Search and Recovery

Yesterday morning (Saturday) I slept in until 8 a.m. which is extremely late in the desert, generally I have been getting up with the first signs of sunrise. I enjoyed the ultimate in luxuries, a nice long shower and got dressed in regular non-desert clothes to catch the best of the Farmer’s Market. I arrived at the Market at 9:30 a.m. and stopped by the library to grab some wifi and check my messages. The first message I saw announced a Search and Recovery (SAR) beginning at 10:30 a.m. just south of the Border Patrol checkpoint on I 85…like that my plans changed. I rushed home to get my desert boots, hat and backpack, then hurtled down the 85 to meet up with the SAR team from Aguilas del Desierto. I pulled up at the location, which was packed with cars, just around 10:35 a.m. and hoofed it out to catch up with the group already lining up to begin the search.

SAR is exciting! There was a long line of people spaced 20 feet apart covering about a mile, ready to start walking slowly out into the desert checking washes, clumps of saguaro and lone palo verde trees for signs of the missing person. As we began to walk out I was so sure we would find him, at every tree I expected to see him sitting there waiting patiently to be found.

After about 2 hours we stopped for a break. Everyone took out their lunches and drinks. In my haste I had forgotten to bring a lunch, plus in my head I had decided that we would only be out there for an hour or so before we located him. Luckily, I had a can of Sun Vista beans in my pack, so I ate those and felt very much like a desert professional, out finding a person with only a can of beans and a gallon of water for sustenance. I also had a couple of blankets and three pairs of socks, which I felt he would appreciate, as he might be cold, and his feet might be sore when we found him.

We continued searching until a call came over the radio to head back over to the road. We gathered up and were told that it seemed we were in the wrong location. The maps were reviewed, and the cars shuttled up from the original parking spot to the point where we had re-joined the road. Then a long line of vehicles pulled out and headed as a caravan to the newly determined location.

The process of lining up was not so orderly this time. As the sun began to set we headed out into the desert in a much more haphazard fashion, everyone keen to find the man before darkness called off the search. No-one wanted him to spend another night alone in the desert. Again, it was a forlorn hope, as evening closed in scattered groups of 2 or 3 searchers headed back to their vehicles, while the organizers tried to ensure everyone was accounted for before the caravan of headlights wound its way back to town for the night.

This morning (Sunday) was back to the regular desert routine, I got up at 6:30 a.m., ate breakfast, gave my teeth a cursory brush and packed up lunch, water, snacks, maps, GPS and compass. This time I was going to be properly prepared for a long day. The caravan reformed at 8 a.m. and drove to where we had left off the night before. I no longer had illusions of a quick search and home for a nice lunch. I was in it for the long haul, hours of checking vegetation, scrambling through washes, debating the likely route the man may have taken and reforming the search line where it had collapsed or broken due to a particularly deep wash or gnarly hill. We kept at it for 8 hours before our old enemy time forced us to again call it a day with no success.

Where is this man? His companions left him a week ago Monday with a gallon of water, a couple of cans of tuna and a blanket. He had hurt his knee and could not keep up with their pace. They called in to the Aguilas del Desierto with the best information they could about where and when they left him.

Most of the searchers must go back to work tomorrow (Monday). I have the privilege of desert aid being my full-time life. I can keep looking. I have some leads to follow but the window of time to find him alive has narrowed to a sliver of the barest chance. What began, for me, as a search full of hope on Saturday has become a recovery full of dread. They told me to look for the birds.

Exploring the Growlers

The desert is huge and trying to figure out how to get water to people crossing it is the subject of endless speculation and conjecture. In the summer I was part of a crew that placed a 5-mile water line across the Growler valley in the hope that people crossing would find it in a vast flat expanse with no clear trails.

