The Border

The sun is baking the earth at ninety degrees in the swampy wastelands north of the Rio Grande.  The campground is desolate except for a few older tourists in their RVs.  A sign on the picnic table warns me that wild pigs live in this area.  I am running out of food, and the camp store is closed for the evening.  I take a seat at a picnic table near the laundromat and scrape the insides of my last peanut butter jar and spread the peanut butter onto two slices of bread.  My plastic squeeze-jar of jelly suffocated then exploded in the heat of my car.  My hands get sticky as I squirt the remnants onto my sandwich.

When I finish my meal, I enter the laundromat to fill my water bottle and see an old white lady sitting near the washing machine.

 

“Did you cross the border?” I ask her.

“Yes, we did,” she says.

“What did you think of it?  I am considering it tomorrow.”

“At first I was nervous,” she says, “but now I can’t see why.  They were so friendly and so appreciative.  I went with my husband, and we had a wonderful time.”

“I’ve heard nothing but good things.”

“It’s part of the whole experience. You won’t regret it.”

Her husband emerges from the restroom, and they leave together after telling me that I will enjoy myself in Mexico and there is nothing to worry about. Now I am alone with nowhere to go and nothing open, so I collect my toiletries and a handful of quarters and head into the restroom, where I stand under the shower’s spraying needles that sting my sunburned skin. I have no urgency so I stand under the water until my session is timed out.

The sun is setting behind the Chisos, the leftovers of the Rockies.  I sit on another picnic table and read my book while swatting mosquitos and occasionally glancing over my shoulder for signs of javelinas.  The bugs and my paranoia of being ambushed by a pig with tusks force me to retreat into the backseat of my car.  I roll the windows down a crack to prevent a mosquito infiltration, but even after the sun has set the inside of the car becomes unbearably hot.  It is too early to sleep and I am three hundred miles away from the nearest highway town.  With the exception of islands, Big Bend National Park in Texas is perhaps the most remote park in the lower forty-eight.

Boredom and heat overcome me as sweat glues my shirt to my chest. In the dark I strip down to my underwear and read by the light of my headlamp.  This plan backfires as a kamikaze moth smashes into my forehead.  I freak out and my body spasms from the surprise attack.  The moth flutters its wings but fails to rise and eventually dies on my sleeping bag. Another moth invades and hovers around the lamp. I smash him against the ceiling with my flip-flop and then switch my headlamp’s light to a blue glow.  The color doesn’t seem to attract the moths, but a gnat lands in my ear and buzzes eternally and drives me mad.  I abandon my book and roll down the windows completely to catch the occasional breeze that warrants the frustrating but inevitable presence of insects.  My pillows are covered with sweat as I try to force myself to sleep.

I manage to rest a few fitful hours but am awakened at one in the morning with a headache.  I assess my options:  I could sleep on the picnic table, I could try again to sleep in my sweaty bed in the stuffy car, or I could drive an hour into the mountains where the temperature is cool at an elevation over five thousand feet.

I had spent the previous night there at a campground patrolled by an old woman.  She shined her flashlight into my eyes and knocked on the door until I was jolted awake. 

“Camp host,” she said with a soft tone. “Did you pay for this spot?”

“Not yet,” I said, “I didn’t have enough change, so I plan on paying in the morning.”  The fee was fourteen dollars, which you had to place in an envelope and place the envelope inside a box at a bulletin board at the campsite entrance.  You couldn’t put a twenty dollar bill in there and expect to get change.  It seemed a legitimate excuse to not have exactly fourteen dollars. She told me the hours of the camp store and restaurant where I could get cash.  When she wrote down my license plate number, I knew I would have to pay in the morning.

Driving in the dark while fatigued is dangerous, especially so in a remote national park with no street lights and the added risk of hitting a deer.  But I am desperate for sleep.  Only the cool mountain air will offer me respite, so I start my car and drive away from the river and down the only road.  I turn the music up loud to keep me awake.  I turn on my high-beams. 

A jackrabbit dashes across the road and then I see a mound of gray fuzz.  I am too tired and apathetic to swerve out of the way, so I hope and wait for the animal to move.  As my car creeps closer I see the animal swivel its head completely around as I stare into the eyes of a freakish-looking owl that flaps its massive wings and barely evades the front of my car.  I think I hear a thud, but I could be making that up.  I checked later for blood but found none.

Thirty minutes later I zigzag up the mountain’s switchback, and my interior of my car is flooded with a chilly breeze.  I pull into a parking spot outside the only hotel around and collapse into the backseat.

The next morning after breakfast I am north of the Rio Grande again, and a border patrol agent is checking the contents of my backpack.  He is a barrel-chested man with a demeanor that can be welcoming and intimidating depending on the need. He asks me where I am coming from while he searches my bag, and I ask him about his job. He plays a unique role as a Park Ranger/Border Patrol Agent.  He seems to carry more guns and responsibility. He says there’s good eating at the two restaurants in Boquillas and tells me to walk a quarter mile down to the river where I’ll be picked up.

