Northbound: the flyway was filled with avian migrants, their journey fraught with peril and promise

While driving south on I-29 through Iowa with the wide Missouri River on our right and Soldier River, Forney’s Lake, creeks, sloughs, and several wildlife management areas on our left, my older brother Ken and I kept our eyes to the water and sky.

It was about a week before the first day of spring, and the flyway was filled with thousands of migrants: mallards, redwing blackbirds, solitary hawks perched on dead limbs, snow geese, meadowlarks flitting across the highway and settling in the tall grass, blackbirds and starlings, and especially Canada geese. In the early morning light breaking over the bluffs in the east, a vast black flock of honkers, their white markings concealed by the distance, rose in a slow chaotic circle above the wetlands.

Higher still — just above the rolling ridgeline of the bluffs — another disorganized flock behind a single leader angled into the sky. Then, from out of the south, three separate groups climbed toward us — a smaller one in a checkmark rather than a V, fifty or sixty geese comprising the west leg, fewer than twenty the east leg — and all three flocks arrowing steadily northward. And higher still, several thousand feet overhead, so high we craned our necks and squinted through the top of the windshield and into the brightening sky, an immense V consisting of a couple hundred geese, the trailing legs of the formation drifting in and out and drafting behind the leaders, swept like dotted lines across the pale white face of the cirrus clouds beyond them.

We were migrating south to Laredo for a week of warmer weather, and they were northbound, bearing the new life we all associate with the arrival of spring. But their journey wasn’t without its dangers. Concealed in the Dakota grassland, goose hunters waited in coffin blinds with shotguns leveled at birds descending after long hours and hundreds of miles on the wing. And, unfortunately, a couple of days later, a snowstorm swept out of the Rockies, dropped over two feet of snow around Denver and then, on its way east across the plains, blanketed southeastern South Dakota with over a foot and southwestern Minnesota with several inches that covered migrating birds’ food sources. Their journey, like that of all migrants, is fraught with both promise and peril.

I couldn’t help thinking of my descendants who emigrated from Germany in the late 1800s. They purchased a ticket in steerage for about $30 (the equivalent of about $900 today) and faced the travails of a lengthy voyage in crowded quarters where illness was often rampant, across the stormy north Atlantic, and then inland — another long journey from Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan to Illinois and then, when homesteading made it possible to purchase cheap farmland, on to Iowa and southwestern Minnesota. Much like the winged migrants following the Missouri River and other waterways northward, European immigrants in the nineteenth century faced a variety of hazards: not only disease — typhoid, scarlet fever, cholera, pneumonia, and tuberculosis — but also other life- and crop-threatening natural disasters, including tornadoes, blizzards, floods, and swarms of ravaging grasshoppers and locusts. But necessity and faith that a better life awaited them in a strange land drove them on despite warnings of the dangers and difficulties that lay ahead.

In terms of motive and obstacles, they were not so different from those now arriving at our southern border, and because the current migrants are also confronted and even threatened with cultural, racial, economic, and political obstacles, I find it impossible not to sympathize with them. How can a country as wealthy as ours, one that gives so much lip service to Christian values and the right to life, not afford — financially, ethically, and morally — to help those in such desperate need of help, of salvation from circumstances out of their control, from threats of horrific violence and death?

Even from a strictly practical point of view, doesn’t it make more sense to help “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” than to separate migrant children from their parents, to deny them their legal right to asylum, to force them to linger in tent camps in Mexico, or to imprison them in wire cages or under highway overpasses? Wouldn’t the long-term benefits of making migrants our allies rather than resentful enemies outweigh the selfish, short-term “benefits” of punishing them, “protecting” those “sacred” American jobs that virtually no American wants, and characterizing the cost of social services necessary to help migrants get on their feet as “welfare” and “wasted money” rather than as an investment in the future, all just so we can continue handing out billions of dollars through programs and tax breaks to farmers and the wealthiest Americans?

Through the dark hours around midnight, we continued down I-35 from Austin and San Antonio to Laredo. Amid the eighteen-wheelers and SUV’s and late-model pickups loaded with tarp-covered heaps of cargo, we passed five southbound Greyhound-type buses with dark windows and Mexican signage on the side. Were they loaded with migrants who had been rounded up by ICE or BP and were now bound for the border and deportation? Or were they filled with people like Ken and me fortunate enough to make the trip south to warmer climes until winter gave up its tenuous grip on the land?

In a week we’ll get back on I-35 and head for Minnesota, spring a bit farther up the road and migrants of all kinds still northbound — all hoping for a new start and a new life.