Not my story to tell

When a car runs a red light or a stop sign and crashes into the side of an unsuspecting driver, the term often used to describe the event is “t-boned”. After such an event, the victim is often left not just with physical trauma, but mental and emotional as well. The world becomes an unsafe place and danger can seem to be lurking in every shadow.

In our family, we used the term universally, especially when it came to relational and emotional areas. When a distant family member’s response to another’s vulnerability and honesty was unexpected and cruel, we would say, “That was a t-bone.” When a social issue came up where we assumed everyone was on the same page and something cruel and expected came out of somebody’s mouth instead, that was a “t-bone”. If instead of expected love, we received intentional harm, it was a t-bone.

And lately, I feel like a walking car crash.

It is not because people are cruel, though they can be. It is not because anything is going on in my social relationships, though sometimes there can be. No, it is because, though I should expect no different, our culture has been crashing into my recent new vehicle, and I am always unprepared.

This new car is different from my old one. My old car was safe and unnoticeable. I drove around in it and had conversations with myself about the state of the world, and then I drove to the mountains or to the vast sea and walked and talked with God and everything was good,because my world revolved around the thoughts in my head and my perceived notions about the world and its occupants.

But this new vehicle was built on confronting reality and not safety and escape. This new vehicle has four wheel drive, with the top down in the heat and the wind and the dust. Its views of the desert are not of sunrises and sunsets over a manicured path, but of rocky ravines and desiccated river beds.

This new vehicle does not just read headlines and plaster bandaids and frolick off into an interior life of peace and security in solitude on well marked roads.

My old car touted the value of social justice. But it only received dings in the parking lot. Here, every time I get into the new vehicle, the side of it gets destroyed.

I cannot drive down a road without encountering a cross where hope died crossing the desert, often steps away from civilization…more often in remote places, unforgiving places…inhumane places to die. I cannot unsee the images that surround us here in the borderlands. Nor can I unhear the despicable responses to the sufferings of others.

T-boned. Every day.

As hard as this is, I have lived here less than two years. Others have been driving their battered vehicles through these deserts for decades, tending to the lost, the thirsty, and the bruised and never giving up hope for a more just world until it becomes one.

I had breakfast with a road warrior like that. Decades of driving through these desert roads, tending to the broken hearted, building bridges where others build walls. I felt the warmth of her spirit and sang baby shark to her granddaughter. She shared her vision for the work she does for a more just world. She promised to send a public documentary video of her life story.

I would never want anyone to be experience being t-boned in reality, but today, I am inviting you to be t-boned in your spirit and watch the short documentary at the end of this post. Hear the story, her story, and let it wash over you into any dry places you might have when it comes to issues around the border and immigrants.

Hear the story of someone who lived the headlines, and now, even knowing the dangers, has been cruising through the intersections anyway, because being on the road matters. No matter the cost.

It is her story to tell. I could never do it justice.

The man who said yes.

My husband Tim described his dad as a “no” machine. Only one opinion in the family mattered: His. Anything he didn’t like himself was branded unworthy of exploration. So deeply ingrained were his parameters for life that to go against his way of thinking was, well, unthinkable.

But I loved his dad. He was all gracious Texan charm to me and to his acquired grandchildren. Even after the unimaginable happened. One day at a family gathering, he expressed a less than favorable opinion of teachers. Since I was one, I felt the need to challenge him on the subject.

I literally remember a collective gasp from the rest of the family, who awaited the punishment for my crime of having an opinion, but, as I recall, he merely smiled his gracious smile, a twinkle in his eye, and moved on. Apparently, I may have been the only one who did not fear the paper tiger that had ruled this family.

But Tim had ingested a wealth of “must held”opinions, one of which was that outdoor adventures, especially camping, were stupid. Our family, on the other hand, only went on camping adventures, being too poor to do anything else. And every weekend we seemed to be doing something in the outdoors. As someone who only found peace from conflict on family camping trips, his anti-camping stance presented a conundrum for me.

It took years before I began to devise a plan and then to feel safe suggesting it. Knowing that his version of camping was a motel, I first broached the subject of a “cushy” camping week, all meals provided, tents set up and a week to kayak with the orcas off the northern end of Vancouver Island. And the “hook” was this:

We would stay at a hotel on each end of the trip.

