Go West

I woke up bright and early and loaded my stuff into the car. My trusty ’97 Mazda was maintenanced and ready for its triumphant return to Tijuana. I picked up my sister and drove toward the highway.

Two hours later, we were sitting in a transmission shop in Alabama. “Anywhere from $500 to $1900?” I heard myself reiterating to the mechanic. “The parts won’t be in until Monday…..?” It was Friday afternoon. I got drunk while waiting for someone to pick us up and stared dismally out of the window as we road back to Atlanta.

Saturday morning, I was awake again, put the same clothes on that I had worn the day before and pretended like it was Friday. I got in my sister’s car and we headed west.

A day and a half later, we started seeing Border Patrol check points as we headed west, then south, south south. We entered Brownsville. Agents had a man surrounded on the side of the road, his trunk open. Strange, shanty like houses lined the border. “Does someone live in there……?” I asked and stopped, as I saw a man walking out of a pieced together home. The border wall cut through their backyards. A dusty expanse on the other side was Mexico, mi querido México.

We drove west. The border wall stayed on our left as we passed through vacant, blighted towns. Shanties were mixed indiscriminately with larger homes, some that looked older, oddly historic and strangely reminiscent of homes I had seen in Chihuahua, Chihuahua city, on the other side….something that continued but had been interrupted by a large rusty wall.

We stopped in Eagle Pass for the night. We passed through the empty downtown that would be charming if someone, anyone, actually opened something up in the empty storefronts. We drove by the river, or what we could see of it through the border wall. Suddenly, there was a space, a huge space; a large gate that was part of the border wall was wide open. We stared through. Across the narrow expanse of Río Grande, Mexico sat. Kids swam in the river with a couple of adults. It was tranquil and strangely homey and lovely in the late afternoon sun. And then the Border Patrol pulled up, tearing down the dirt road and stopping, staring at the Mexican side. The kids got out of the water. We left too.

As we careened through El Paso a day and multiple border patrol check points later, I saw the signs pointing to Mexico, to Juárez, and suddenly realized I was in the line TO Juárez and no one was letting me out and I shoved my way into traffic and out of the line, determined, bound and determined, not to go there.

We drove by the wall separating El Paso from Juárez. Was it caging Mexico out, or caging it in? Tidy houses mixed with shanties lined the dusty Mexican side. Some roads were paved, some were not. Water ran through the street. White people played golf on the American side. A massive crowd of people waited in line over a long bridge that went over the highway, a line that extended from the gate to the United States and into Mexico for as far as the eye could see.

We drove west, through the desert of New Mexico flanked by Border Patrol trucks and on to Arizona. We stood, gazing through the border wall on a dusty road west of Douglas in a desert so familiar to both of us, when a racing truck with a plum of dust behind it tore up. I snapped a picture of it, then continued doing what I was already doing, basically looking around. For once, I actually wasn’t doing anything wrong. “Hey… ,“ the Border Patrol agent said tentatively through his open window, “…um, just uh, taking some pictures? We have cameras. Someone called us in on you.”

We headed toward Nogales. Wildfires got in our way and clouded the air above the desert, reminding me of a summer long ago when a helicopter picked a sick man up and flew him into the sky while the fire glowed like lava from the hills. Nogales looked different in the daytime, much different than the nervous couple of evenings I spent there one time, one strange time while fireworks exploded in the sky and things scurried in the night. The border wall cut straight through the town, dusty houses butted up against it on the American side and brightly painted houses squeezed against the Mexican side.

As we passed through the Imperial dunes, my Arizona memories were replaced by California ones. I remembered the moonlit night I had spent a year ago, driving through the glowing dunes after finishing my last day of school in Tijuana, crying and singing in a strange delirium of emotions and separation. We came to Holtville and stood in the odd part of the cemetery, way in the back, where only “John Doe” bricks mark the graves. Signs warned of stepping on the ground, that it would cave in. By the graves. People say the bodies, the migrants, are not buried in caskets in their pauper graves. Flies swarmed and one bit me hard on the face, leaving it itching for days. A migrant-friendly group had put crosses up, wooden crosses, each painted carefully with “No olvidado” across the front. They were inserted by the bricks.

We looped around the familiar country roads heading south. Finally, we came over a hill and Mexico exposed itself before us, a sea of twinkling lights in all directions. After days of avoiding the lanes that point straight toward Mexico, I drove straight in.

Oh, Mexico. How I’ve missed you.