On the eastern edge of the valley, the Growler Mountains, named after miner John Growler, stretch from Bates Well on Organ Pipe National Monument in the South up through Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge to the Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range in the North. Their multiple peaks and ridge-lines tower more than 1,000 feet over the desert floor and their southern foothills are a mass of deep washes, jutting fingers and small hills. Crossing through one of the many saddles along the range, the Growlers hold something of a surprise, instead of dropping down as sharply as they rise up, they flatten out to a wide plateau with gently sloping valleys interspersed with secondary ridges and hilltops. Beautiful as they are, the Growler’s upper valleys are deadly. Having made it up the steep climb from the South the need for water and food can quickly become desperate.

The Arizona GIS for Deceased Migrants shows more deaths in the Growlers than anywhere else in the deserts around Ajo. Accordingly, over the past week it has been our mission to explore the Growlers, looking for trails and identifying trail intersections and resting places where humanitarian aid supplies are most likely to reach people in need.

The exploration has generally been a success, we have found well-used trails and resting places. However, like all good explorations, in addition to providing answers, it has thrown up new questions. Some are practical - How are people getting to a seemingly inaccessible resting place? Which direction do they travel after they exit the plateau? Is there a trail along the ridge-line connecting the plateau valleys? Others are thornier and more emotionally challenging. On 2 of our 5 hikes in the Growlers we have found skeletal remains, for me the most challenging is balancing my emotional and practical response this occurrence.

For me, skeletal remains do not provoke the same sensory reaction as more recent deaths. There is not the over-powering smell that clings to your nose, your clothes, your boots long after you leave the site. There is not the same tactile response of touching flesh or the same visual response of seeing a full person.

What is similar is the profound sense of silence and aloneness, of trying to connect to the feeling of the person as they waited for the inevitable, the feelings of those they were possibly with and the worry of their families and friends who have no idea what happened to them.

When we find a person, I try to sit and look around, to visualize what they might have seen. I hope that as they let go of the struggle against the physical violence of dehydration, heat or cold and the mental anguish of realizing they could not go on, they found peace in the beauty of the mountains and slid gently into being a part of the soul of the desert.

After a few moments the call to action rushes back over me, the desire to do everything I can to help ensure that the person might be identified. To identify the person can give them back their person-hood and return them to their community; comfort their fellow travelers that, even though they may have had to go on, someone cares enough to follow their footsteps and find their companion; and give closure to loved ones left back in their country of origin. I have less purely altruistic responses too, it makes me feel useful, like I am making some small contribution to alleviate the suffering of one family, one group, one traveler.

All these responses draw me back to keep on exploring in the Growlers. We will unlock their secrets, find their lost and share their stories.

Do you know where you are going?

For the past 27 years I have been an urban wolf. During the 1990s my primary habitat was the DC streets and nightclubs, first as a bike messenger and later as a bartender, where my idea of Mexican food meant a trip to Burrito Brothers. After the millennium, my world changed, expanding to include theatres and art spaces, museums, historical sites and bougie Mexican tapas in DC and Detroit. A couple of weeks ago, for the final weekend of 2018, I went full feral desert wolf - back country camping in the Sonoran Desert. Here is my handy guide to staying warm and not getting lost in the desert…

How to not be cold in the desert at night…

The temperature was set to drop close to freezing so my most important consideration was staying warm at night. I really hate sleeping bags, they are so confining and claustrophobic. Having tried various experiments with different combinations of blankets, over the past 3 weeks of living in a barn, I hoped I had hit on the magic ratio of under to over blankets. Accordingly, I filled the back seat of the Ford F150 with my tent, a foil emergency blanket, sleeping pad, sleeping bag (acceptable if unzipped to the feet), and 5 FEMA blankets. If you have never seen a FEMA blanket, they do not look very enticing, they are made of felt and carry the, not very comforting notice, that they “do not contain DDT” and warn you not to wash them. But they are really, really, really warm. Frankly, I don’t care if they contain napalm; better a short, warm life, than a long cold one!

