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October 2008 · Readings · Previous · Next   PDF

The only place to go

By Charles Bowden

By Charles Bowden, from his essay in the July/August issue of Orion. Exodus, a collaboration between Bowden and the photographer Julián Cardona, is out this month from University of Texas Press. Bowden’s “Teachings of Don Fernando” appeared in the June 2002 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

At noon, the air burns—strike a match and toss it into a gallon of gasoline to get the feeling—and it stays this way into the night, when the blackness wraps the body like velvet. For hours this air remains higher in temperature than the bodies of mammals struggling to stay alive in it. The ground rolls, a brown grassland dreaming of rain with clots of mesquite in green leaf. The mesquite tortures the mind. The dirt beneath the shoe may be 150 degrees, the skin roars with fire, the body feels baked and erratic, and still the eyes stare at these thriving trees feasting off water as deep as 200 feet below the surface.

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SEE ALSO: Boundaries; Drug traffic; Emigration and immigration; Environmental degradation; Human smuggling; Illegal aliens; Labor movement; Mexican-American Border Region; Radio broadcasting

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