Slipping In and Out of Time on the Border
Fusing temporal visions of colonial-climate disasters
A stench of burned life filled the valley, accompanied by the wrenching cry of the machine that tore open the land. They had come to find solace in the mountains, but could escape neither marks of the dread disease nor the rampant destruction wrought by monied powers even in these remote stretches of the territories.
So the above passage is either a) a random excerpt from an apocalyptic fantasy novel, or b) a description of the day hike I took on an average Wednesday this spring. Signs of the times suggest you all will probably know it’s (b). So just how much apocalyptic symbolism can you pack into a single day hike? Let’s see.
Last month, around mid-March, the boyfriend and I set out for the afternoon to the Coronado National Monument. I’d been curious about border wall construction here, which I’d heard was interfering with hiker access to the starting point of the AZT, a long-distance trail I’ve more than once considered thru-hiking. As it turned out, I wouldn’t be getting anywhere near close enough to see the construction. First, the trail to the border was entirely shut, not just at the border itself. The gist of the closure warning was: “don’t hike here, you might get blown up.” The second and less expected obstacle was smoke. The source was a nearby controlled burn, which lessened our worry but not the heavy smell of ash in the air, or its quick impact on my body. We opted for a short trail near the visitor center, but even that proved difficult. Not long in and I was sluggish, my head aching, my stomach nauseous.
We turned around, headed back downhill, and shortly stepped aside to let a large group of hikers pass by (hiker etiquette for those who might not know: let the people with the harder work of going uphill have the right of way). We put on our masks as they approached, and I stood there, stringing together all the facts of our situation:
First, we were at a site memorializing a Spanish conquistador obsessed with a delusional pursuit of gold; a memorial, no less, built on stolen land. The land was acquired from Mexico by the U.S. via the 1853 Gadsden purchase without either party seeking the consent of the O’odham people.
Second, part of said memorial was presently being blown to bits to fulfill the promise of another gold-obsessed public figure, who had used the idea of a wall to stoke racially-motivated fear and paranoia and instigate vigilante violence against immigrants. While he may be out of office, wall construction has yet to be halted.
Third, and potentially related to the construction—maybe they were lowering risk of fires near the blast sites, though it could have been a routine seasonal activity, we didn’t know—a controlled burn was flooding the monument and surrounding area with smoke, making it difficult to breathe, and not just for humans. I had learned on our way over that we were only a few miles from the watershed hosting an astonishing two-thirds of the country’s avian diversity, leading me to wonder what all the additional particulate matter meant for them. It’s easy enough for birds to fly away from momentary burns, but we also know that mass die-offs of birds resulted from last year’s major wildfires.
Last, of course, there were all the markers of the pandemic: the unstaffed visitor center, replaced by a table with hand sanitizer and a whiteboard with current conditions; the masks, with a greater number of buffs and bandanas given that we were outside; and the social distancing—the larger group on trail, all young boys of color in their mid-teens, were all hiking well-spaced out from one another, hence giving me all my extra time to think about avian breathing troubles and possible similarities in temperament between recent presidents and the namesake of this strangely dedicated monument.
As my mind stitched this all together, it created a bit of what we might call “temporal vertigo.” The disasters one might often ascribe to different time periods—the particular variety of 16th century colonialism; the endless accumulation of death and illness in the present pandemic and the continuing chaos and brutality at the border; and some future endpoint of the unfolding climate processes, be it charred landscapes or mass extinction of birds and other species—all slid into one another, and they were not some linear unidirectional unfolding of sequential disasters but instead all happening at the same time. The many moments were one moment and the many disasters one disaster. It was, you could say, Your Moment of (Apocalyptic) Zen.
Which is, in part, how I experienced it. The profusion of problems didn’t trigger anxiety, which for many years had been my default emotion when thinking about climate change. Much of that anxiety, I think, resulted from the heavy emphasis in the climate movement on needing to do things quickly. Like now. Like yesterday. “Winning slowly is losing,” people working on climate issues often say. Only the experience of temporal vertigo interferes with that demand for urgency, and with its very sense of time. It challenges the activist sensibility that aims to make the present moment weirdly static—to prevent today from slipping into a future tomorrow where the disasters are waiting to happen, ones we can prevent if we only do enough quickly enough right now. It erases the fact that both the present and the past have been continuing disasters for many; that for some, it’s not that the world as we know it “might end”—it already has, and they’ve been living in the death of their world ever since. “Worlds end all the time,” as Ben Ehrenreich puts it simply in his Desert Notebooks: A Roadmap for the End of Time, a book attempting to think about how the proliferation of crises in the present era alters our experience of time. Saying that “worlds end all the time” is not intended to mean “so what?” It is, again, a little like Zen: to be able to look at suffering, and attend to it, but not be thrown off balance by it. Things have ended before and they will begin and end again, but that does not negate our duty to prevent what suffering we can. It may negate some of our urgency-fueled neuroticism, and help us get over ourselves and any savior complexes we’ve secretly been nursing. Or I’d like to think so.
Which is why I hold up that moment at the monument, with all the layers from past, present, and future hurt all interwoven together. It’s not meant to suggest “we’re probably been doomed, but did you know how long the roots of our doom really are?” It’s the oneness and the constancy of it that is the point, and recognition of that can change our perspective, and the ground from which we look to take action on such immense and complex challenges. I’m not the first to say this, to articulate the idea that the problem of colonialism and climate are the same problem—not one past and one future, but both past/present/future at the same time. There are theoretical arguments and practical arguments one can find setting this out. But from where I stood on the hillside in unceded O’odham territory last month, I didn’t really need any arguments. It simply was how things were, how they are.
Moving from this new vantage point, there are lots of interesting questions that can begin to surface as you start to interrogate the sense of time that has informed your perspective on how the future will unfold and what needs to be done in response. For instance, what about the present do I presume will stay the same? What forms of change do I presume will or will not take place? What do I put ‘in the past’ and why do I think it’s ‘all gone’? What if there are actually many different forms of experiences of time happening all at once—does this change how we plan, how we incorporate others in our plans? Can shifting my experience of time shift my own capabilities and my sense of what’s possible? My hunch is that there’s a lot we take for granted about time, and a lot that playing with our mental conception of time, and our physical experience of it, can shake loose and change.
That might be too many questions of a theoretical bent for a Monday morning, which is when I’m finishing this particular reflection. For those who’d like to say a little closer to the concrete, last month the NYTimes ran a piece on the border wall construction at the monument—in a funny moment of serendipity, it came out the same day as our visit there, and you can see more photos of the wall cutting through the “sky islands” of southern Arizona. If those questions get you jazzed up, though, and you happen to be a theory geek, let me recommend sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity.
For me, at least, the questions stuck. Wondering how our sense of time changes our perception of events—particularly climate-related disasters—gave me a different way of looking at forest fires as I hiked through burns further north in Arizona just a few weeks ago. Stay tuned for an upcoming photo essay digging into the odd structures of time that shape how we think about climate change and catastrophe.