They do not like: George Soros; La Raza; signs in Spanish; the term Hispanic; the term African American (“I’m not an Irish-American, I’m an AMERICAN”); the federal government (which, they claim, routinely provides the Mexican government info on the time and place of their Ops); the fact that the Mexican Flag Guy at the rally was holding the Mexican flag higher than the American flag; being compelled to accommodate anyone, in any way (“I don’t mind being compassionate,” says Art, “but I don’t want you to force me to be compassionate”); and the dull conformity of the American masses (“Most people are sheep,” says Art. “They’re sheeple. The guys you meet out here? Are at least trying to get out of the sheepskins.”).
A civil war’s coming within the next four years, they say: The warring parties will include the police and the government/corporate coalition and the Mexicans and the people like them, the non-sheeples, for whom the government is, even as we speak, preparing secret concentration camps.
We go on and on, because we’re bored and because, turns out, we all belong to the same species: the American Male Opinionated Chatterbox.
Around midnight a tough-looking guy with a bandage across his nose, a former Air Force sergeant everyone’s been, not surprisingly, referring to as Sarge, comes stomping over. “What is this?” he barks. “A prayer meeting?”
The Team freezes, suddenly identified as: Yappy Fems Who Talk Too Much.
“We’re talking too quiet for God to hear us,” says Lance.
“God always hears us, man,” says Art solemnly.
Sarge stomps off, spends the rest of the night sitting by the irrigation ditch like a bitter mystic. We continue to enthusiastically surmise, theorize, construct alternative governmental models, occasionally crack up; we start at a respectful whisper and gradually modulate up to kegger-level roaring. If there were any Mexicans in the vicinity that night, I expect they mistook us for a New Age sleepover, went down the road a few ranches, and crossed there.
HAVING STEMMED THE TIDE OF INVADING ILLEGALS, WE RETIRE FOR THE EVENING
We’re tired. Art’s face, earlier lean and savage, begins to kind of melt, increasing in affability and weariness, until finally he makes the calclass="underline" Knees and legs are going here, maybe we should live to fight another day, tomorrow let’s remember the lawn chairs.
We quit at three, slog back to the cars.
“Ready to debrief, sir!” shouts our sole black Minuteman, Booker, who then shines his flashlight on Brian, who’s got a tricked-out AR-15 with a SureFire sighting module. Booker’s tongue drops out of his mouth, and he starts moaning and thrashing his head around.
“Dude, what are you doing?” says Brian.
“I just had an orgasm,” says Booker.
Curtis gathers us around.
All in all, he feels, it went well. He was impressed with the professionalism exhibited here tonight. These media people didn’t see a single white racist KKK person out here tonight, he doesn’t believe.
“That’s right,” says Booker. “They haven’t hung me up yet!”
WELL, NOT ALL OF US RETIRE
I can’t find a room in Eagle Pass, so just start driving. I make it nearly to Del Rio, start falling asleep at the wheel, then park the minivan in a white-stone quarry, get out to pee.
Mounted on a pile of drill pipe is the severed head of a buck.
Around the head, five does pay tribute.
At the sound of my many electronic doors flying/ sliding open at once, the mounted head grows a body, then disappears up a steep cliff, followed by its worshipful does.
It occurs to me I’m too tired to be driving.
I sleep a few hours, drive west all morning. I pass a vulture feeding on a baby deer, then another vulture feeding on a second baby deer, then a third vulture feeding on a small unrecognizable thing, decide to discontinue the noting of vulture sightings.
Then it’s Big Bend National Park, like a Pecos Bill cartoon. Cacti, dust devils, a couple of mules preparing to fuck, the horizon a kind of Model Showroom for Used Mountains: Here’s something kind of Gibraltar, if you like that; a huge cleft chin; a classic butte; a Tibetan hooked-nose cliff; four in a row we just got in from Peru (see how they’re covered with green near their peaks?); a flattop; a Rushmorish one with faces in it, but not the faces of anybody famous.
Above the Used Mountains appear three Muppet-looking clouds, the size you imagine God to be when you’re a kid and imagine God has size.
The countryside is so big, so gorgeous, that it outs human ideas for what they are: inventions, projections, approximations, delusions. In the face of all this Size, action seems pathetic and comic, and fearful, preemptive action seems most pathetic and comic of all.
I find I’ve been made sad by Minuteman dread. They take a fact and make the worst of it. This beautiful world, all this magnificence, seems to inspire in them only a fear that the beautiful world will be taken away. I liked them, I had a good time with them, but it feels good to be away from them, out in all this open space, where anything could be true, and what is true might even be good.
A PLACE WHERE WHAT IS TRUE IS AT THE VERY LEAST BEING MADE A LITTLE BETTER
In the old days, the border crossing at Rio Grande Village was considered a Category B, or “historical,” crossing. Mexicans from Boquillas would cross by rowboat to shop at the little American grocery, and it was considered part of “the Big Bend experience” for American tourists to cross into Boquillas and spend the day there.
But a few months after September 11, a TV helicopter shot some footage of a couple of guys wading across, and Boquillas was identified as an example of Appallingly Porous Border Syndrome. On May 10, 2002, the crossing was closed, as were those at two nearby villages, Paso Lajitas and Santa Elena.
The effect of these closings has been the slow death of the villages. Boquillas has shrunk from 250 to 90 people. The store, denied its Mexican shoppers, has lost 40 percent of its business. Paso Lajitas is made up mostly of people too old to relocate and who have to drive eleven miles on a terrible dirt road to get their drinking water. Santa Elena is now down to just three families.
I hear about this from Cynta de Narvaez, a former Manhattan debutante, Studio 54 vet, crew chief for the French hot-air balloon team, and river guide, as we sit on her porch in Terlingua.
Imagine a map, Cynta says. Color drug activity purple. Before the closures, you would have seen a few blips. Now the entire fucking border is purple. Stop watering half a plant; parasites move into the dry half, it dies.
The Terlingua hippies used to take their town band, Los Pinche Gringos (the Freaking Gringos), over to Paso Lajitas on weekend nights for a binational all-ages hoedown: grandmothers dancing with nine-year-old boys, fathers dancing with babies in their arms. But this is now a five-hour trip for the Americans; they can still cross at Lajitas but legally have to come back in via the Customs Station at Ojinaga.
So no more dance parties.
“This was a bicultural community before they closed the border,” she says. “The people over there aren’t numbers, they have names and faces. We’ve danced together, reached for onions in the store at the same time.”
But the hippies struck back.
So far they’ve sent a solar-powered water pump and two wind-powered generators across to Boquillas, begun facilitating a craft-importing business for the Boquillans, bought a solar water pump for Paso Lajitas, and are working on one for San Vincente, which, in the meantime, is being served by a Terlingua-provided reverse-osmosis water filter.