2,000 Miles in the Borderlands: The Making of a RAVE, Part One... Page 5

When we arrive at the gate that leads to Bill and Ellen’s property, Bill is there to greet us. But instead of taking us directly to his house, he leads us to the site of a recent incursion along the wall.

“A couple of nights ago, somebody cut out one of the wall panels, rigged up a ramp and drove a car right through,” Bill explains. He then shows us where the wall has been quickly repaired by border patrol.

Former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff admitted that the wall will not stop people, the aforementioned instance a prime example. Chertoff claimed it would slow people down a few minutes and was a component in a multilayered plan. What he did not publicly determine was whether this component of the plan, which will cost $70 billion over its expected lifetime and creates enormous environmental problems, was really worthy of pursuing.

When we pull into Bill and Ellen’s driveway, the sun has already set, and in the near-darkness we are greeted by a gaggle of talkative dogs, some of which jump into our vehicles and onto our laps as we open our car doors.

After we have settled in, Bill and Ellen fix a spaghetti dinner for the eight of us, and we spend the evening drinking beers and talking about how things have been going since the wall was built. For Bill and Ellen, this unexpected construction has meant they can no longer see the mountains or their neighbors to the south (except through steel mesh), that they have much more noise and traffic, and their dogs often get stuck on the other side of the wall, unsure how to get back home.

And the people continue to come across.

“The border patrol have picked up pregnant women who have gotten over it,” Ellen says.

In the morning, Chris Linder and I drive to Douglas, Arizona, to meet a couple of pilots who have volunteered through the organization LightHawk to fly us over the border for aerial photography. I will be flying east out of town, over the Animas and Playas valleys.

Last year, I flew several flights in this region for a story I was doing on a herd of Southwestern bison. This herd is one of only five free-ranging herds of plains bison left in North America. What’s more, these bison range between two countries, over the U.S.–Mexico border. Before my research trip, I had only an academic understanding of what a wall would mean for a species like this. But in spring 2008, my vague notion of this borderlands threat became suddenly very concrete, and getting involved became imperative.

We were flying in search of the bison, when the researcher I was working with on the story, Rurik List, spotted two members of the herd below us and declared, “There they are!” The bison were thin, haggard by recent drought spells. Rurik consulted his GPS and added, “They’re in Mexico.”

Then our pilot, Sandy Lanham, pointed out, “That’s the border, right there. That fence.”

We trained our eyes on the two bulls, and in the blink of an eye, they had jumped the broken-down barbed wire border fence, and were standing suddenly on U.S. soil. When we returned to the ground, Rurik and I visited the property owners on both sides of that stretch of border. The one in the U.S. said he thought the bison stayed on his property because the grasses were healthier. The one on the Mexican side said he believed the bison came regularly to his property to visit a nearby pond.

Now, nine months later, I’m back.

Up in the air over the same landscape, I am unable to locate the bison herd, though the pilot I am with, Will Worthington, makes a valiant effort to find them. But what I do see makes the flight sadly worthwhile. The border between the U.S. and Mexico in these remote grassland valleys was, less than a year ago, almost imperceptible from 1,000 or even 500 feet. I had to consult GPS to know whether we were in the U.S. or Mexico. That we flew above the Animas Valley, a vast stretch of pale yellow grasslands, was evident from the terrain. And we knew when we passed into the next valley that we had reached the Playas, somewhat hillier and dotted more frequently with arid grassland shrubs than the Animas. It was the natural features of the landscape that defined it, just as they defined what species were going to be able to survive there and how they would move upon the land.

But now, something altogether different defines the landscape. It appears as if a chisel has been scraped along the earth for the breadth of both valleys, and in many places, steel barriers have already been erected. Elsewhere, dump trucks carrying loads of earth are churning up the dusty ground they have just uncovered. A profound change has taken place. My only solace of the morning is that the barriers that now line much of the Animas and Playas valleys have not yet reached the area where I saw the bison crossing last spring. But the construction continues. If the barrier is erected when the animals are on the U.S. side, they will be blocked from the water source that has been drawing them southward. If they are on the Mexican side, they will be blocked from the healthy grass that has been sustaining them.

This is the real story of urgency in the borderlands.