Above the border

WEST OF TUCSON are picturesque lines of jagged mountain ranges. From the city, the ranges seem randomly scattered. But from the air it is clear that they mostly run north to south — all the way to Mexico. Between them are open tracts of land, as much as 15 miles across. Some are sandy, some brush filled, some dotted with Sonora cactus. These flats are where I work.

I am temporarily assigned to Arizona with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, part of the Department of Homeland Security. From my helicopter I can see the many trails leading from the southern border north through these flats. There may be 10 within a mile, and not another for the next two. They pass and weave across each other. As they lead northward, the trails dip in and out of the washes that run east/west through the flats. Illegal aliens hide in these washes. On the rocky and sandy bottoms and under the thick, low trees, they have built sturdy lean-tos from cut wood and brush.

As I fly north along a trail, every few hundred yards I may come across another wash with five or six wooden hutches on the bottom — at the bottom of where this particular trail intersects the wash. Travel 200 yards east or west in the wash, and you will come across another wide northbound trail and another set of lean-tos. Little communities, abandoned at the moment, but populated for short times throughout the day and night.

Because I do not know the area well, I fly with agents from Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue, commonly called BORSTAR. They throw their heavy medical bags in the back of the helicopter and often respond to emergencies in the middle of nowhere, at least nowhere an ambulance can get to. Many times I’ve seen children, waist high, with oxygen bottles held to their small faces, or their fingers gently pricked to test sugar levels.

All this going on in the middle of nowhere. Women with chest pains, bee stings, snake bites, dehydrated. Thousands of people migrating through 40 miles of wilderness are a kind of moving city, an invisible human caravan, requiring all the necessities of any permanent community.

I’ve caught so many people, the days and adventures have merged and split like the weaving trails I follow. But a few come clearly to mind.

One afternoon, after catching a group, I landed to assist the agent on the ground. Most of those apprehended were men. There were a few women and a young couple with two small children. As we sat by the side of a dusty road and waited for transport, I spoke to the couple. They were both 19, the older girl was 3, and the younger girl, dressed in a dirty pink outfit, was just 14 months. The 3-year-old, exhausted from a night of walking, slept heavily, sprawled on her back across her daddy’s spread legs. The 14-month-old seemed a bit cranky, hungry it turned out. She took eagerly to her mother’s breast.

The two parents smiled at one another. They talked about their children and their lives, what they hoped to do, where they might find work in Mexico and if they would again chance a crossing. We spoke about the girls’ names — one had been named after her maternal grandmother. I told them I had two daughters. The mother laughed when I told her my wife was Hispanic. “From Mexico?” she asked. No, I answered, but her mother was from Mexico, and my wife swears at me in Spanish. “So does mine,” shouted one of the other men from the group.

Then the van showed up and we said our goodbyes. I gently touched her children on the forehead, a Hispanic gesture: When you see something as sweet as these children, so valuable, you touch them there to protect them from the “evil eye.” I don’t know if I believe in the evil eye, but I do believe in a simple gesture, even to strangers, that tells them their children are precious.

It was an odd thing to do, I instantly realized, with someone I had just arrested, and immediately I asked myself what future, immediate or enduring, had I set in motion for this family. What might have happened if I had not seen them that day?

Once we were called to assist with a body. We normally do not give rotor time to bodies, but this was different. The body had been found in a rather large wash, broad and open in the center. Another pilot had seen it earlier in the day and recorded its GPS coordinates. There had been an execution: The body had a gunshot wound to the head. Littered around the body were bloodied clothes. Investigators believed that there might be another injured person nearby. A single bullet to the head is typically how one smuggling organization tells another not to interfere on its “turf.”

The next day we worked with a few “shadow wolves,” American Indian agents who are specialists in tracking people across the border. They were tracking eight mules — narcotics smugglers — in the mountains. The mountains are jagged and steep; for that reason, illegal aliens tend to avoid them. Drug smugglers, meanwhile, tend to avoid the trails used by illegal aliens. So the mountains are where federal agents catch dope smugglers.

I never saw the mules. The sound of an approaching helicopter must have scattered them. But they left their burlap-covered bundles of drugs in the brush. The bags are straw colored and blend into the landscape; it took agents about two hours to find all of them.

I spent 30 minutes just looking for a place to land and eventually found a small niche on which to balance my helicopter. The agents loaded what they could into the back, and I flew it to the station. I didn’t return to the mountains that day. The sun was setting, and I knew I would not be able to land the helicopter on that spot in the dark. The agents stashed the remaining bags in the brush, intending to return the next day to recover them, and walked the three or four hours back down the canyon to their vehicle.

A few days later, I visited family friends, a retired couple who winter in Phoenix. They took me to a fancy Italian restaurant, and we spoke about all those things people say not to mention in polite company — politics, war, religion. When we spoke about religion, the husband said he no longer believed in miracles. Every day, he said, science seems to be able to explain a little more.

I mention this only because the next day was so slow. Flying with a BORSTAR agent, I followed some tracks from the air, but they led nowhere. The radio was quiet. No one asked for assistance. I was about to turn home when I noticed a bit of smoke on the horizon. The smoke started white, then turned black — and black smoke usually means something man-made is on fire. With nothing else to do, we decided to check it out.

When we arrived, the fire had just about died out. In the blackened center was a man. He seemed to wave to us, then he seemed to wave us away. He tried to get to his knees and fell over. Another agent on the ground had also noticed the fire and driven to it, but he was unable to see the man in the center.

We landed and the BORSTAR agent and the agent on the ground made their way through the embers. When they reached the man, they carried him out. By the time I landed again, the smoke had mostly dissipated.

I walked over to them and commented to the other agent, who was with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, on how odd it was that the fire burned so black. As it turned out, it was nothing more than a grass fire. But he had come to the same conclusion I had: that it was probably some sort of vehicle burning. Neither of us would have bothered to check it if we had thought it was only a small grass fire. But that’s exactly what it had been, and now there wasn’t even any smoke.

The guy looked pretty banged up. He was weak, but after a few swallows of water, his story slowly came out. Three days before, he said, he had been shot in the head. Above his right eye, beneath a layer of caked blood, was a hole. He also had been shot in his side and back. This was the guy, I realized, I had been asked to look for earlier. Those were his bloody clothes beside the body in the wash. He had fared better than his friend — but not by much.

This man had survived nights so frigid that I had to wear thermal underwear to make it through hours of doors-off helicopter flying. He had survived an execution, with a bullet in his head and one through his lung. He had survived four or five days without food or water. But he was still bleeding to death in the middle of nowhere. So, in one last desperate hope, he started a fire — and that fire burned black, which confused both me and the Fish and Wildlife agent. And it happened to be the only slow day I’d had in weeks, so I was able to check it out.

As he gave the man care, the BORSTAR agent flying with me worried the guy would die right there. He’d seen that before. People will themselves to survive through incredible odds, he said, and then, right as help arrives, they relax, let down their guard and drift into death.

As he told me this, I thought it odd. A modern view of science grounded in cause and effect has no space for a metaphysical phrase like “the will to survive.” We’d say the bullet killed him, or maybe the loss of blood. But it certainly wasn’t the fact that he felt tired and decided to lie down one last time.

As it turns out, this guy didn’t lie down. He never let himself rest. While I held the IV, blood filled one of his eyes, and he talked slowly, at a whisper, to himself.

It is all chance, I know. Everything is chance. But I couldn’t help thinking back to my conversation a few days before at that Italian restaurant in Phoenix. Maybe my father’s friend was right; maybe miracles don’t happen anymore. Yet I’m sure when I flew over that waving man in the blackened grass, he knew something bigger than chance was at work.