| The New Americans | |||||||||
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So where have we been on this journey? Up and down the borderlands, from Wisconscin to Michoacán, from California to North Carolina, with frequent, very frequent stops in Los Angeles and Mexico City...
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In the last few years I've flown the L.A.-Mexico City route perhaps 50 timesI know every nautical mile, each and every valley and snow-capped volcano and alluvial fan and duned desert and sand bar beneath blue-green sea, have seen each detail of the landscape from 33,000 feet. And I know the exact moment when we cross the border, because I always listen to the cockpit conversations on Channel 8 of my headphones and when the controllers order the pilots to lock their guidance equipment on the radar beacon at Julian (a small town in the mountains east of San Diego) that is the sign that we are crossing from Mexican into American airspace, but, you know what? There is nothing down there. There is no line, there is no wall (the new 9-foot fence that begins running eastward from Tijuana only goes a dozen miles), there is only semi-arid land, very sparsely populated, and the beginning of a great desert to the east, a desert that lasts for two thousand miles until you get to the Gulf Coast. I've been saying it for years: there is no border; it is much more of an idea than a reality. What does exist are the dangers of the road. | ||||||||
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I write from a place in the desert, the Mojave, the very one those United Airlines jets fly over on their approach to Los Angeles International Airport, carrying free trade business-types and, increasingly, working-class migrants (it's a curious thing to see a guy in a double-breasted suit sitting next to one wearing a sweat-stained cowboy hat and faded plaid shirt). This morning I drove up into Joshua Tree National Park, perhaps the most strangely beautiful part of the Mojave, and chose a spot far away from the German and Japanese tourists and those immensely irritating middle-class American families, to a spot not where the Joshua trees reach this way and that with their yearning arms, no, to a more arid place, closer to the Colorado Desert, which is drabber and lonelier and I guess most people think that it's not as pretty as the landscape at the higher elevations, because very few people go there.
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That's why I went. I went there to climb a mountain and look around
at a place without roads or checkpoints, and to think about all
the places and people I've left behind and all the places and
people I have yet to see, about all our journeys, each and every
journey of necessity, each and every road taken.
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