The Wall

(Stock shot , Border Wall at El Paso)

A four-day swing through southern New Mexico and northern Texas yielded excellent delights, from the sublime to the ridiculous. To start with the sublime: Carlsbad Caverns are a wonder, deserving of their place on the World Heritage list. Yawning deep into the earth for miles, chamber after glittering chamber blazes with otherworldly images: brilliant, jewel-tone crystals; long, boney fingers that sprout from the floors and drip from the ceilings; towers and clamshells and curtains built over millions of years of geologic busyness. One chamber seemed alive with dancing multi-colored creatures. It reminded me of the cantina scene in the old Star Wars movie, where they’re jamming to John Williams jazz.

Hueco Tanks in northern Texas, with its ancient pictographs, is both an oasis in the desert and a step back in time. Silver City is a pretty little mining town that managed to survive the depletion of its minerals and more recently, a two-year tourist drought brought on by the pandemic. Even Roswell --- site of the most widely publicized, best researched and most thoroughly debunked UFO sighting ever—is delightfully quirky. The populace has obviously decided to go with the alien story; there are little green men everywhere. In the McDonald’s, where we stopped for a drink and a bathroom, you can take a selfie with one of the little extraterrestrials, while listening to a PA system blasting an evangelical anthem declaring that “Jesus is da bomb!” Jesus and aliens. It's fair to say that Roswell is out of this world.

But the sight from our ramble that sticks most stubbornly is one that chills. The border wall in El Paso.

Having ventured this far south, we hoped to get a glimpse of Mexico. Our wonderfully helpful friend Ed, who lives with his partner in Santa Fe but grew up in West Texas, suggested the El Mirador bar atop the Del Norte Hotel. In old downtown El Paso, the bar looks over the Rio Grande into Juarez. We tapped it into the GPS, and immediately encountered a hiccup. Alas, the El Mirador is closed on Tuesdays. OK; need a pivot. Instead of the bar, we decided to take State Highway 375, which drops down from Interstate 10, turns west at the Rio Grande, and sweeps around the perimeter of the city, hugging the border for miles. We will ride along the highway, we figured, and gaze over the river at our neighbor to the south.

When we hit the westward bend, we didn’t see the river. We didn’t see Mexico. We didn’t see anything, except the highest, longest, most forbidding expanse of metal imaginable. It was at least 30 feet high. It was kind of slatted—thin ribbons of daylight shone through—and it curved with the road and stepped up and down with the terrain. It was dark grey--nearly black—and it stretched for miles. We drove and drove, the wall on the left side of us; the city of El Paso on the right.

I have seen pictures of the border wall. I have seen pictures of kids in cages. In the early months of 2017, when Trump was serving up demonized immigrants as red meat for his base, these images were hard to miss. But rounding that curve and seeing that wall with my own eyes was like—well, like hitting a wall. It felt like a prison. It felt like East Berlin during the Cold War. It felt monstrous, in every sense of the word. How must it feel to travelers who—having braved traffickers, smugglers, thieves, rapists, killing desert heat, and God knows what other horrors just to get this far—arrive to see that thing as their welcome to America?

“Jesus,” breathed Cal at the moment I thought that. “It seems so un-American.”

I read that in some places along the border, building Trump’s “big, beautiful wall” cost more than $41 million per mile. This was true in geographically inaccessible places, and also where the land was privately held. In cases like those, the feds (under the leadership of first son-in-law Jared Kushner), tried to seize the land through eminent domain. These attempts largely failed. Of Trump’s dream of 700 miles of wall, about 450 got built. Most of this was “low hanging fruit” in Arizona and New Mexico—places that were easy to get to and that the feds already owned, usually in the form of national forest or wildlife preserve. In the waning days of the administration, contractors slashed through the terrain, trying to complete—and bill—as much of the project as they possibly could. They left behind what Nick Miroff of the Washington Post called “mutilated landscapes and a bone yard of steel fence panels.” Scarred remains of half-built walls are everywhere, posing hazards to people and wildlife.

The day after our circumnavigation of El Paso, we drove through a Border Patrol station west of Las Cruces. This wasn’t such a big deal, really. We had to slow down, have our car photographed from every conceivable angle by a bank of about 20 cameras, and drive through a gate. It was a little like the old days of agriculture inspection at the California border. But there were differences which, again, were chilling. The cameras, for starters. Signs everywhere declared that trucks had to stop and be searched---for human cargo, no doubt. There were large flat areas to hold diverted vehicles. And, likely, the human beings who, so desperate to come to this country, are found out, apprehended, denied.

I am not an open borders person. I think we need a rational, enlightened immigration policy. Perhaps like Canada’s, which values multiculturalism, caps the number, and grants entrance based on a point system that considers things like threats in the native country, availability of sponsors, education, language skills, employability. I don’t pretend to know how to get there. But walls and cages seem stupid. And cruel. And un-American.

And in a four-day period that offered transcendent natural wonders, I wonder: why is this the image that sticks?