“Can I touch the fence?” I ask.
“Sure,” says the Border Patrol Agent #2, “but you just might catch a disease or something, like Typhoid.”
He laughs. His partner doesn’t.
Me? Nah. Not that fucking funny. Way too racist for my tastes.
And so continues my exchange with Border Patrol Agents #1 and #2.
I decided to drive down to the border to see the new Trump Wall. I got a little confused where the new wall was. Seems they are actually building it 50 miles to the west of here, near Lukeville. I’m a few miles east of Sasabe. Using my Arizona Gazetteer map, I skirted the tiny town of Sasabe and got on the dirty roads of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge that hugs the border all the way from Sasabe to Nogales. My Pathfinder is old but with its big tires and low gears, it can go just about anywhere.
So here I am, at the border fence. Not the Trump Wall but the rusty tall steel fence build back in the early 2000’s. Except now, it has Trumpian Concertina wire along the top. It was almost an elegant structure years ago. Now it looks like shit, like a prison fence.
I park the truck and take out Pamela’s Baby Rocking Chair, put it near the fence and begin to compose a shot. Way off to the east, close to a mile away along the dirt road that parallels the fence, I spy two white Border Patrol SUVs. I wonder how long it will take them to see me. I click off a few exposures along the fence, when I notice, through the long lens, the dust from their tires. Here they come. I take the chair back to the truck and place it near the back bumper. Going to have to explain myself as it is. Don’t want to have to explain why I have a toddler’s rocking chair with me too. I sling my 70-200 over my shoulder and wait for the boys to arrive.
Doesn’t take long
I walk up to them first.
“How’s it going,” I say.
“OK, how are you?” says BP #1.
“I’m OK,” I say. “I’m a photographer from Tucson and I was photographing in the Buenos Aires, and thought I would come down here and take a look at the fence.”
Now that’s a lie. I came down specifically to shoot the border.
“Oh,” says BP #1, “Do you work for a newspaper?”
“No,” I say. “I’m just a freelancer.”
As we talk, BP #2 flanks me, putting himself at a 90 degree angle and more from BP #1, so he’s just out of my periphery vision. That pisses me off but I don’t say anything. Really? You got to fucking flank me? I know it’s your training but come on, dude.
We talk a little bit. BP #2 makes the diseased-Mexican joke that only he laughs at. I thank them for doing what they do to rescue people who are dying in the desert. BP #1 tells me a story about how he’s worked for the Border Patrol since 1998 and in the 2000’s, he saved many people’s lives.
“It was really bad back then,” he says, with true sadness in his voice. “One time I thought it was only 15 people dehydrated. Ended up being over 50 but we helicoptered them all out and nobody died that day.”
Then BP #2 says his second Trumpian remark.
“Yeah,” he scoffs, “they have turns us away from being law enforcement and now we are just search and rescue.”
I don’t say anything. I think, ‘asshole.’ But he is still flanking me. And he is armed.
We talk a few more minutes, then we say our goodbyes.
BP #1 wasn’t a bad guy. Pleasant, courteous, seemingly compassionate. Granted I have three things in my favor. One, I’m white. Two, I’m male. Three, I’m old. As they drive back to their perch to the east, I thought BP #2 and even BP #1 probably wouldn’t have been quite so friendly if I was a lone young Hispanic woman with a camera. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am.
I retrieve Pamela’s chair and start shooting again. BP #1 and #2 have returned to where they were before, a mile or less away. I take a shot of the PBRC sitting at the base of the fence. Then, in my mind’s eye, I see the shot. I can see it in black and white. It’s evocative, political, sad. Yep, that’s the shot.
I walk over, pick up Pamela’s chair and hang it upside down in the razor wire. Its placement in the wire compositionally works good, the first time I hang it. Good. I don’t have time to mess around with it and I don’t think the Border Patrol would like me doing this. I need to shoot quick. I shoot the crap out of this with the long lens, many exposures bracketed and framed. I’m not coming back for a second go-round. I look at the back of my Canon. I think I got it but I won’t know until I get back to the studio. I take an insurance image with my iPhone. I look east to see if BP #1 and #2 have moved. Nope. Just sitting there in their vehicles. I best not push it. I walk to the fence, reach up and free the chair. I walk back to the Pathfinder and stow it in the back.
Then I just gaze at the wall for a while. I think of how fear builds this things. Back in the day, the border was relatively open. Tohono O’odham and Pasqua Yaquis native people would travel back and forth with regularity. Sure, smugglers would cross too with bales of marijuana and cocaine, but also, young men and women and sometimes whole families would take the trek north, looking for employment opportunities, many sadly misled by the coyotes who they had given tens of thousands of pesos to take them to Phoenix. Then they would leave them a few hundred yards on this side of the border and tell them, ‘Those lights over there is Phoenix. It’s not far. Walk that way,.’ What the immigrants were really seeing were the lights of the small town of Sells on the T.O. Reservation, maybe 20 miles away. Phoenix is over 120 miles at best.
I sigh. Good news bad news. Good news, less people are dying in the Sonoran Desert now then in the early 2000’s. The economy in Mexico is a little bit better and it’s somewhat harder to find good work in the U.S. now. Bad news, xenophobic, old, angry, white men are pushing policies to separate refugee children from their parents at the border. Billions of dollars are being spent just a few miles to the West to make an even taller wall, just so ignorant white people in Omaha don’t feel irrationally afraid, while rocking on their front porches at night.
It’s so fucked up.
Trump isn’t really the problem, or not the whole problem. He’s a symptom. It’s his political party and the people they represent. The Republican Party leaders sold out their conservative values so frightened, ignorant white people would continue to vote for them and keep them in power. They sold their souls to the Devil and now the Devil want his due.
Throughout our entire history as a country, a good third of all voting adults have at best, been ignorant and fearful, and at worse, mendacious, greedy, racist, sexist pricks. It was true in the year 1801, and in 1901, and in 2001. It’s still true today.
One third.
And where have Trump approval ratings been for the most of his Presidency?
35 to 40 %.
That’s right.
One third.
But I do take great solace in the fact that 60 to 70% of Americans are not that way. They may be more conservative than I, or even more liberal, but they are not bad people. They are raising their kids, trying to be good people in the worlds where they walk and work, and are, at the very least, considerate of people who are different from them. They are good people. They work hard. They love their families and some love God too.
But as the old saying goes, one bad apple spoils the whole bunch, and the chief bad apple in the fall of 2019 is President Donald J. Trump.
I take the long way home, through washes full of sand that are rationally scary as hell to me but I got through them; past an old ranch cemetery of the Garcia family, with new marble headstones to replace the old soft ones, where the names and dates of the dead have been rubbed away by the blowing desert winds and the heat of many Arizona summers; past a huge Ocotillo grove of tall straight plants, that tempted me to stop and saw a few of their stalks off, so I can making walking sticks out of them; popping in and out of the little town of Sasabe, mostly empty now, with its large Border Patrol presence, but it stills hold a colorful charm of the small Southwestern border town, with his pastel painted homes and the smell of someone cooking beef nearby; through another Border Patrol checkpoint north of Arivaca, where this old white man is quickly waved through; and back on Interstate 19 and north to home, the lights of Tucson twinkles as I arrive after dark.
Only one bad thing really happened on this trip: I think I knocked the front end out of alignment. It’s pulling to the right like a son of a bitch but that can be easily fixed by the talented techs at Gibbs Automotive. (A purposeful plug for Mike Sams and his shop.)
I arrive back at my studio.
I unload the truck.
Now let’s see what’s on these CF cards.
Text and photography by Stu Jenks (c) 2019