The Flight of the Iguana (28 page)

In Tucson—with a community of sanctuary activists much larger and more visible than the one in the Rio Grande valley—the U.S. Attorney's Office dropped charges against the Salvadorans (though deportation proceedings were still in motion) and filed none against Flaherty, who had only been a passenger in the car. Phil Conger on the other hand had been driving; also, he was
known to be a principal figure in the local efforts to house and feed Central Americans. Still, it can be assumed that the U.S. Attorney's Office did not approach this prosecution blithely. There would be media attention, an airing of the broader issues, political fallout. It was “just a routine smuggling case,” according to Don Reno, the special assistant U.S. Attorney in Phoenix who handled the Conger case. According to scuttlebutt, though, a deal was offered. Federal officials proposed not to prosecute Conger—says a source who asks not to be identified—if he would promise to cease assisting illegal aliens.

Conger refused to make any such promise. On May 17 he was indicted on four counts of transporting.

Meanwhile, back in Texas, Stacey Merkt pleaded innocent to transporting illegal aliens (though she made no denial of transporting
refugees)
and was convicted. The nun pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the prosecution; she was given a year's probation. And then another Texas man—Jack Elder, who is Conger's equivalent at the Casa Oscar Romero—was indicted too.

Unlike Conger, unlike Stacey Merkt, unlike anyone else so far, Jack Elder was not apprehended with undocumented aliens in a routine stop at a Border Patrol checkpoint. He was accused before a grand jury first, on the basis of testimonial evidence; then federal officers came onto church property and arrested him.

Some people suspect that this is the start of a general and coordinated roll-up
⁴
of the sanctuary movement by the Justice Department. Others believe that the government is still groping its way warily, reactively. No one wants to go to prison. But, says Jim Corbett, “If the government gets tough, they're going to have a lot of people under arrest—and I suppose, ultimately, in jail.
But I think that, in terms of what we're doing, it's going to go on and grow. Because the need is there.”

•   •   •

At last Jeff comes back. He brings the unsettling news that two cowboys, apparently the same men who parked the Jeep, are at this moment just a hundred yards above on the west hillside, stringing fence. They seem to be working their way down, inadvertently, toward the hiding place; and in the meantime they command an open view of that last crucial stretch of the wash. Since there is every reason to fear that a pair of local cowboys would report any border crossers to the Border Patrol, it is time to move again. Quickly and quietly and invisibly. Staying hidden behind foliage and boulders, all seven people scutter back upstream along the wash.

Rounding two or three bends, past the Gila monster's cranny, they retrace their route back toward the border fence, to a point where the cowboys are safely eclipsed. The pace is faster this time, a little panicky, and when they pause for rest the canteen water begins to seem finite. But at least the cowboys showed no sign of having noticed. Now the problem is: How else to get out?

Jeff and Helen confer. The gravel road on the American side is just
not
very far away. But there is no other branch to this wash, no other shielded path between here and there.

So they all leave the wash, scaling the east shoulder on a steep traverse across desert scree that crumbles and slides beneath each footstep. They come up out of the cover of the cottonwoods, slowly ascending, exposing themselves on a bare hillside upholstered only in shin-daggers and prickly pear and the wiry, frazzled tufts of a few ocotillo. Under this midday heat, it would be a hard climb for anyone. Lupe pulls herself along haltingly, looking unwell, lagging behind the others. The boy falls again and comes up with a palm full of cactus spines, which he dolefully but mutely presents to his mother for plucking. Jeff picks an unpromising line, hikes a long way up and ahead until he finds
himself again within view of the cowboys, then doubles back to rejoin the group and follow a still more roundabout traverse. Halfway up the hill, Helen stops. She is drastically red in the face. The journalist is alarmed but it's just hypoglycemia, says Helen, a chronic thing for her; and in a few minutes she is ready to go on. The canteens are passed around after every hundred steps.

They reach the ridge top. Under a last solitary mesquite (by now it's a matter of shade, not concealment), they all rest again. The water is gone. At this point they can see—and be seen from—miles away. Nothing to be done about that. Helen and Jeff are quite deliberate about stretching out this final rest. No sense in stumbling on hastily. Nevertheless, Roberto is restless and anxious; so is the journalist.

They cross the ridge top. Steering their downward traverse away from a ranch building visible to the east, they come slowly and very gratefully down to a stream running clear water beside a gravel road.

Within a few minutes the Salvadoran family is hidden among a crowd of respectable Anglo faces, in two separate vehicles, everyone headed toward Tucson.

•   •   •

To an outsider viewing the sanctuary movement with even a morsel of dispassion, three points stand out.

First, this is not a political phenomenon, most essentially, but a religious one. That is fact, not rhetoric. Religious people are performing these acts—smuggling and harboring refugees, transporting them across America, facing jeopardy of federal indictment—for religious reasons. The proportion of secular humanists, agnostic liberals, political radicals of the Old or New Left variety is startlingly low. What you find are nuns, priests, ministers, devout Quakers, rabbis, serious Unitarians, church assistants, church volunteers, and all other sorts of churchly people, most of whom sound quite convincing when they explain that
abandoning the refugees would be equivalent to abandoning their own faith.

A second point: Notwithstanding the prominence of Fife and Corbett and Conger, this movement is dominantly populated by women. Stacey Merkt has been only the most heroically visible of many. Other unknown but resolute souls like Helen seem to account for an overwhelming female majority among those doing the smuggling, transporting, harboring. Ironically, the fact that males have played a disproportionately large role as the conspicuous spokesmen probably reflects less the real dynamics of this movement than the traditional balance of gender and power within organized Christianity and Judaism, carried over as an artifact into sanctuary.

The third intriguing point is that this movement—like so many other religious upheavals throughout history—came out of the desert.