First set up your tent in full sun, this allows all the bedding inside to capture as much warmth as possible during the day. Once the tent is up, line the floor with the foil emergency blanket. Next comes the first layer of FEMA blanket and the sleeping pad. On top of the sleeping pad, place another FEMA blanket then the unzipped sleeping bag. Double fold the third FEMA blanket and encase the feet area of the sleeping bag. The fourth and fifth FEMA blankets go on top of the sleeping bag. When you are on your way to bed, grab a sixth FEMA blanket from the back of your pick-up truck and throw it into the tent for good measure. Lastly, take the clothes you plan to wear tomorrow and place them between the sleeping bag and the bottom FEMA blanket. If you follow these instructions you will wake up in the middle of the night because you are too hot, have to get naked and in the morning, you will have nice warm toasty clothes all ready to put on before you have to climb out from under the mountain of blankets.

How to not get lost in the desert…

I have visions of myself as a rugged desert wolf, able to find my way by the position of the sun by day and the stars by night. Of course, these visions are simply castles in the air, the sun does not cooperate by starting exactly due East in the morning and I have absolutely no ability to identify individual stars or constellations, much less any knowledge of where they are in relation to the earth.

Before heading out for the weekend I visited to REI to purchase a GPS and almost had a heart attack when I looked in the case and saw the prices! I got a good, old fashioned compass for $20.

Compasses look simple. You hold them in front of you and they tell you which direction you are heading. Except they don’t, they tell you where North is, and even more confusing they tell you where magnetic North is. And magnetic North changes its relationship to true North depending on where you are in the world. To combat this deficiency you have to figure out your “declination”, or the variance between magnetic North and true North for your location and adjust your compass accordingly. This turned out to be easier than it sounds, good maps include a declination angle in the legend and good compasses have a little screw that you can turn to set the declination for wherever you are. Cheaper ($20) compasses do not have the little declination screw so you just draw a line in sharpie for the angle of magnetic North on your compass.

Once you have finished messing around with the declination and start walking a new issue arises; the Compass needle does not point in the direction you are going, it always points to magnetic North! To figure out where you are actually going, you have to move the “direction of travel arrow” on the baseplate to point to your desired direction, while keeping the compass needle still pointing true North. Then, you start walking following the direction of travel arrow while keeping the needle at or around the sharpie mark you made early for magnetic North.

This is as far as I have made it with the compass. I can walk in approximately the right direction, but I have not even the beginnings of a clue how to tell when I should stop. That is a lesson for next week when I have time to spend the whole day at the library on You Tube.

It may be a while before I am as comfortable navigating my current habitat of stars and saguaros as I am roaming the streets of my urban homes. For now, being warm and snug at night and having an approximate idea of where I am and the direction I am going by day, seems like a good start.

A Brief History of Borders in Ajo, AZ

Ajo, Arizona sits about 43 miles from the Mexican border. It is a one stoplight town with a population of around 2,500 year-round residents that increases to closer to 4,000 when the snowbirds migrate south for the winter.

Ajo is a town of borders. Prior to the town’s founding the land on which it sits belonged to the Tohono O’odham Nation. The Nation stretched from present day Arizona into Sonora, Mexico. In the mid-1500s, Fray Marcos, a Spanish missionary, leading a small expedition in search of the famed City of Cibola arrived in the Nation. Fray Marcos was followed by Melchior Diaz and the much larger conquistador expedition of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado. Coronado’s men and weapons overpowered the settled tribes on the Nation and the Spanish slowly colonized the entire area.

The Tohono O’odham Nation and the Spanish continued mining on a small scale and Ajo remained part of Mexico for the next 300 years until the Gadsden purchase in 1854. The Gadsden purchase, negotiated between James Gadsden, US Ambassador to Mexico, and Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, ceded 29,670 square miles of Mexican territory to the United States and moved the border southward to follow the courses of the Rio Grande and Colorado Rivers. Not only were people who had formerly been Mexicans become US citizens but the Tohono O’odham Nation was slashed in half, separating families who had lived on the land for generations.

