Wanderlust

Wanderlust, still and always

August 10, 2008 at 6:03 pm elinordye Leave a comment

It’s Nora, writing from the Spirit House high on the hills of Marin, having traveled farther in the last two months than you would believe – than I would believe myself.  Wanderlust the journey, the bicycle adventure, is a month gone, and the memories are starting to settle.  The narrative begins to have a coherence that I’m sure is different for all of us who were part of it, and I find myself wondering how our memories diverge, what things each of us carries with us from the ride.

I have spent very little time by myself since we rolled back into New York. I left almost immediately for a retreat in Boston and then flew directly to Arizona to volunteer with No More Deaths (www.nomoredeaths.org), an organization that provides food, water, and medical relief to people crossing the Sonoran Desert.  Surrounded by people I love, I spent two weeks hiking through the lush, malicious desert, where everything can kill you and everything has thorns.

We met groups and individuals, young and old, men and women, who left Mexico to cross the unforgiving desert. It is almost unimaginably vast – even knowing the trails, and having cars to go back to, and being in relatively good physical health, I was utterly exhausted at the end of each day. For the people who are migrating across the desert, it is at least a four day walk, mostly at night.  If they get lost, or injured, or separated from their coyotes, it can be a many day walk – and some never reach their destinations. So far this summer, there  128 deaths have been confirmed, and probably many more have simply disappeared.

Everyone has a story, and it was incredibly powerful to hear the stories of the people we met.  We met people like Octavio and his cousin, two men from Michoacan, who had been walking for two days when we ran into them.  Octavio is married and has a five year old daughter and a newborn baby. He left his family, left his baby, left his wife to work as a tomato picker in Florida.  I asked him why, and he told me the story that is every story, that could be anyone’s.  His home is in a fertile valley, and he’d been a farmer, planting corn, selling it at market. Now, the United States imports subsidized corn from Iowa and floods the market. Octavio said “Ahora, perdimos mas que ganamos, y no podemos sobrevivir” – We lose more than we make, and we can’t survive.

It makes me so angry that our laws and our policies create a situation in which trade is legal but people are not – where the commodities that create a global marketplace are allowed to cross borders freely when it benefits the people in power, but the people who that marketplace relies on to function are criminalized, are dying because crossing the border seems like the best possible option.

Some pictures I took on the border are here on my flickr page.

No More Deaths is always looking for volunteers and donations, so if you’re interested in helping out, visit http://nomoredeaths.org/.

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