Book Report: The Devil's Highway

 24. Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil's Highway: A True Story (2004, with an afterword from 2014) (9/17/2020)

The Devil's Highway is a harrowing story about the "Yuma 14"—aka Wellton 26—a group of Mexican men who attempted, in May 2001, to cross the mountainous southern Arizona desert in the company of a guía with inadequate experience, to pursue opportunity in the US that was nonexistent at home. "Wellton 26" refers to the Border Patrol (BP) station that responded to a call of "bodies," maybe alive, maybe dead, in the desert, and the number of victims. "Yuma 14" refers to the BP sector in which they were found, and the ultimate number of dead.

The story begins with five men stumbling "out of the mountain pass so sunstruck they didn't know their own names, couldn't remember where they'd come from, had forgotten how long they'd been lost." The scene is fully, viscerally imagined and described: the ferociously shimmering heat; the men's black-burnt skin and lips, their hair hardened from dried sweat; their hallucinations, their desperation.

We then learn a bit about the history of the "white man" in this region, a bit about native myths, a bit about natural history—stories that come almost as welcome relief from the men's suffering. 

And then another key player is introduced: the Border Patrol, in the form of an agent, "Mike F.," who finds these five wandering souls, and then learns that there are up to 21 more whose fate is unknown. Immediately, an all-out search & rescue operation is mounted. 

The story told is experiential, sometimes slowing down to a walking pace as we follow the migrants (or as the BP calls them, "undocumented entrants") on their journey, one that starts out hopeful and ends up horrific. But it also delves deeply into structural components of this complicated drama that plays out every day along our southern border: the wants and needs and dreams of the walkers themselves; the convoluted society of the smugglers; the Border Patrol's dedication to their task. No one is a hero, or a villain, exactly. It is, unfortunately, just the way things go in a world out of balance.

As Luis explains in his 2014 afterword, 

When the research began, Jesús Lopez Ramos [the guide] was presented to me as the "bad guy." Soon his defenders made a strong case for the Border Patrol being the "bad guy." Law enforcement made a strong case for the smugglers being the "bad guys." And I knew that popular culture, as expressed in talk radio for example, considered the "illegals" the "bad guys." It was my field experience with [BP] supervisory agent Ken Smith that led to the epiphany. If I was going to write a book hoping to deal with the issue fairly, how could I write it with a prejudice toward Ken and his brothers in forest green? Once that key turned in the lock, the tone of the narrative opened for me. I have to trust my readers to make up their own minds. Even if that means reaching decisions I didn't intend for them to reach.

The writing is lyrical, full of sensuous detail. We are introduced to the desert itself as geography becomes a character in the story. And even before we get to the desert:

They saw many wonders as they traveled north. In some of their ancient beliefs, north was the direction of death. North was the home of winter, and the underworld could be found there. They went from jungle to rain forest to pine forest, from pines to plains, and from plains to desert and volcanoes.
 They gawked at the worms of snow on the highest peaks. They stared at the pine trees, the roadside deer. The big cities were no more amazing than the dry lands they entered, the maguey and burros of the heartland, the cacti and plains of the north. The ones who knew geography told the others where they were—the states with the strange names: Zacatecas, Chihuahua. They passed through a hundred towns, a scattering of cities. They crossed little rivers, watched a thousand beaten cafés and gas stations whip by, burned out hulks of ancient car wrecks, white crosses erected along the highway where their ancestral travelers had perished. The whole way was a ghost road, haunted by tattered spirits left on the thirsty ground: drivers thrown out windows, revolutionaries hung from cottonwoods or shot before walls, murdered women tossed in the scrub. Into the Sierra Madre Occidental, the opposite side of their continent....
 Mexican towns full of Mexicans, so like them, yet so different from Veracruz.

Luis is a master of lists. There is an amazing section midway where he outlines in excrutiating detail the six stages of heat death. "They are the same for everyone. It doesn't matter what language you speak, or what color your skin. Whether you speed through these stages, or linger at each, hyperthermia will express itself in six ways": heat stress, heat fatigue, heat syncope, heat cramps, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke.

But most remarkable is the humanity in this book, something that is hardly surprising if you've read other books by Urrea, or heard him do a reading, or workshopped with him, or interact with him on Facebook. (He is the instigator of Operation Uplift, which I've written about a couple of times, as here.) And so, one final passage; this takes place after Mendez, the guide, has left the group, ostensibly to find water and help:

The day tormented them. Thirst. Pain. Men crawled under creosotes, under the scant shade of scraggly mesquites. It was a dull repetition of the entire walk. As rote as factory work. Their hours clanged by like machines. They were in the dirt like animals.
 Six o'clock in the morning took ten hours to become seven o'clock.
 A week later, it was eight o'clock.
 The temperature screamed into the nineties before nine o'clock.
 They waited. They couldn't even talk. They panted like dogs, groaned. Men put their hands to their chests, almost delicately, as if checking their own pulses. But they were barely awake. They were half in dreams and half in the day, and the day itself was a bad dream. Dry wings swished in the air around them. Voices, coughing. Far above, the ice silver chips of airplanes cut the blue. Out of reach.