Between 1854 and 1884, Ajo was little more than a staging post. In 1884, Tom Childs re-opened the mines that had been abandoned by the Spanish, and the Arizona Mining and Trading Company established Ajo’s first copper mine. As industrial revolution bought new technology to mining, Phelps Dodge began open-pit copper mining in 1911 and a new set of borders were created. On the ridge, were the grand houses of the mine owners, overlooking the spectacular desert landscape. The lower town was segregated into white, Mexican and Native American sections with the living conditions become progressively worse and the pay progressively lower. When workers attempted to unionize in 1983, Phelps Dodge, following the prevailing anti-union sentiment of the Reagan administration, bought in non-union workers from outside Ajo, but the days of the mine were already numbered. Phelps Dodge shuttered operations in 1985.

Today, there is a new set of borders in Ajo. They are harder to define because many of them are no longer based on geography, race or economics. New housing for Border Patrol families sits next to winter homes of snowbirds. Edgy’s REB Supply is across the street from the American Citizens Club, which, contrarily to our current perception of the name, was founded by, and is still mainly a meeting place for, Mexican Americans. Humanitarian Aid workers and Border Patrol agents park next to each other at Olsen’s grocery store. Year-round and part-time residents gather at the library to use the wifi. Despite their physical proximity, borders are ever present and seemingly more insurmountable between them than the fence that marks the arbitrary boundary between the US and Mexico.

Nearly 200 years since Gadsden cut their land in half, the Tohono O’odham are still fighting to re-unify their Nation. If we continue to create more and more literal and figurative borders between us, will our children and their children still be fighting to break them down in 2220? Better, perhaps, to remove them now. #sinfronteras

Sources:

Ajo Chamber of Commerce

US Department of State, Office of the Historian

US Historical Markers

How the Raccoons got High

On Sunday, my first time as a solo facilitator with No More Deaths, I selected the South Growler Mountains for our water drop. We packed up the truck with water, beans, blankets, trail snacks and socks, checked the maps and GPS and drove down into the desert.

We made easy going of the first mile and half, straight out across the gravelly sand, across a few shallow washes and through a grove of cholla. As we neared the foothills of the mountains the terrain became rockier, the washes deeper and the cholla were replaced by a mix of organ pipe cactus, palo verde and creosote.

On dropping down into a particularly deep wash we found an evident migrant rest stop with blankets, clothing, used tins of food and empty black water bottles, which are issued to migrants in Mexico. As we searched the area, we spotted a trail of ATV dust headed straight for us. Quickly climbing out of the wash we set ourselves up behind a palo verde tree and took out our snacks and personal water bottles. We discussed how to handle the coming interaction. The only question from Border Patrol that you legally have to answer is “Are you a US citizen?” We agreed that we would not answer any other questions.

The ATVs came closer and we could hear the Border Patrol agents shouting to each other as they looked for us on the other side of the wash. Finally, one agent called out, “I got eyes on them!” and drove through the wash to where we were sitting. “What are you doing out here?” He asked. We sat silently for a couple of minutes, he waited. “Are you all US Citizens?” While I could probably get away with saying “yes” to the citizenship question, I always answer “no” because I want in some small way to challenge the assumption that all white people in the desert are US citizens. He asked about my documents, then got back on his ATV and left. We sat for a few minutes, waiting for them to be far enough away that we considered it safe to return to the water drop.

After making our first drop we continue to follow the wash up into the mountains and found a well-used trail, with historic and recent trash of all kinds, winding up a saddle. At the top of the saddle we reached the Cabreza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge fence. There was no sign of the previously established water drop, based the strong signs that the trail was being used regularly, we decided to place an experimental drop just below the saddle and check on it in a couple of weeks.

