November 14, 2009. Arivaca, Arizona. — Five past six A.M. and bitter cold. I’d been cold all night in my cheap sleeping bag. Staying asleep when you’re cold is difficult, especially when you don’t drink enough whiskey. Someone scratched the outer nylon of our tent, a chilling noise, and told us it was time to get up. Still dark out, the surreal clusters of stars visible through our tent all night were now gone. There isn’t much in the way of civilization here.
We were tagging along with a group of human rights activists called No More Deaths, or No Mas Muertes, which provides direct access to food, water and medical help to migrants crossing the border.
Rocky got up quickly, dressed, and piled his sleeping bag on top of me—finally warm and I had to get up, damn it. I reached for my jeans on the ground, they were nearly frozen. I stuck them down in my bag to try to give them some warmth, but ended up putting them on outside my sweats. I thought about how cold it must be for the migrants, who don’t even have sleeping bags—only the clothes on their backs, literally.
The campfire had been stoked, thank god, so I sat there like a zombie until someone yelled “Coffee.” The coffee was good. I couldn’t complain. I got some oatmeal and things started looking up.
We had gotten into town the day before, and a volunteer named Daniel came to pick us up and drive us down the dirt road to the camp. It was nothing much—a few RV trailers and a few large white tents. A bucket with a toilet seat and a tarp sufficed as the bathroom. The children’s book author Byrd Baylor, who lives nearby, allows No More Deaths to use the land for their humanitarian work.
Daniel is a tall, gawky guy with a tattoo on his face in place of a beard. He’s training to be a physician’s assistant in hopes of opening a clinic in Africa or Central America one day. He’s full of radical ideals and clearly has a big heart. Driving us to a couple of water drop off points as the sun went down, he tells us about the days when he was younger and he used to train jump across the country. The road was exceedingly rough. At one point, we got the ancient donated truck stuck in a ditch, and I was convinced we’d be spending the night out there. In the back of the truck were a couple dozen gallons of water and a case of black beans, so we’d survive. But luckily, Rocky and Daniel maneuvered the rusty beast back onto the road.
That next morning, after breakfast, the group of 16 volunteers and leaders of No More Deaths stood around the campfire and conferred about where to go do supply drops. Rocky and I were assigned to a trail called “Ruby,” with a leader named Annie and another volunteer named Ben.
Ruby is the name of a cluster of migrant trails that wind through a treacherous area of Coronado National Forest. It was a pretty challenging trek. We hiked on the trails for a couple of hours, and I was in pain the whole way, even though I’m in decent shape. (Though, our superhuman guide Annie busied herself climbing a rock face while the rest of us took a breather).
The trails aren’t well-marked like the official ones you’ll find in many parks, and we had to use a GPS to keep on track. Of course, we could have also followed the trail of litter, strewn about continually along the trail. There were rusted out tuna cans, plastic wrappers, and the ubiquitous gallon jugs emptied of water. We were each carrying two or three full jugs, until we came to a drop point, where we would mark the jugs in Sharpie with encouraging words like “Bien Suerte” or “Vaya con Dios!” and leave them for people to find.
While it was upsetting to see so much litter in an otherwise untouched national forest, I had to remember that these water jugs regularly save human lives. There’s no way to tell exactly how many, but if you think about the fact that it takes four to six days to make the trek, and migrants have only the food and water they can carry, it’s easy to see that supply drops could be crucial in their survival. When we came upon a drop point, often many jugs from the last drop would be gone, taken by a migrant and quite possibly keeping him or her alive. At several drops, however, sinister slashes in the jugs denoted a hunter or some other hiker who clearly disagreed with No More Deaths’ goals.
Recently, a group like ours found the body of a 14-year-old girl out here. Her name was Josseline, and she had been left behind by her group, unable to keep up because of some unknown ailment. No one will ever know exactly why she died or what her last moments were like. I imagine they were pretty scary.
Acacia trees, choya, and mesquite dotted the landscape, which was otherwise made up mostly of rock. Yellow sandstone faces and odd finger-like formations jutted off into the iridescent blue sky, like rockets in waiting. Nearer at hand was the slippery up-and-down terrain—many times you have to slide on your butt on downward slopes to keep from falling, and grip with both hands to climb up the rocks to the next plateau.
All the while, you have to remember that migrants make this trek at night, doubling the challenge. At one point we hear a helicopter whirring overhead—Border Patrol. When they fly over a group at night, the migrants will scatter. Some get picked up by the BP, while others find themselves alone, in this desolation. Like the rest of Homeland Security’s efforts, this tactic is ruthless, and accounts for an unknown number of migrant deaths.
We didn’t run into any migrants on our hike, which is a good thing and a bad thing, according to Annie. On one hand, perhaps there was no one out there in need of help. On the other, maybe we just didn’t find them.