It's an amazing book. And it reinforces a sense of the humanity that is trapped today at our border, in detention camps, and the inhumanity of our current administration, and, I would add, of the higher-up smugglers, sex traffickers, and drug lords on the Mexican side. I was heartened, though, not to emerge from this reading experience with a negative view of the Border Patrol. Theirs is a difficult job. They, too, are human beings. Sure, there are certainly bad eggs, as in any police force. But the ones that Urrea introduces us to seem like people I wouldn't mind knowing. 

As for the Yuma 14: May they rest in peace. And their families not suffer. And I pray that the migrants currently incarcerated are soon, soon, able to find a better life. I do not understand how human can turn against human so easily. Maybe I'm naive. But I think we all deserve a decent shot at life. It doesn't last all that long, after all.

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Today's stats for Covid-19: 9,550 confirmed cases (up 789 since Friday, September 11); 553 hospitalizations (up 31); and 67 deaths (up 3). At least deaths don't seem to be rising too fast. But still the cases mount. When will we get a day without any change? Soon?

Book Report: Exit West

 23. Mohsin Hamid, Exit West (2017) (9/11/2020)

NB: I wrote the following after participating in a two-hour Zoom discussion of this book. And so it doesn't feel like my usual "report." But I could be wrong. The discussion was part of a semester-long seminar called "Border Crossings," conducted by University of Houston professor Pete Turchi (and author of one of my favorite books about writing, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer). I am going to do my best to read all nine books on the syllabus. This was the first. So far, I feel the seminar will make me a better reader and writer. I'm pleased to be participating. But from now on, I will write my report before attending the discussion. Before, that is, I get my head blown open by so much perceptive, thoughtful, questioning analysis by my fellow readers.

*     *     *     *     *

This is a book about change and about possibility, one could say. It is about globalization and warfare, flight and safety, displacement and belonging. It is also a love story. In the end, it is about migration, both geographic and temporal, for as the narrator observes, "We are all migrants through time."

Yet although Exit West has a lot of weighty themes, it is a slight book, with fairy tale elements and a sense of spaciousness created by lots of white space, dozens of very short sections, brief asides lifting us out of the central action (a breath of other air), and sentences that go on and on. The occasionally super-long sentences were at times dazzling (but, I confess, at times also a tad annoying), allowing multiple perspectives (if that's the word) on a particular moment to flow together. For example, here the protagonists, Saeed and Nadia, as they are getting to know each other, eat some psychedelic mushrooms:

They spoke quietly under the clouds, glimpsing occasionally a gash of moon or of darkness, and otherwise seeing ripples and churns of city-lit gray. It was all very normal at first, and Saeed wondered if she was perhaps teasing him, or if she had been deceived and sold a dud batch. Soon he had concluded that by some quirk of biology or psychology he was simply, and unfortunately, resistant to whatever it was that mushrooms were supposed to do.
 So he was unprepared for the feeling of awe that came over him, the wonder with which he then regarded his own skin, and the lemon tree in its clay pot on Nadia's terrace, as tall as he was, and rooted in its soil, which was in turn rooted in the clay of the pot, which rested upon the brick of the terrace, which was like the mountaintop of this building, which was growing from the earth itself, and from this earthy mountain the lemon tree was reaching up, up, in a gesture so beautiful that Saeed was filled with love, and reminded of his parents, for whom he suddenly felt such gratitude, and a desire for peace, that peace should come for them all, for everyone, for everything, for we are so fragile, and so beautiful, and surely conflicts could be healed if others had experiences like this, and then he regarded Nadio and saw that she was regarding him and her eyes were like worlds.

Okay, that is about a mushroom trip, so of course it's dreamy; but much of the book has that same quality: of wonder and open-heartedness, of worlds not yet discovered. It is also marked by a deep moral center. Despite the fact that the story concerns a period of great unrest and violence—at first in an unspecified place (that could be Pakistan) and time (that could be the present day—there are cell phones), then opening out into other places that Saeed and Nadia, and others, escape to via mysterious "black doors" (among them Mykonos, London, and Marin, California)—there is a sort of sensuous plurality and universality that is embracing, and bracing. I found the book uplifting, optimistic, and as such it is an excellent one to read in these troubled times of hypernationalism.

Here are a few interviews with Hamid about Exit West, the first in the New Yorker, the second in Lithub, the third in UC Berkeley News. And here is a list of essays he has written. I will certainly be reading more of him.

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In the last five days, the number of confirmed Covid-19 cases has climbed to 8,761 (up 322); hospitalizations, to 522 (up 5); and deaths, to 64 (up 6).  Of all the cases, 82 percent remain in the Salinas Valley. Here on the coast, I am generally seeing everyone wearing masks. It is quite a sight. I'm glad to feel relatively safe.

