What Would It Take?

It’s the question I’ve recently asked myself, one that most of us ignore because we can’t imagine that it actually concerns us. However, when we apply it to others — particularly migrants who pack up a few belongings, leave home and family behind, and travel hundreds of miles — too many of us reach for the lazy answer: they do it only because they want a free ride; they come here to get welfare, food stamps, and free medical care. Of course, this makes very little sense. People looking only for a free pass wouldn’t expose themselves to the peril and hardship of a long journey on foot or on top of a train or in a rickety bus and would never entrust life and limb to a coyote. Which brings us back to my question: what exactly would cause us to take such risks? Just what would it take to become them?

It might start with a seemingly small mistake: an off-color comment in class, a misconstrued compliment, an accidental touch, an e-mail sent too hastily, which leads to an accusation, a confrontation, documentation, a reprimand. I’m convinced that my record of ten years of effective teaching here will negate the effects of this one minor event, so I apply for another one-year contract. A few weeks later I learn that interviews have commenced, but I’m not among the candidates being considered. If labor unions hadn’t been outlawed in Pennsylvania the year before, I’d have some recourse. Instead, I stew about the unfairness of it all before applying for other teaching positions in Ohio, North Dakota, Georgia, even Mississippi. Unfortunately, most are already filled, and I suspect that my age and rumors about why my contract wasn’t renewed hurt my application, so I face the fall unemployed.

I search for work outside academia, but the labor market is bad, and when I apply for the few openings I find, I’m told I’m over qualified or unable to meet the physical demands of the job or lack the technical skills other applicants have. Or I’m told nothing at all. I move out of the townhouse I rented for the past two years and into a cheaper, smaller efficiency. Because I no longer have room for everything I own, I run an ad in the classifieds and sell the couch, love seat, computer desk, and two lawn chairs. What doesn’t sell — a mattress, box spring, frame, an end table, and some camping gear—I donate to the Salvation Army. Some things I can’t bear to part with, especially books, book shelves, and personal items from my years in Laredo and Minnesota, because doing so would mean giving up and deserting a life I spent years building. I rent a small storage unit down the street, carefully box up those things, and put them there. I rely on unemployment benefits and my savings to pay the rent, insurance on my fifteen-year-old Jeep, and monthly electric, water, and cell phone bills while I look for work.

Since I no longer have health insurance, I cancel appointments with the optometrist and doctor, tell the receptionist at the dentist’s office that I can’t make my next exam and cleaning because of my busy schedule, and discontinue the monthly visit to the chiropractor. I don’t qualify for Medicare, and I’m too young to retire, so I run two to three miles every other day. I try to take care of myself, and getting out makes me feel normal, productive, capable of more than just teaching.

Months pass, my savings dwindle, unemployment benefits run out, and I’m no closer to finding full-time work. Through the winter I conserve money by setting the thermostat at 62˚ and wearing extra clothes; I get a bad chest cold with a barking cough that keeps me indoors for nearly two weeks, but I shake it without paying for a visit to the doctor. As spring approaches and the weather warms, I walk to the public library to use a computer to complete more job applications. My only internet connection at home is through my cell phone, but even that I’ll have to discontinue soon if I don’t get a job since I need the money for groceries, rent, and upkeep on the Jeep. I can no longer afford the storage unit, so I empty it, sell three six-foot-tall bookshelves to a neighbor, and stack the boxes of books in my tiny apartment. When none of my applications results in an interview and I compare what’s left of my savings to what another year without work will cost me, I call my older brother in Minnesota.

We hadn’t talked in a while; I didn’t want to bother him with my troubles. In recent years he and his wife had done well, and I thought they might be able to help, but the plummeting stock market, tariffs, and some of the lowest hog and grain prices in years have financially crippled his customers and decimated his investments, which should have been the nest egg to carry them through their retirement years. “I’m just glad I still have a job,” he tells me, “but things are tight. I don’t know how much help we can be.” He describes the debt that area farmers face, the bankruptcies, foreclosures, and, for those able to survive, the lack of operating capital because of bank failures. “And it’s only getting worse,” he says. “If you’ve got any other option, you should take it.” I know he’s right, that things for him are more serious than he lets on, and I don’t want to add my troubles to his. “Good luck,” I say, and then he’s gone.