He agreed, to my surprise. When we arrived at the dock with our gear bags, a small cruiser awaited to boat us to a remote location with eight other participants all, we learned quickly, from foreign countries. After about 45 minutes, we turned the corner into a small cove, and the engines were shut off as we coasted to about ten or so yards off shore.

One of the crew member threw a park bench over the side as our “step ladder” and reminded us to carry our gear over our heads to keep it dry, sending us one by one into the icy water.

And, yes, it was a portent of things to come.

Once on shore, we were assigned to one of the permanent tents scattered around the hillsides. We were directed up a root tangled trail into an overgrown, rank forest. In the afternoon air, a rotting smell filled the air, which I chalked up to the hot midday sun. Throwing our gear inside, we hurried back to the main camp for dinner.

As the light faded, we clambered back to our awaiting tent after dinner with our insufficient flashlight, noting the smell had intensified. But sleep eluded us both. With the odor and the sound of a small stream nearby, the only antidote to the effects of intense nausea we were feeling was to drag our sleeping bags down to the beach in the dark to spend the night.

Stretching our bags on to the rocky sand, we lay there under the stars fighting the downhill tilt of the beach. In the distance, we spotted a cruise ship lit up like a Christmas tree and fantasized about swimming out to sea and pretending we had fallen overboard.

But finally sleep overtook us both. At least until I was awoken by the beautiful sound of waves crashing on shore. Getting nearer. And nearer. I wrenched my eyes open to note flashes of white near my feet.

The tide was coming in and we were below the tide line.

That was the beginning of the worst “cushy” camping trip in the history of mankind. Within two days, we had also discovered that Tim’s legs were too long to fit in a kayak without pain, and I had panic attacks when they tried to button down the skirt on my kayak to be in open ocean. We were land bound for the remainder of the trip.

Without kayaking as an activity, we became the guardians of someone else who found kayaking not to be to his liking: one of the twin teenage boys from Germany whose only English was the F word. At least that’s what he and his brother had convinced the group to believe, but I saw the twinkle in their eyes, and decided my contribution to their language study would be to add the sign language for “loser” to their vocabulary. Not our finest moment, but we somehow bonded with him over this sign language, and the three of us applied it far more than was appropriate.

Being the adventurer I was, I begged Tim to bail and go home early. We were covered in bites from an active sand flea invasion every night.. Sleep eluded us, and we woke up every morning to soaked sleeping bags. And our leaders expressed incredulity that anyone would book a kayak trip who did not, in fact, kayak. But we did kayak. Once. In an ocean kayak on Maui. True, we flipped it the moment we put our paddles in, but I was so sure this would be different.

Tim held the line. It was only a week.

Yes, a week. The longest weeks of our lives. Finally set back down on the dock, we limped to our car and drove to our hotel room. Once inside, we both literally looked at each other and started to weep. Uncontrollably. I looked at his slightly swollen, bug bite covered face and caught a glimpse of my own in the mirror. We had never looked so beaten up.

You would think that would have ended Tim’s adventures in the wilderness, but I continued to come up with wild ideas for “cushy” wilderness experiences, and, unlike his father, he continued to say yes. Yes to car camping, yes to tent camping, yes to camping on a river trip. Yes. Yes. Yes. In none of these trips did he ever have what I would call a positive experience. But he has hung in there.

When I read him my take on this adventure and asked him if it was accurate, he replied that it was all totally true. As we processed our less than stellar record with outdoor adventure, I shared that I marveled at his unfailing good humor when presented with yet another crazy idea, given his family DNA. . He looked me in the eye.

You know why I would do that?

Because I love you.

And so friends, we are headed on an another adventure this week to New Mexico to run in the White Sands and whatever else comes our way. Just another crazy idea. But because love is reciprocal, I booked a casita for us. Someplace with hot running water and fresh baked bread for incoming guests and a pool and a hot tub. Someplace where toilets flush and the yard is fenced.

Somewhere fit for a man who turned his back on “no” and, because of love, embraced the adventure of a spontaneous, sometimes uncomfortable life.

Soundbites and slogans at The Wall

My high school Honors English teacher, Ms. Nancy Roach, was an intimidating presence. But what she seemed to lack in “warm fuzziness” she more than made up for by her unbridled passion for language. She savored well written sentences like a food critic savoring an excellent recipe. Even more so, she had a love of words- beautiful words- words that had nuanced meanings and rolled off the tongue like a foreign language.

