water bottles that we have left in the desert at our drops. But, when it comes to items left behind in the desert by people travelling, I definitely do not pick them up and pack them out. Why not?

First, I do not consider these items to be “trash.” I think of some of these items as artifacts, tools that people have made a conscious choice about. For example, pantouflas (carpet slippers) that people get for a specific purpose, in this case covering their tracks. Like pottery, or other cultural artifacts that you see in museums, pantouflas have a cultural relevance to life in the Sonoran Desert in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Second, I see these items as providing signs and guides for others travelling through the desert. They might help someone to navigate the easiest way through an area. This is especially true when there are multiple apparent canyons going through a mountain range. Some of the canyons will dead end or lead to high cliffs. By following the signs of other travelers, people may be able to identify which canyon leads through the mountains. Items can also identify safe or unsafe places to rest depending on what they are or how they are arranged. For instance, a circle of camouflage clothing can indicate a detention site.

Third, sometimes items can be re-used, a water bottle that has recently been left can replace one that is leaking or it could be cut in half to make a bowl for eating the beans that we leave or collecting water from rain or a natural rock tank.

I have ideological reasons for not picking up items too.

Items left in the desert. Photo from PBS.

I want people visiting the desert to see the impact of Prevention through Deterrence on people and on the desert. Sometimes the number of items can be overwhelming. Every water bottle, every tuna packet, every backpack, blanket, jacket, pair of jeans, shoe represents someone who has traveled through the heat, the cacti and the surveillance to save themselves or to search for a better life. It is hard to believe that anyone could see the endurance, determination and resilience that these items represent and not feel compassion for their fellow humans.

Finally, there is the hypocrisy of the land managers. Their complaints about the environmental impact of items left behind in a desert that is, and has since 1941, been an active military training ground. We find all kinds of military debris, from bullets to tow darts, flares and even full-size missiles. The military says it is too hard to collect their debris because of the terrain and the distances they have to travel to pick it up. Usually I am all about community rather than individual responsibility, but as the military has, arguably, dropped more “trash” in the desert than anyone else and as, also arguably, it is militarization of the desert that is causing people to travel through wilderness areas and leave items behind, it is, again arguably, the military’s responsibility to clean it up.

One simple solution to all this would be open borders (my personal preference) or at least the end of Prevention through Deterrence and an humane and respectful immigration system that means that people no longer leave anything behind in the desert, because they no longer have to cross it. Then, the desert, which has resisted everything from mining to ranching to bombing can go back to being wilderness. Then I will pick up any, and all, items I find out there.

Day 3: Wednesday, April 15, 2020

So, you think that life in a small town might be boring, well not in Ajo. Ajo only has 4,000 residents in the winter and about half that in the summer. But life here is anything but boring, take today…

Today I towed a friend’s car out of the mud, hiked 6 miles through the desert, did 3 water drops and sleuthed a mysterious stranger. Its all really rather exciting...

First the towing. Towing is always fun! This is my third time at the towing rodeo, so I am getting pretty good at it. We were driving down Pozo Nuevo Road to do our drops and to our surprise the road was still flooded in places from the rain we had last Saturday morning. Coming to a particularly long stretch of flooded road I decided to take the “work around.” That is a track that people have taken through the desert to get around the flooded bit of the road. The Mossy made it fine, but the car behind me got stuck in the mud of the “work around.” We tried all the usual stuff: putting wood under the tires, pushing and digging out various wheels. None of that worked. So, I took the Mossy around behind the car, backed it up and we got out the tow straps. Hooked them up, put the Mossy in 4LOW and boom! less than a minute later the car is free, and we are on our way again.

We arrived at our parking spot an hour later, and an hour hotter, than expected. Loaded up our “bro” packs for the day’s drops and set off east into the Bates Mountains. It has been over 2 months since the last time we were there so we could find a whole lot of something, or a whole lot of nothing. Today it was the later, our drops had not been used by people, removed by law enforcement or broken into by animals.

Sometimes its hard for people when the drops are not used. They question why they (the people) are there, why they (the drops) are there, and why they hiked 6 miles in the heat carrying so much weight. Even humanitarian aid workers sometimes need validation for their work. The longer I am here, the more I recognize the value of “negative space.” A space that has not be recently travelled, a space where the desert and the aid workers have a chance to just breathe and be together, a space to return to later because routes change and seasons change but sadly border militarization remains the same and so the need to come back and check and check again remains too.

