MY FAVORITE BORDER has always been the world's oddest perimeter. It's the threshold of home: the United States-Mexico line. I hardly recognize it anymore.
Not long ago, while out feeding horses in a corral in West Texas, on a parched ranch close to the Rio Grande, I heard an unplaceable sound. It was strange yet familiar, like a lawn mower in the desert. Squinting finally up into the chrome-bright sky, I spotted a Predator drone. It was my first one since Iraq.
This growing militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border has an elegiac quality about it that transcends nostalgia for a time when this 2,000-mile-wide doorway between two sister republics was congenially open. Ultimately, the slow but steady closing of the United States' vast southern frontier says less about Juárez's narco-violence or the jobless rate in Phoenix than it does about the end of an era of exceptionalism in the United States. The fences of I-beams rolling across the desert now seem almost provisional, an artifact of hindsight, a theatrical gesture against demographic and cultural reality.
With Mexican cowboys in the Sierra Madre tucking Sam's Club cards into their wallets and U.S. politicians struggling through slogans in Spanish, it would be impossible for author Graham Greene to marvel, as he did nearly 75 years ago in Laredo, Texas, at the otherness of la frontera: "The atmosphere of the border -- it is like starting over again; there is something about it like a good confession: poised for a few happy moments between sin and sin." Not anymore.
As for the borders interrupting my long walk, I'll be supple and patient. Some will be merely a line of rocks across a salt plain. Others will be triple-fenced minefields. Most, like X-ray body scanners at ports of entry, will peel away my skin. This is what borders do. Denied passage, I'll simply pivot and trudge in another direction, much as our roving ancestors must have done 2,000 generations ago. Scientists have their pet theories about this, of course.
The prevailing hypothesis holds that we unwittingly conquered the Earth by walking along the margins of the seas, lured onward by a bifurcated horizon. Erik Trinkaus, an ancient-migration expert at Washington University in St. Louis, doesn't truck with this shoreline idea. We spread inland across virgin continents, he believes, shrewdly exploiting the places where major ecosystems met. "The transition zones between mountains and plains, wet and dry regions, that's where the greatest diversity of foods was," says Trinkaus. "That's what offered us the greatest fallback on resources."
Either way, it seems from the very beginning, we sought, found, and hewed to borders.
Next: Peter Chilson on waiting out the coup in Mali.
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