Introducing us to new vocabulary every week, she would sound out the words and then read a sentence from which the meaning could be inferred. It has been fifty plus years since I have sat devouring new words in her classroom, and yet I still remember even the context sentences like this:

The coonskin cap was an anomaly in the Senate cloakroom.

Years later, as an English teacher myself trying to pass on that same passion for language, I remember commenting towards the end of my career, that at the rate we were going, our written language would be back to pictures and grunts in no time. Sadly, I fear we are closer than ever.

We have become a culture of soundbites and slogans.

Here’s the thing about sound bites and slogans. They fit easily into a tweet on X, or a post on Instagram, or a 20 second video on TikTok, or on one of the other numerous social media apps currently available.

Here’s the other thing about sound bites and slogans. They require no thinking, and they require no context. They can be easily passed on without investigation. They fit nicely on a scroll at the bottom of a TV screen, and many can be crammed into a speech without any connection to reality.

And never has this been more true than in sound bites and slogans directed at The Wall.

“Finish the wall and keep out the criminals,” has been a theme of a constant thumping on campaign trails and in the halls of Congress. Bumper stickers, memes, signs on street corners all carrying some version of this story.

But I have been wondering these days how many people who have strong opinions about The Wall have actually ever been there? How many have driven the bordering roads that run up and down hills and arroyos in the desert sun? How many have studied the cost to human life, the environment, and our own long held but often rarely practiced spiritual beliefs? Having spent even just one day traveling along this wall, my overall reaction, using some words I learned from Ms. Nancy Roach, is simply this:

The Wall is an abomination, and it is epitome of lunacy and hypocrisy.

The Wall, at a cost of billions of dollars, can never be finished. To do so would require it continue on to sovereign land of the Tohono O’Odom nation, which is not allowed. The Wall, at a cost of billions of dollars, is already in a state of disrepair, causing sections to be dismantled and repaired at added cost of millions per year. The Wall, at a cost of billions, cannot be completed because to do so interferes with the natural paths of water and animals, which is an environmental disaster.

And the Wall will never keep out people hungering for hope and for freedom in a land that promises both for all who seek asylum, but fails to deliver.

If you were to actually travel along The Wall on any given day, you might find vigilantes who travel from in and out of state because of the soundbites and slogans they digest from media sources. Because they are “law abiding citizens” they destroy water stations and they harass migrants, often passing on information gained to other “patriots” who then harass the sponsors.

And if you were to travel along The Wall, you might find armed members of conspiracy groups basically hunting for migrants in the desert to turn them over for deportation, which they believe is their legal obligation as “law abiding citizens” because of the information they get from, you know, soundbites and slogans.

You know what else you might find? On some days, you may find a small group of teens who have been traveling for fifteen days, the last three without food, like our pastor did on one of his humanitarian aid runs. And in the middle of that group, you might find, as he did, a three or four year old little girl who the group found wandering in the desert alone and adopted to keep her safe and alive.

And you might find yourself imagining, as I do every day now, how long that little girl walked by herself, and how long she might have stood in observance of whatever happened to her parents in that unforgiving desert. A toddler in the desert. Frightened. Lost. Confused.

Alone.

You know what else you might find? Someone like the Samaritan next to me who regularly hikes the desert not far from us outside Tumacacori. He goes there because it is a level area migrants encounter after crossing two mountain ranges. He and others with him hope to find travelers in need of aid. Often they do, and are able to give food and water. Other times, he has found dead bodies lying exposed in the desert sun.

Alone.

None of these stories of The Wall fit in a soundbite or a slogan. But they happen around us every hour of every day while men and women in “hallowed halls” throw around terms like “invaders” and “rapists” and “drug dealers” and create policies that do nothing more than stoke the flames of violence and prejudice.

So, with apologies to Ms Nancy Roach, I can offer this slogan of my own.

If you want to know what inhumanity and insanity look like, visit The Wall.

I may never visit it again, but the images are seared into my mind.

And I cannot close my eyes now without thinking of a little girl wandering in the desert and the bodies left lying under a scorching desert sun.

Alone.

There is no soundbite to convey that inhumanity.