The sun came out as we made our way back down to the pass, following a different wash from the one we had made the first drop in. As the sunlight filtered through the mesquite it glinted off something metal. IT’S A 20 POUND BRICK OF WEED! A very old, very moldy and much chewed upon brick of weed, but still a brick of weed! The buds were tightly packed together and wrapped in tin foil, which had been torn open and the brick chewed at, likely by a combination of raccoons, rodents, birds and insects. Judging by the amount of weed that had been eaten, there were some very stoned animals in the Growlers.

We had a good day. It had everything you could ask for in a day, good exploration of trails, a worthwhile water drop and a little desert surrealism….as the sun set we left the remainder of the brick for the raccoons so they could “wake and bake.”

Don't Leave Your Bag Unattended...

I have been back in the desert for a week now. At first it was a slow adjustment, leaving behind my regular type life for real this time and not knowing where the desert would lead me.

On my first day, we found a homemade backpack constructed of cardboard, burlap sacking and string. These backpacks are often used to carry marijuana bricks across the border and finding it led to a conversation about the difficulties of unraveling the border narrative of the drug trade. 

On the Mexican side of the border, most if not all, the crossings are controlled by the cartels. Migrants who cannot afford to pay the cartels for passage across the desert are forced to carry drugs in full, or partial, payment for a coyote’s (guide) services provided by the cartel.

Here in Ajo, the crossing is the longest of any point on the border, up to 70 miles of uninhabited national parks, US army and Bureau of Land Management land. The dangerous nature of the crossing means that the cartels charge the least to cross and that the migrants who cross here are often the least able to afford the crossing fee, therefore they are forced into carrying drugs in lieu of cash payment.

On the US side of the border, this reinforces the right-wing narrative that all migrants are drug smugglers. It is a disingenuous narrative, designed to provoke fear in the US population and to criminalize people who have been displaced through violence, climate change and economic insecurity. A person who has left their homeland though fear of gang violence, walked thousands of miles in search of basic safety and arrived in Sonora only to find that the cartel crossing fee exceeds any amount they could possibly muster, who then agrees to carry a brick of marijuana across the border is not a “drug smuggler.” An unwilling “mule,” maybe, but not a smuggler which implies repeated commercial interest in the drug trade.

For now, the desert is leading me to help these migrants, the ones who do not garner sympathetic news stories or spark crowd-funding campaigns. I am looking for a place to stay in Ajo and to play a small part in humanizing the border for those most in need.

Sin Fronteras

You cannot visit Arizona without visiting Mexico, until 1854 Arizona was Mexico! On our last Saturday with No More Deaths we packed into the car and drove down to Nogales to cross the border. The streets of Nogales, AZ were quiet, the only activity was in the parking lots and a small strip of shops changing money and selling Mexican car insurance. It took less than 5 minutes to walk across to Nogales, MX, where suddenly Nogales came to life. The town was bustling with people, traffic, souvenir markets, street vendors (selling everything from small appliances to popsicles) and dentists. The dentist offices were piled on top of other, each with a big sign advertising their services; it almost made me feel like I might need some work done and that somehow by not going to the dentist I was not getting the full Nogales experience.

One street in Nogalas, MX was practically empty, the one that runs parallel to the border fence. To call it a fence seems inaccurate, it is more of a barrier, 25ft iron posts dominate the skyline and are topped with rectangular iron sheets. On the Mexican side artists have decorated the barrier with graffiti and arts installations and commemorated loved ones who have lost their lives at the border. Through the gaps you can see the deserted streets of Nogales, AZ and the cameras, motion detectors, vehicles and watch towers of US Border Patrol.

It was not always this way. Prior to the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 by the Clinton administration, there was no barrier. People crossed regularly for seasonal work in the US on farmers and in factories. They also crossed back again to spend holidays and special occasions with their families.