When I reach the muddy riverbank, I hear a group of Mexicans on the other side singing in Spanish.  A man in a small wooden boat rows to the Texas shore, and I step in and take a seat on the bench.  The boatman uses the oars to push off the embankment, and he digs the oars into the river and propels us into another country.  This seems a bandit’s way of crossing the Rio Grande. 

“Bienvenido a Mexico,” the boatman says.

A short potbellied man with tan skin and a gray mustache greets me. He is wearing a pair of faded jeans and a yellow hat curled at the sides like a cowboy’s ten gallon. He carries a jug of water and a reeking scent of sweat and undeodorized armpits. He is my guide.

“Hablas espanol?” he asks me, but I tell him no, I only know a few words.

In broken English he tells me it is five dollars for the boat ride and maybe I want to give a little money to the singers, so I put five dollars plus an extra single into a box near the singers so as not to appear rude. I crossed the border with three five’s and five singles.  I forgot to go to the ATM before breakfast to make change, but I was told everything is cheap here.

Now there is the matter of getting to the village of Boquillas. It is free to walk, five dollars to ride in a pick-up truck, eight dollars to ride a horse, and five dollars to ride the donkey.

 

“Which one you want?” the guide asks, and I pick the donkey. 

I swing my leg over the saddle, and the guide pulls the donkey forward with a rope, and we start out slowly as I bounce along with the donkey’s awkward gait through the sand. The guide turns his back to me and occasionally asks me questions about my travels over his shoulder:

“You have been to Mexico before? Or first time?”

“You like Big Bend?”

We near a corral of horses on our right side.  Before the fences, two ladies sit under the shade before tables adorned with beaded knickknack scorpions and crocheted kitchen towels featuring a donkey and the name of the village.

 

“Maybe you want to buy something?” the guide asks and picks up a kitchen towel. “Oh, yes. Very nice.  You want to buy?”

“No, thanks,” I say.  “It is very nice, but I am not interested.”

The guide says something to the salesladies in Spanish, and the vaqueros behind them eye me with suspicion.  I can tell they are upset I am not budging with their pressure to buy a souvenir that I don’t want.

We move onward to the village, and I ask the guide how long he has been doing this.

“I work as a guide here at the Big Bend National Park, yeah, and after 2001, they close the borders, yeah, so nobody coming to Boquillas.”

“What did you do?”

“I go to Dallas.”

“Where did you work?”

“I work on the fences on a ranch, yeah, in Dallas.  Then a few years ago, the borders open, and I work as a guide.”

“Why did you come back?”

“This is my home.”

“Do many people come to Boquillas?”

“Oh, yes, many people coming to Boquillas.  Many people in the spring.  In the summer not so many, but in the spring sometimes fifty, sometimes a hundred.”

We reach the customs building, a trailer with one employee behind a desk.  Inside the air-conditioned room, I hand the customs agent my passport, and he gives me a one-day visa, and I step out in the sun again.

The village consists of about two dozen small, square buildings; a green church with a few benches inside; a restaurant; a school; and solar panels.

“In Boquillas we use the solar panels.  Before we have no electricity here.  The government give us the solar panels, yeah.”

“How much do you pay each month for your electricity?” I ask.

“Four dollars.”

“And the school?  Who teaches there?”

A few children race around the school, and a little girl approaches me and hands me a beaded scorpion souvenir.  The guide tells her in Spanish to go away.

“There is a teacher in Muzquiz who comes here.”

“Is Muzquiz far from here?”

“Yes it is very far.”

“Is there a road to Muzquiz?”

“Yes, the road is maybe sixty miles from here, yeah.  And then the road go to Muzquiz.”

Later, I consult my road atlas of northern Mexico.  Boquillas is not mentioned, but Muzquiz is the nearest town on an unlabeled backroad.  Nearest is a misleading word.  There is no pavement for miles around, but trucks in the distance kick up dust on the path heading southeast.

“You want to drink something?” the guide asks me.  “Here is a store.”

A fat woman stands on the porch before an open doorway, and the guide leads me inside while the storekeeper follows. On a plastic shelving unit lie a hodgepodge of snacks like Doritos and Cheetos and Mexican brands I have never seen before. There is instant rice but nothing of substance.

“Do you have Mexican coke?” I ask the storekeeper, and the guide translates my question and then opens the fridge, which doubles as the woman’s own fridge.  There is orange Fanta for sale next to a few of the storekeeper’s groceries but no Mexican coke.

“Are you hungry?” the guide asks. “Maybe you buy some food?”

“No thank you.  I am not hungry.”

I thank the storekeeper and we leave.  The guide asks me why I don’t buy anything.  I tell him that it is nine o’clock in the morning, and I have just eaten breakfast.  I tell him I don’t want to buy souvenirs because I don’t have any room for them, and he backs off.

