In south Texas the line really was a river, even if it didn’t look like much. From the window of the pickup that Rose used to pick me up from the bus station the land on either side appeared equally flat and bland, the unpainted houses and patchwork fields set amid groves of trees as brown as grocery store bags. Winter had leached the color from the landscape, if not from the old pickup trucks, the small tiendas and tire-repair shops from which ranchero music played. Which side of the border were we on? At times it was hard to tell.
The trees were palms and oranges and grapefruits and they weren’t supposed to be the color of a northern autumn, but just a week before a record freeze had set in, killing off subtropical trees and plants on both sides throughout this lowest part of the Rio Grande Valley. Rose was the manager of the nature preserve where I was to work for a few weeks, and she called it an ecological event: the nonnative species like citrus and imported palms had likely been killed off, while the native species would be fine. Local people, unused to such sustained cold, would have a new marker year to talk about, as memorable as the scattered hurricane years: the big freeze of ‘89.
The preserve sheltered one of the few remaining sizable patches of native palms, green and healthy. During the day skeins of birders dropped in, migrants who had traveled far to get here. As I worked the cash register, selling them souvenir T-shirts, I heard them talking excitedly about their wish lists, full of exotic-sounding birds like green jays and clay-colored robins, great kiskadees and golden-crowned warblers. That these birds were all quite common farther south was hardly relevant: the birders were here because this was one of the few places where these birds could reliably be found north of the border.
In late afternoon the early winter dusk came in and we locked the door, and the gate. The hunting hawks and scrounging vultures were replaced by great horned owls that played winter games of courtship, counter-hooting from the telephone poles and chasing one another through the fading light. The birders gave way to Border Patrol agents who also were playing a game of cat and mouse with biological visitors from the south. They didn’t seem much concerned with people crossing over to work, or maybe there weren’t too many of those right after New Year’s. No, they were fixated on smugglers.
This morning we arrested six guys over on Ortiz Road, one of the agents told me one morning. His name was Cameron. Pale blue eyes, short-cropped law enforcement haircut, Texas drawl. 4 a.m. Between them they had 150 pounds of pot. The guy in front was holding a .22 pistol and he’s lucky he didn’t get popped. We found them because of the motion sensor that we have out over by the levee.
Rose had already told me that there was a good deal of nighttime traffic coming through the preserve. They usually stay away from the visitor center, she said. But you should probably sleep inside.
I was already preparing my monastically simple dinners and breakfasts in the small kitchen in the back. The first night I learned that the drinking fountain up front made annoying pumping sounds all night long. I felt cooped up, restless. Why had I come to Texas if not to be in direct contact with the land? The second night I spread my sleeping pad and bag out on the tiled porch out front. It was a breezy night, and a restless one. The palm fronds never stilled, brushing heavily against one another like a thousand brooms sweeping away winter’s collateral damage. Once a dead frond must have fallen, crashing hard onto the dry woodland floor. I started. What was the difference between a human footfall on a dry palm leaf, and a deer’s? And what about that catlike growling that came late in the night? Bobcat? Ocelot? Jaguarundi? The preserve was known for hosting small predators that were as exotic, or at least as subtropical, as the birds. I was wearing myself out wondering what was out there. Finally I fell asleep, exhausted, and didn’t wake up until I heard the buzzing of hummingbirds (buff-bellied) at the feeder in the morning light.
That day Rose’s husband Mike and I went out to start filling up the resaca. A resaca is an oxbow lake, a onetime river channel cut off when the river changed course, probably during some flood that must have happened before the river became a theoretically unchanging international border. It used to fill up seasonally with floodwater, providing great habitat for least grebes and black-bellied whistling-ducks, among other waterfowl, but these days the Rio Grande, controlled by dams and depleted by irrigation, didn’t flood that way anymore. The resaca was chronically going dry. So Mike and I went to start up the pump, which pulled muddy river water up a thick PVC pipe.
Mike was of a species that seems barely to exist anymore, the redneck environmentalist who simply thought there were too many people everywhere. I’m not prejudiced, he joked as he re-glued a pipe fixture loosened by the big freeze; I hate ‘em all. But he was a friendly guy in a one-on-one situation, and from him I learned how after all the fittings had been checked and re-set if necessary we could use a smaller pump to prime the big one.
Thirty years is a long time. I’m more attuned to the desert border now than the river one, dismayed at how an absurd wall designed for TV show is newly marching through desert basins that until now have had a fundamental unity. Yet sometimes it is the borders in time that feel more solid and substantial than those on the ground—the way in which a single day in 2001 caused the U.S. to place fear at the top of its decision-making; the way in which one election day in 2016 made it clear that unreality and made-for-TV moments would dominate policy decisions; the way in which when you visit the preserve now you have to pass through the border wall to get there.
This does not mean you are leaving the country, entering disputed territory or putting yourself at risk, reads the sign at the preserve entrance. The Border Wall is simply a first response barrier for homeland security.
When we were done Mike switched on the pump and the Rio Grande water gushed up and out into a narrow ditch that fed the resaca. It was brown, and it pushed a wave of downed leaves and crusted dust and mysterious foam before it. It puddled and pooled and grew slowly deeper. In a couple of days he’d have to turn the pump off, earlier than planned, because the river level would be too low. But for how we watched, in silence, as the old dry earth so long sundered from its river grew slick and muddy with moisture before it disappeared under the muddy water.
