Up and down the Rio Grande a thousand footprints in the sand

Reveal the secret no one can define

The river flows on like a breath in between our life and death

Who’s the next to cross the borderline

—Willie Nelson

Looking down over the swaying side of the horse I saw the river, a thousand feet below. I felt like I was spinning, leaning into the canyon, when big hands pushed me back into the saddle, safely behind the horn.

That image stuck in my mind, with a whiff of vertigo. 

It was 1953, the summer I was 5. Lois and Gail, two of my three sisters, had set out in Big Bend National Park on horseback. I don’t think they had any choice but to take me along, since as teenagers, they were often my babysitters. Gail told me later that I was sitting in front of one of their “boyfriends,” who had secured me with a rope around my waist.

My first summers were all spent in the Big Bend, starting with Mitre Peak Girl Scout Camp, which my mother started in 1947. The summer of ‘55 I went to the summer camp at Prude Ranch, and the camp year closed with a two-night horseback camping trip. I was galloping through a field in the Davis Mountains. What can be better than that for a 7-year-old cowboy?

When I was 10, I went off to school in New York, and lived in that city for 40 years—with interesting side trips to San Francisco, L.A., St, Petersburg (Florida), Milan, and Hong Kong. I still returned to West Texas, often with the pretext of visiting my family in Midland and Houston. In 1996, my good friends Pam Murfin and Don Gardner (now a director of Sentinel) organized a Rio Grande rafting trip—seven days and six nights on the river. My husband, Foster, and 20 friends came along, and we all got into the genius loci, the spirit of the place. After a week of flowing river you fall into a meditative mood that can only be described as Zen. Along the way, we camped (without bothering with tents) on either side of the border. We only encountered two other groups—the first, some American fisherman. And the second, a group of Mexican cowboys. They waved. We took the hot springs, explored the caves, and then one day took a big hike a thousand feet up the side of a cliff, with the help of an Indian trail. 

At the top, there was no sign of a road or a telephone pole. I asked Foster, “Where do you think Jesse Helms will put his wall?” It seemed so absurd. 

In 2000, Gail helped me find a ranch in Brewster County, 30 miles southeast of Marathon. I’ve been here, off, and on, ever since. Recently, I noticed I’d marked it as “home” on Google Maps. And I feel that way. It seems like I belong here.

Topophilia

Most of us have a sense of their home place. It’s not just nostalgia. There is a lot of writing about topophilia, the term coined by W. H. Auden writing about the poet John Betjeman, who described the feeling beautifully. The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote about it in his influential treatise, The Poetics of Space.

If you live on a farm, at the seaside, on a mountain range, or in a great city, you know the nature of the place, and it’s sealed into your mind perhaps as strongly as my screenshot of the river from horseback.

That soaring landscape, the zen flow of the water, the interwoven cultural border is part of your identity. No matter how many miles they are from the river (and I’m writing this 40 miles away), they say they live in the Big Bend (a region the size of Switzerland). And they love this place.

And so it came as a great shock when we realized that where Jesse Helms failed, President Trump seems certain to succeed. He is on the verge of building his big wall. It’s all funded. Bids have been submitted, and Sentinel hears that the first contracts are about to be announced. 

The wall will destroy the genius loci: the zen flow, the interwoven border, the stunning views. We’ll be like the people of Kiev, where the topophilia has been bombed into rubble. 

And why? According to the DHS, apprehensions of illegals along the Big Bend where the wall is slated to be built, have been reduced to 3,000 a year. So, for the next three years, the American people are going to spend $222,000 per “illegal”–based on a projected cost of $2 billion. 

But will the wall stop them?

Could it ever be completely finished, with no gaps along the way—as they are all in sections built in the Rio Grande Valley and Arizona?

Are there no alternatives to destroying the place? Of course there are, even if you agree that the “illegals” should all be rounded up. The American Way has become the Rule of Force—for every problem. No thought about spending the money to keep migrants at home. No thought about dampening the demand for cross-border drugs rather than just smashing the supply. No thought about protecting the historic interdependence of border people and border culture. No thought about protecting the water supply, or cross-border trade. 

No thought that this “solution” to illegal migration will never work, without addressing the causes. 

But in the meantime they’ll destroy the spirit of our place.