Within a year of the passage of the original NAFTA it became clear that the creators had either not given serious thought to the impact of the agreement on Mexican workers or that they did not care about it. As a result of heavily subsidized, cheap US corn flooding the Mexican market and the expansion of large US corporations, for example Walmart and Home Depot, opening big box stores in the country selling cheap goods, Mexican farmers and small businesses owners lost their jobs or were driven out of business. Consequently, Mexican workers did the only thing they could do to provide for their families, they migrated north with the goal of more permanent settlement in the US.

Free movement of people was not part of the NAFTA plan; the goal was free movement of capital not workers.

On October 1, 1994, to combat this increased migration, the US government launched its new policy of Prevention Through Deterrence in San Diego with the first physical barriers on the border and hiring additional Border Patrol agents. The goal of Prevention Through Deterrence was to curb migration by Mexican workers by forcing them to risk their lives crossing in the deadly deserts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California. Between 1994 and 1997, Prevention Trough Deterrence expanded rapidly long the border with additional fencing being erected, increased Border Patrol manpower and checkpoints up to 100 miles north of the actual border.

Over the past 24 years, more than 10,000 migrants have died in the desert as a result of Prevention Through Deterrence and many thousands more have gone missing, fallen victim to people smugglers, or been separated from their families though detention or deportation. By all measures, the human cost of NAFTA, ignored by the drafters of the original agreement, on Mexican workers and families has been immense.

Fast forward to 2018 and the Trump administration is currently trying to renegotiate NAFTA. Given Trump’s overwhelmingly nationalist, anti-immigrant stance it seems unlikely that his administration’s proposed agreement gives any more thought to its impact on Mexican workers than Clinton’s did.

Two of the mostly widely reported proposals in the new NAFTA are the requirements that 75% of new car content be made in North America (ie the US, Canada and Mexico) and 40 to 45% of content be made by workers making $16 per hour. Ostensibly the goal of this second provision is to force car manufacturers to bring jobs back to the US and hire white US citizens. That is not the only possible outcome. How could this provision could impact migration on the US-Mexico border?

Firstly, the US could see an increase in Mexican migration similar to that which occurred in 1994. Car manufacturers could open new factories in the US to comply with the $16 per hour wage requirement. This would lead to job losses in Mexico and workers, already skilled in those jobs, and facing shrinking employment opportunities at home, crossing the border with the knowledge that their skills are needed in the US and the hope that they will be paid well should they be able to secure a job.

Secondly, if car manufacturers move factories to Canada, the US could become a “gateway” country. Mexican workers faced with job losses at home might decide to risk the long journey to Canada. The US could find itself hosting caravans of migrants crossing its southern deserts, continuing across the plains of the mid-west and attempting to cross its norther border in harsh, cold winter conditions, while also facing a Canadian government berating it to do something to stop them. While there would be a kind of delicious irony in this scenario for the chattering classes, it would undoubtedly result in many more migrant deaths and family separations.

Lastly, car manufactures could decide to pay workers in Mexico $16 an hour. This might make economic sense when factoring in the costs of building new factories and hiring and training a new work force in the US. This would make wages in the auto industry disproportionately high compared to wages and cost of living in the rest of the Mexican economy. Within Mexico, it would increase inequality and possibly, ultimately, cause the type of gentrification we have seen in the US due to the increasing disparity between wages for workers in the middle and working classes. It could, ironically, also result in a reverse migration where US workers head south, through the desert, to cross the border in search of a better life in Mexico. The role of organizations like No More Deaths would be reversed from assisting migrants who have already crossed the border to preparing those getting ready to start the journey from Arizona.

All of these scenarios create new challenges for migrants, they all lead to long, dangerous journeys, hardship and upheaval for families, and greater inequality. If there must be a North American Free Trade Agreement, then it must include freedom of movement for people as well as capital. Only by opening the borders and allowing human beings to move across them as freely as car parts, money and technology can the US, Canada and Mexico create an agreement that does not cause people to risk their lives through migration and result in more families creating memorials to their loved ones at the Nogales border barrier.

Sources:
BorderAngels.org
No More Deaths Border History
US Trade Representative NAFTA Fact Sheet