Luckily in this COVID time we are a veteran crew, we have so much accumulated validation sometimes it was a bit of a relief not to have more. Not to find the water used or vandalized, not to worry about the people who used the drops and are they still OK, not to have a human remains recovery, not to encounter law enforcement; just to hike in the desert, enjoy its beauty, check on supplies and log them in the log book.

Now we know about the mud it is a chill ride back to Ajo, where there is cold water and popsicles, it is 80 plus degrees remember. A quick stop at the Aid Office to fill in the log and we are on the way home, but wait, not so fast, there is a mysterious stranger at the barn…

This bit was really odd, one of the Ajo Samaritans went to the barn, and when she arrived, she found the water running and someone in the bathroom requesting his shirt. She called around for assistance deciphering the mystery and me and another friend went to see what was going on. By time we arrived the stranger had left.

What appeared to have been going on was cleaning, not in the regular way of cleaning, more in the way of indiscriminately grabbing things and throwing them in the trash cans. Definitely there was some evidence of regular type cleaning, for example the bathroom floor had been swept. Other evidence pointed to something not in the regular way of cleaning, like throwing a box of toilet paper, a whole box, not just one roll, in the trash…are you kidding me, that box of toilet paper is worth more than my investments right now!

Aside from rescuing the box of toilet paper and locking it up securely in the barnlet, there wasn’t much else we could do. So, we left. After a couple of phone calls, I think I know who it was. There will be more discussion about this at the Ajo Samaritans Meeting tomorrow…

PS If you want to make an offer, and it needs to be substantial, I am trying to stay retired, on the box of toilet paper DM me.

Day 2: Tuesday, April 14, 2020

No chillin’ in the morning today, no letting my brain wander off on tangents about crossword clues or cards games. This morning I woke up at 6am, got up at 6am and was dressed and out the door by 6:45am.

Today started out, how I hope none of your days ever start out, with a call to the Ajo Sherriff to report the discovery of two people we found this past weekend who had died in the desert.

L'Aguja aka Sheep's Peak

Last Friday, we set out from Charlie Bell Well on an exploratory through hike, going North of a mountain named L’Aguja, the needle. Well, we and our allies in the South, call it L’Aguja, on the maps it is called Sheep’s Peak. L’Aguja is a spire just to the west of Growler Ridge. It is about 43 miles north of the US/Mexico border and is so distinctive that you can see it from almost everywhere. Its distinctiveness makes L’Aguja a navigation point for people travelling through the desert. Its distance from the border has made it a graveyard. Well, that’s not quite true, Prevention through Deterrence and the militarization of the desert between the border and L’Aguja is what has made it a graveyard.

Our weekend through hike took us on a 21 mile circuit going up the west side of L’Aguja and coming back on the east side of Growler Ridge. We found the first person about 2 miles north of the peak on a rocky lava flow, and the second person a further 8 miles north in a big canyon at the boundary of the Bombing Range. Both people had been dead for some time, their remains skeletalized by their final resting place in the desert. We carefully marked each bone with GPS coordinates, photos and flagging tape and then paused for a moment of quiet reflection and holding space for the people we found and their families.

Map of Recovered Human Remains
around L'Aguja, 2001 to 2020

Back in Ajo this morning, we called the Sherriff. The Sherriff is supposed to coordinate with the Land Manager, in this case US Fish and Wildlife, to recover the remains and send them to the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner (OME). OME will send the information to Humane Borders, who will add them to the Arizona Open GIS forDeceased Migrants, and to Colibri Center for Human Rights who keep a DNA database from people whose loved ones have been disappeared in the desert. OME and Colibri will try and match the DNA from the people we found with those in the database. This can take months or even years. Sometimes there is no match to be found and the person remains “Desconcido” (unknown).

On our weekend exploratory hike, we also found that all our drops had been CTFO, that is “cleared the &%$# out.” Meaning that people travelling through the desert had found and used the supplies.

Having completed our call with the Sherriff, we loaded up the Mossy and headed back to Charlie Bell Well to replenish those supplies.