Tucson and Nogales. Calexico and El Centro in California. San Benito and McAllen in Texas. The first battles were fought, the first commitments were made, the first wave of prosecutions have been coped with in these hot, red-rock places. One reason for that geographical pattern is obvious: To Central Americans arriving in dusty buses and on the tailgates of trucks, those desert borderlands are the doorway to America. But another factor, equally crucial, is not so obvious.

The Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona, the Chihuahuan Desert of south Texas, are lands of extremity and denial. Too hot, too rugged, not enough rain, not enough fuel, not enough food. When rain does come, there is no carpet of thick vegetation to hold back the flood. Erosion is unmitigated. The earth itself constantly cracks, falls, washes and blows away. Competition for resources is grim. Death is always a vivid possibility. Like
Heloderma suspectum,
most of the animals and even the plants carry weaponry. The environment offers no respite, no margin of error. The physical ecology is merciless. The moral ecology must therefore
compensate, or a species so ill adapted as humanity couldn't survive.

Desert tribes like the Papago understand that. Desert transplants like Jim Corbett and John Fife have absorbed the same truth.

•   •   •

After homemade tamales and grape Kool-Aid at another safe house, now on the Arizona side, the border party continues driving. An elaborate set of procedures (involving a prearranged route and clockwork communications by telephone) serve to evade the Border Patrol cruisers and checkpoints. The journalist has not yet relaxed. He carries notes, he is implicated, and, not being so morally pellucid as the others, he has no desire to face the test of a subpoena.

If Helen can masquerade as a bird-watcher, then our journalist would have anyone understand that he is just along for the reptiles.

Luck is good, though. Today there are no arrests.

The two vehicles reach Tucson just as an operatic reddish-orange sunset is silhouetting the hills west of town. Everyone gapes and coos. But to a family of foot-weary Salvadorans, and likewise to their Anglo friends, this panorama of ragged ridges and playas and back-lit saguaros that makes southern Arizona gorgeous, and terrible, is not merely scenery. It is landscape, the theater of mortality.

Diet and Survival in the Land of the Papago

And behold, in those days the children of Israel had taken their journey into the desert, and they were hungry and they were thirsty and they were sorely vexed, and so they murmured against Moses, saying, What
is
this nonsense? Moses, we are fixing to die out here and shrivel away like dried chilies if you don't do something, they said. So Moses cried unto the Lord and the Lord showed him a sweet spring where it flowed out of the rock. Fine, but what about some food? said the children of Israel. So the Lord sent overnight a great host of scale insects of the species
Trabutina mannipara
and
Najacoccus serpentinus,
this is true fact, and these insects fed upon the desert tamarisk bushes and then they shat upon the ground; a fine white layer of nutritious excrement, tiny granules that lay over the ground like hoar frost, did they shit. And when the children of Israel saw this stuff, they called it manna, and they did nourish themselves upon it for forty years. But they had nothing on the Papago tribe of southwestern Arizona, who have themselves known the secret of desert provenance for centuries.

Here is the secret, as those Papago have known it: The desert is dry but not barren.

The desert is harsh and intemperate and sometimes forbidding,
but not without its moments of sudden bounteousness. The desert (in particular the Sonoran Desert, North America's driest yet ecologically most complex arid zone, which encompasses that corner of southern Arizona where the Papago Reservation lies) is a landscape of extremity and denial, yes, but you can indeed find things to eat and drink out there—improbable things, tasty things, highly salubrious things—if you happen to know what you are looking for.

The Papago lived by that secret for hundreds and maybe thousands of years, until the cruel magic of civilization and humid-land agriculture descended upon them. Now the old ways are largely gone, and the Papago have arrived in a strange sort of Canaan, a promised land of modernity that includes refrigerators, pickup trucks, supermarket food, and an epidemic of obesity and diabetes.

•   •   •

The Papago tribe is just one branch of a larger group of Indian peoples known as the Pimans, all sharing a common linguistic base and all adapted culturally to life in their respective parts of the Sonoran Desert. In addition to the Papago of southwestern Arizona and adjacent Mexican borderlands, this group includes the Pima Bajo, the Salt River Pima, and a distinct population called the Sand Papago, native to an especially harsh environment at the north end of the Sea of Cortez. Besides sharing language and ancestors, the Piman tribes now share the particular health problems related to their transition away from desert foods.

In their own language, the Arizona and borderland Papago know themselves as
Tohono O'odham,
translated as “The Desert People.” The name Papago itself was hung on them by Spanish colonialists, derived evidently from a garbling of several other words that roughly meant “the Bean Eaters.” Both appellations were accurate, the Spanish version no less so for its tone of snide condescension. These folk did choose to inhabit some of the most
unforgiving terrain of the Sonoran Desert, and they did depend heavily, through at least part of the year, on their bean crops.

The beans in question were teparies, a desert-hardy species of legume that had long been domesticated and treasured among the Papago. These tepary crops were grown each summer from strains of seed lovingly passed down between human generations. Tepary beans were ideally adapted for Papago floodwater cultivation, wherein a field (laid out at the mouth of an arroyo, with a brush dam to spread the runoff) might get only one or two summer soakings and then be left baking dry for three months. The tepary plants grew quickly after a single soaking, sent roots deep, tolerated excessive heat, and reacted well to late-season drought, taking that dryness as merely a signal to shift their metabolic efforts more concertedly toward seed production. Like a camel, tepary plants could gorge on water during a brief period when water was available, then continue to function robustly when it was not. The desert's feast-and-famine regimen suited them fine. But tepary beans were only one Papago crop among several, and the planted crops raised by means of flood irrigation were only one aspect (a minor one, though important) of how these Desert People made their living.