“You want to see my house?” the guide asks, and he leads me to a white rectangular prism with a gray and lumpy mattress outside.  The compound is partially surrounded by chicken-wire.  We enter his house, and he shows me a tiny model of a mining cart topped with gold that he made himself.  Garbage bags filled with crushed aluminum cans are piled on top of each other in the corner of the room.  The guide says he can get a few cents for each bag of crushed aluminum he turns in to the recycling plant.  There is no furniture to sit upon, so I stand as the guide retreats into another room and brings back a folder with pictures and documents.

“This is my certificate, yeah, to be tour guide in Boquillas. I make sure you are safe, and there are no drugas, yeah. Many people think Mexico is not safe because of the drugas, yeah, but not in Boquillas.”

He flips through the pages and shows me pictures of previous tours. Young Americans pose with the guide and smile like they would beside Mickey Mouse at Disney World.  Then he shows me pictures of the old mine.

“This the Puerto Rico mine,” he shows me with a grimy finger pointing at the opening in the rock facade.  “Years ago, many people work in the Puerto Rico mine, but now it is closed and so we have no work.  We only get money from the tourists.  When the border was closed, we had no work here in Boquillas. Maybe you want a picture?”

I declined his offer politely and asked him where he sleeps.

“Outside.”

He shows me his mattress, and he tells me it is cooler outside and hot in the house. 

“What about animals? Like snakes?”

He laughs.  It does not seem he has an answer to this.  I notice a pile of coins in the sand in the shade of his mattress and ask him if those are pesos.  He picks a gold coin from the sand, and I offer him a dollar for it.  The exchange rate in this transaction is in his favor.  I basically pay a dollar to get a quarter, and the guide knows this, but I do not care because I like to collect foreign currency and I want him to get off my back for not unloading my American money into this impoverished, tourism-dependent village.

“You must trust your neighbors,” I tell him, but he does not seem to understand the joke. He leads me to the restaurant and I buy a Mexican coke with real sugar and no high fructose corn syrup and sit next to another gringo with white hair and a casual familiarity with the place.  He speaks Spanish to the proprietor, and I wander how this old man ended up here before musing on the economy of Boquillas.

Anybody can drown in their own sorrows and say what a shame it is to be born in a place such as Boquillas, but the guide managed to get out.  He got a good job mending fences on a ranch outside of Dallas, and he sent money home to his family.  That might not be the dream we all share, but he made significant progress and he climbed out of this hole.  Crossing the border into this Mexican hamlet made me aware of my fortunate birth in America, but I wasn’t reduced to sympathy to the point where I was giving handouts. If I were to unload my money to the villagers, I would help to cement their dependence on outsiders. 

I don’t believe there is a self-sufficient capitalist economy.  You’d have to find a rare band of hunter-gathers to witness true autonomy.  But to center a village’s entire economy on one of the least visited national parks in the country seems destined for failure.  And the whole idea of Boquillas as a tourist destination is a paradox.  I’m sure there are people who want to seek out an authentic Mexican village, devoid of both the luxurious seaside resorts and the dark veil cast over the country by the violent cartels.  But what is the attraction here?

I was led on a tour to evoke sympathy toward people less fortunate than I am so that I would part with the cash in my pocket. Did the guide want me to see his village?  Or did he want my money?  Is there even a difference between the two?

After I finish my Coke, I hand in my visa in the trailer and mount the donkey once more and the guide leads me back to the boat that will take me to Texas. When we reach the Rio Grande, I dismount and hand the guide my remaining six dollars for a tip, and he is visibly sour about this.

I rationalize this in my mind:  I am the only person on a one-hour tour.  He makes six dollars an hour.  Yesterday I saw a group of ten people at the river crossing, and if each one of them left the guide five dollars he would make fifty dollars an hour. If everyone left him ten dollars an hour, he would make a hundred dollars an hour. But is the tour worth that much?  And should a tour guide from a tiny impoverished village make more than an entry-level worker in America?

The answer could go both ways, but the question shows that when we tip we sometimes give out of sympathy.  I have served people richer than me, and with their money I bought my groceries, paid my rent, and went to the movies. I should have given the guide more money, purely to avoid a guilty conscience, but I gave him all the cash I had left in my wallet.  In one day, I donated twenty dollars to Mexico to see people who live in rectangular buildings, sleep on mattresses exposed to the elements, and buy groceries from a neighbor’s fridge.  

I thank the guide for showing me around and answering my questions, but now that he has my mediocre tip his warmth is gone.  He bickers to his friends in Spanish about how cheap I am and what a waste of time this has been. I am reminded of all the times I have gotten a ten percent tip when I expected twenty. I want to say to him that I will mail him more money when I get home, but there is no post office here and I am so flustered with the guide’s lack of gratitude that I don’t care about his poverty anymore. 

I pat the donkey goodbye and step into the rowboat, and the boatman propels me wordlessly into Texas.  I step foot in the muddy soil where the boatman is prohibited.  When I am out of their view, I turn around and remark how small is both the river and the gulf between what my life is and what it could have been.