It is getting hotter in Ajo, today’s projected high was 80. Still Lia and I got our “bro” on each carrying 4 gallons of water (each gallon weighs 8lbs), cans of beans, trail snacks and our personal drinking water for 2.5 miles down to the drop. It sucked, my shoulders, hips, legs, feet and brain agree that it sucked, but it was worth every wince and every ache….hopefully the supplies we left today will keep someone alive tomorrow.

Day 1: Monday, April 13, 2020

Many people have asked me what I “DO” out here in Ajo, Arizona. This week I am going to try and keep a daily journal posted on this blog that responds to that question. The proper answer is that I provide humanitarian aid; which means food, water, blankets, socks and medical care with the goal of saving the lives of people making the crossing from Mexico to the US through the Sonoran Desert.

That sounds rather good, it sounds like I interact directly with people on their journeys through the desert and provide them directly with humanitarian aid. Most of the time that does not happen, most of the time I wander around in the desert carrying an enormously heavy backpack looking for trails and other signs that people have moved through an area. Then I leave the supplies and hope that people who need them, find them.

Working in the Sonoran Desert around Ajo is like playing a giant game of Bridge. In Bridge there are 4 players, North and South are partners and East and West are partners. One team controls the hand and can see their partner’s cards. In our scenario, East representing the Trump Administration controls the hand. East can see their partner, Border Patrol’s (West) cards.

We, North, humanitarian aid workers are partners with people crossing, South, but we do not have control of the hand. We cannot see South’s cards, so we put out feelers, experimental caches of aid supplies to see if South picks them up. Then we continue in that area if South agrees or we try again in a new area if South is not there with us.

In this game, the Trump Administration and Border Patrol’s cards include the technology, the money and the manpower (there are approximately 700 Border Patrol agents in the Ajo sector and their numbers are bolstered by the military personnel on the Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range, the Ajo Sherriff’s Department and the Law Enforcement arms of the National Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife). Against this awesome array of military might, we, the 20 or so humanitarian aid workers in Ajo, and our allies in the South, hold the cards of humanity, compassion and resilience. We have the strength that comes from reuniting families, instead of tearing them apart, and the search for a new and better life, rather than the supposed maintenance of an old and stagnant one….and frankly one that never existed in the first place, nor would one want it ever to have existed or to exist in the future.

Anyhow, before I digress down a long and convoluted rabbit hole, the question was, “what do you DO in Ajo?” “DO” being to do with actions not ideals expressed as imperfect card game analogies.

Well, today I woke up at 6 am, which is the time I wake up now. This may come as a shock to anyone who knows me as better than a passing acquaintance, I absolutely hate getting up in the morning. So, I woke up at 6am, wandered outside for a cigarette and then promptly went back to bed with the Guardian crossword until, the significantly more acceptable time of 8am.

Then I “ran errands.” “Running errands” is an activity that I always suspected people said they were doing when they wanted to get out of doing something else, or were up to some nefarious other activities that they didn’t want you to know about. But actually, “running errands” is a real thing, who knew! It includes things like: getting the spare tire on the Mossy (F150) fixed so we can go back out into the desert for real tomorrow; stuffing empty water gallon bottles with snacks, duct taping them closed and writing “comida” on them so we can put them in the desert; mailing ink cartridges for recycling and returning my Snapshot device (I got that in an attempt to reduce my exorbitant Michigan car insurance, I saved $42…yea!); looking for Clorox wipes (COVID safety, in case anyone lives under a rock); not finding any and so making wipes by putting bleach water with dishcloths in sealed zip lock bags (you are welcome!); and finally rounding up a variety of brands of walkie talkies, getting them to work and talk to each other (because people, who shall remain nameless, keep losing them in the Mohawk Dunes or dropping them in Sheep Tank).

With breaks for food, checking my phone, general procrastination and an afternoon visit with Linda, sitting the required COVID safe 12 feet apart outside while wearing our masks, “running errands” took all day.

I am pretty sure that none of that sounds even remotely like playing Bridge against Trump and Border Patrol or like providing humanitarian aid to people crossing the desert. But it is, it is the bits they leave out of the history books. The stuff that someone had to do before the Freedom Rides, before Standing Rock…and before we go to Charlie Bell Well tomorrow.