Over the next year things get steadily worse, not just for me but for most people. Because of the gridlock in Washington, thousands of federal employees who hadn’t received a paycheck in months are laid off or quit out of frustration and desperation. The stock market continues to plummet and, as a result, millions of people’s investments and retirement funds evaporate. Generous tax breaks for the wealthy and a staggering national debt lead the federal government to raid Social Security and raise the retirement age to seventy. Drought ravages the Midwest, and wildfires sweep through the Rockies and across California. Gas prices and unemployment skyrocket, and crop production collapses. Because of the continuing government shutdown, food inspections are mostly discontinued, which leads to outbreaks of food-borne illnesses. Several airports close terminals due to massive sickouts among TSA workers. Rumors of bioterrorism, hijackers, and cyberattacks against nuclear power plants run rampant, leading to suspicion, fear, desperation, and more crime across the country.

Early one morning I’m jarred awake when the house across the street from my apartment explodes, the concussion shattering my front window and debris raining down on parked cars and neighboring houses. Sirens wail, lights flash, and people peer from behind drawn blinds. Eventually the fire is contained; then, two firefighters carry first one and then a second body bag out of the charred doorway and lay them by the curb. They’d been cooking meth. Two days later another explosion rocks the end of the block. A week after that when I return from the library, I find the door to my apartment ajar, the frame splintered, the place ransacked. Some indecipherable symbol is spray-painted in black on the wall above an overturned bookcase, the same image I saw tagged on one of the bridge pillars on the south side of town. Someone plunged the butcher knife from the kitchen drawer into the back cushion of the only chair in the room. My heart thumps in the dead silence. I consider calling the police, but that might only make matters worse. I call the landlord, but no one answers. I wait for dark. Then, I pack the Jeep and drive west under a moonless sky.

I’d heard that along I-80 headless corpses had been left leaning against the posts that hold up “No passing” signs and that north of here armed “patriots” had set up roadblocks and dynamited bridges, overpasses, even cell phone towers. I stick to two-lane roads through the hills and drive all night; by morning I’m in West Virginia. I need gas and pull into line behind a dozen other vehicles at the only service station in this small town. When I reach the pump, I discover it’s $6.29 a gallon and a limit of ten gallons per vehicle. I pump, pay with a credit card, and get back on the road.

And so it goes. Over the next two weeks I encounter protestors blocking roads and toxic smoke from a burning chemical plant. I hear of a sniper along I-40 and ruptured gas pipelines in Arkansas and Louisiana. I siphon fuel from an abandoned cargo van outside Nacogdoches, which is enough to carry me past Houston. National Guardsmen in full gear and carrying automatic weapons man roadblocks on all highways leading into the city. Plumes of smoke rise over the skyline.

Then, just a couple miles outside of Nada, the Jeep dies. I coast onto the shoulder, jam it in park, and get out. In the distance, through the quivering distortion of heat rising from the asphalt, small dark shapes shift and bend. People walking, I suspect, sometimes seeming like just two or three, then like dozens. I slam the door and trudge to the rear, where I take out the backpack and slip it over my shoulders. I grab the plastic gallon jug half full of water, push the end gate shut, and look back at the city. A warm Gulf wind carries the moan of distant sirens, suddenly drowned out by the concussive whump-whump-whump of two Chinook helicopters passing overhead and bound in the direction of the smoke. I turn south and walk.

Most of us believe we’re safe from the circumstances that uproot people, and, consequently, we cannot conceive of the fear, desperation, anxiety, and hunger that lead millions to remote borders. In our first-world comfort, we see only the safety nets that separate us from the road, the desert, the monte, the dangerous waters, and we assume that these nets — welfare, unemployment, Medicaid, legal protections, etc. — are the migrants’ goal, that the desire for these social services drives them to our southern border. Of course, reality is much different and their motivations more fundamental and human. But this perception is what blinds us to their predicament, and, as a result, we resist foreseeing the circumstances that might cause us to become them.

So wanting only a safe place to lay my head, food enough to keep me healthy, knowledge that friends and family fear no harm, and respectable work to earn my own way, I stumble down the shoulder of that southbound road and through the ranchlands with less than a gallon of water and a backpack containing a change of clothes, jerky and a can of tuna, a few photos, a jackknife, a pocket-sized New Testament, a notepad and pen. And now I think only of the river and of finding a new life on the other side, maybe doing farm work like I did as a teenager in Minnesota. And I repeat the mantra I hope will help me once I cross: ¿Comida? ¿Socorro? Compasión, por favor. Yo soy Americano. Yo soy humano.