This blog post is brought to you by the word, “yes.”

While in Puerto Peñasco, Mexico, Dwayne and I met a cool couple parked near us in the RV park, Rene and Pat. When they encouraged us to visit them for the weekend after we left Mexico, we agreed. After all, that’s one of the gifts of this year: the flexibility to say “yes” to new adventures. So on Friday we drove the five and a half hours from Puerto Peñasco, Mexico to Douglas, Arizona.

Rene told us that in all the years that he and Pat had been meeting people and inviting them to visit, we were the first ones to take them up on their offer. I heard awe in his voice, for us or the fact that other’s hadn’t come I wan’t sure. What I am sure of is that our visit a gift. They were the best hosts imaginable: offering a few days of amazing food, great conversation and beautiful places to visit. It was one of the best weekends we’ve had on the road.

The first night they drove us around Douglas, which enjoyed a glorious past due to it’s booming 1800’s silver mine. We drove through the downtown and stopped for a drink at the 1907 Gadsden Hotel, said to be haunted. The bottom right corner of the decadent marble staircase has a chip from where Pancho Villa rode his horse up the stairs.

We also visited the old western town, Tombstone, the setting of the movie, Tombstone, with Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday. Apparently, the film was shot in several locations in Arizona, but not the actual town of Tombstone. That said, Val Kilmer visited Tombstone many times to give out autographs and it is still a popular tourist destination. We went to the shootout reenactment and quickly discovered that Neo does not like gunslingers. He got so riled up when the “bad guy” shot his gun that he lunged at him and Dwayne had to usher Neo out.

The last town we visited, Bisbee, was our favorite place. Like Douglas, we could also see a past decadence in the buildings fueled by a mine, this time copper. Today it’s a beautiful old town revitalized by artistic and culinary delights. If we lived in the area, we’d live near Bisbee for sure.

Each day Pat cooked for us and each evening we visited her dad, who gave Dwayne a run for his money with his teasing. And then on our last day Rene drove us into Mexico to visit his mother in the little town of Fronteras. After living most of her life in the US, she returned to Mexico a couple years ago to build a home near where she grew up and have the community she has so missed in the US. Sure enough when we first popped by she had two visitors, so we went on a little tour and returned after her guests left. His mother was a serene host in Fronteras, a sweet town time forgot.

More than all the things we did though was the joy of begin an honored guest. There is a feeling one gets when one is treated with kind open heartedness.

Douglas was the first Mexican border town we had ever spent any time in. I was surprised at the bustling commerce between Mexico and the US. Enormous truck depots are busy all night bringing fruit and other goods from Mexico into in the US. A train carried even more goods between the two countries and US distribution centers on the Mexican side of the border. Cars lined up the road to the checkpoint with folks coming from a weekly Walmart shopping trip from Mexico into the US, just like what we saw at the border of Canada. In fact, I saw many similarities between the Canadian border with two very glaring exceptions: the wall and the very active border patrol. We passed border police walking slowly along the road outside our friend’s home, looking, Rene said, for footprints in the sand. Rene waved and the border agent looked carefully at everyone in the car before stiffly returning the wave. 

Pat told me that when Arizona became part of the US, the border went right through the town. Her grandmother’s street was the first street in the US. Over night her grandmother became a US citizen, while family and friends just one street over stayed in Mexico. She repeated this again, and I’m sure her family has repeated this often marveling at the randomness of their citizenship. Back then there was only a short barbed wire fence that her grandmother would jump over to go dancing on the weekends and the during the week she’d mend the tears in her petticoat.

Pat’s story reminds me one of my favorite Turkish films, Propaganda, staring the famous Turkish comedian Kemal Sunal. The movie begins by introducing us to the routines and relationships in a sleepy little Turkish village just at the end of WWI. The story quickly takes on a surreal dark edge as the characters wake up to find a strange barbed wire fence cutting through their village, with a gated check post in the center of town. Suddenly anyone on the other side of that line lives in a new unnamed territory. Just like the town of Douglas, Arizona, this new border splits this sleepy desert village separating families, lovers about to marry, and the shepherd’s daily path to graze his sheep. And poor Kemal Sunal’s character has been put in charge of protecting it. The movie ends when he finally understands the senselessness of this barrier to the way people had lived for hundreds of years. He joins the families as they all crash through the gate, destroying the blockade to reunite loved ones.

Our own arbitrary line, the one between the US and Mexico has become more solidified with time, laws, passports, and now a wall. I asked my hosts what they thought of the wall and they laughed. “No one likes it and no one takes it seriously. It  has done nothing to deter anyone who really wants to get through,” said Rene.” “It’s ugly,” Pat added. I asked if they had ever had problems, after all Mexico was a mile across uninterrupted desert. At night you could see the lights of the nearest Mexican town and the factories. “Look,” Rene said, “those poor souls don’t want anyone to see them. They’re not going to bother us.” Rene had been a master sergeant in the Army so I doubt much scares him, but Pat had lived there by herself before she met Rene. She dismissed my question with a shrug and said simply that she had two dogs. The threats they did want to talk about were the rattlesnakes and desert rodents. Pat pulled out a dried snake skin from her little garden as proof and told us a harrowing story about a time she saw a rattler in her yard. Rene was more concerned about the rodents who get into your engine and eat your wires, and he had a lot of advice about keeping them out.

Because we were curious, Rene drove us to the wall. We saw how it snakes around the CVS and lines the Walmart parking lot, crowds against streets, and stretches across the surrounding desert.

When I looked at that steel barrier, I felt an empty sadness that’s hard to explain. It was the same feeling I had when I visited the island of Cyprus just below where I lived in Turkey and saw the UN erected wall between the Northern Turkish side and the Southern Greek side. That barrier abruptly cut off streets and pinched between houses. This one in Douglas feels looming, and strangely sadder on the US side than the Mexican side. Perhaps because of the murals painted on the Mexican side made it brighter. Or perhaps because on the US side everything seemed to be pressed against the wall, as if leaning toward Mexico. Everything else in Douglas relates to Mexico as our commerce partners, our neighbors. But this wall says otherwise. It’s a full stop.

In Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” the line “fences make good neighbors” is well quoted, but the message of his poem is something very different. Each year parts of the stone wall between Frost’s land and his neighbor’s tumble and break and each spring Frost and his neighbor, each on their own side, mend the broken stone wall together. As he is putting rocks back up, Frost expresses his frustration with this yearly ritual with the line, “Something there is that doesn't love a wall.”  He muses that perhaps there is a reason that the wall falls apart every year, perhaps something in the land rebels against it. He asks his neighbor why they need this wall, and the neighbor replies with the famous line, “Fences make good neighbors.” Frost questions him further,

Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.’ 

But instead the neighbor keeps mending the wall unable to move from the teachings of his own father, to stray from the traditions of the land. In answer to Frost’s question, he can only repeat “fences make good neighbors.” I find Frost’s description of the neighbor particularly apt.  

I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

And that is how I see the wall, something of the stone-age, built in darkness. “Something there is that doesn't love a wall. That wants it down.” 

Our hosts asked us what the wall looked like against Canada, and I had to shake my head. It was hard to get the words out. I felt embarrassed by the answer, as if I were the one to blame. We know what hospitality looks like and what it doesn’t. Our hosts were amazing: opening their doors, feeding us, sharing their world. Yet the US has not shown this graciousness to our neighbors to the south. To the south the operating word is not “yes” but “no.”

When I finally answered, “there isn’t a wall,” we all went silent. A moment of silence for something precious lost.