 

Mark Doty, poet

I stumbled on a mention of the following poem in a review of Mark Doty's most recent book, What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life. Pescadero is a town about 80 miles north of here, on the coast. We've visited it a couple of times. More specifically, we've visited Harley Goat Farms, which I have an inkling inspired this poem. It's delightful. I love goats. (My pre-marriage name is Geissman, meaning goatherd. Nuff said.)

Pescadero

The little goats like my mouth and fingers,

and one stands up against the wire fence, and taps on the fence board
a hoof made blacker by the dirt of the field,

pushes her mouth forward to my mouth,
so that I can see the smallish squared seeds of her teeth, and the bristle-whiskers,

and then she kisses me, though I know it doesn’t mean “kiss,”

then leans her head way back, arcing her spine, goat yoga,
all pleasure and greeting and then good-natured indifference: she loves me,

she likes me a lot, she takes interest in me, she doesn’t know me at all
or need to, having thus acknowledged me. Though I am all happiness,

since I have been welcomed by the field’s small envoy, and the splayed hoof,
fragrant with soil, has rested on the fence board beside my hand.

 *

Here's some goats:

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The last time I posted Covid-19 statistics was 8/28, eight days ago. Today's numbers are these: 8,439 confirmed cases (up 820 since 8/28); 507 hospitalizations (up 32); deaths 58 (up 3). Maybe we're slowing down? But no end in sight yet.

At least there are dancing goats to remind us that the world is still full of delight.

Stay safe.

Book Report: Desert Notebooks

22. Ben Ehrenreich, Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time (2020) (9/4/20)

This book begins with a walk in a desert wash, and an owl. It ends much the same way. But in between is a vast exploration of time, of myth, of change, of place, of faith, of history, of life. The owl and deserts, as well as the nature of time, are themes throughout.

I loved this book. It does feel like a writer's notebook, with sometimes very short (two-sentence) sections of description or musing, sometimes longer mini-essays on a larger topic. As such, it constantly changes course, taking the reader in new, and always fascinating directions. There is Lilith of the Bible, the creation tale of the K'iche' Maya, the Ghost Dance, rock art; there is also present-day politics, the climate crisis, Palestine, and Las Vegas. And so much more. It's impossible to summarize, except to say it's a deep meditation on what it is to be alive in the America of today. In that regard, it is not especially optimistic. We are not living in a pretty time. But more than that, it is a meditation on  lived experience, how we interact with the world.

I flagged many, many passages. Here are two as a sampling. The first describes Ehrenreich's perception of time while living in war-torn Ramallah in 2014:

Time seemed to have changed its shape. The clocks behaved as they always had, ticking away, counting off the hours. They seemed to mock us. Time no longer proceeded evenly and sequentially, but according to a strange logic of dread. It curved and bent, revealing pockets inside itself, pockets and holes in which it was easy to get lost. Sometimes time rushed forward, then something happened—usually death—and it stopped, melted, and recovered. It lurched off, racing once more, zigging and zagging before dissolving again and somehow, from nothing, reconstituting itself and limping on.
 I had felt this before in other countries on the verge of collapse. I've felt it since, not quite so acutely but nearly constantly, in the year since the Rhino's [Trump's] election. I don't know what to call it. The time of Crisis, Vertigo Time, the Time of Collapse, Black Hole Time. The days and hours lose their shape, their uniformity, the confidence with which they once marched forth. Time appears to fall apart.

I would say this is even more true of life in the time of Covid-19, which hadn't hit yet when he wrote this book. Though yes, it was bad enough simply with Trump at the helm and things otherwise "as usual."

And here's a bit on the Mesopotamian understanding of the universe, pasted onto the present day:

The entirety of existence was a text waiting to be read. Which means there could be no line between the reader and the written. You, who are reading this, you too are written, you too can be read. And I, a writer, am already written through and through. Everything between us, everything that separates us, mountains, stars, years, shimmering thoughts and dreams that die with waking, all of it is a single chain of signs that do not point to another reality, only to this one, all at once.

I could quote more, but as I said: it's difficult to pin this book down. So I'll leave it at that. Like Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing, I could definitely see reading this book all over again and finding it just as stimulating. 

I looked at Goodreads to see what people thought, and most people either loved it (*****) or hated it (*), in the latter case because the author, in the very first sentence, calls Trump “the Rhino” (appropriately, if you ask me)—those folks simply objected to the name-calling, never mind what was actually in the book—or else because the book isn’t really about the desert in all its glory. That’s exactly what I liked about it, though: the book is about the desert and so much more, and it’s about our present moment, which is awful in so many ways, and yet time marches, spirals, wings us into an other time, inevitably. This won’t last forever. With any grace from the gods, it won’t last more than two more months. But yes, we’ve made it through awful times before, and we’ll do it again. Even as we keep on changing the planet. And that, too, has happened before, over and over. Nothing new under the sun. But that said, this present moment is in itself something of a miracle. Both at once. Ain't it amazing?