Pining for a Paling?

I’ve been reading “War and Peace” lately. In fact, for the last couple of years. Or has it been more like three years? A long time, in any case, and during that long, long journey, I’ve sometimes encountered words totally unknown to me, words in my own language. Many of these have to do with different kinds of horse-drawn carriages or military gear used in the early 19^th century. I should look up the meaning of these newly discovered bits of my native tongue, I know, but often I don’t. One that I did look up recently, or rather, Googled (who uses a physical dictionary these days?) was the word “paling”.

This word appeared around page 1080 of “War and Peace”, as the book is beginning to wind down. Only a couple hundred or so pages left to go! At this point in the story, Napoleon’s Grande Armée is evacuating Moscow, carting away troves of loot and herding along in its exodus hundreds of wretched Russian prisoners, including Pierre (Count Pyotr Bezúkhov), one of the main characters. 

As this unhappy mass of militarized or subjugated humanity slowly pass through the Khamovniky quarter, one of the few districts of Moscow that had not been incinerated, Pierre’s fellow prisoners surge to one side of the road to look with shock at something at the base of a church.

Pierre also strains to see the object and learns it is “… the body of a man, set upright against the paling [around the church], with its face smeared with soot.”

Paling. I had to look it up. Turns out it’s a wooden fence made up of pointy tipped slabs. Or slats, if you will. Basically, a picket fence.

Now that the US is in the midst of a government shutdown over Trump’s border wall -- with the semantics being bandied around of what is and isn’t a wall, a steel-slat fence, a barrier, or a what have you -- “paling” seems a good word to know.

Maybe in his fitful dreams deep in the night Trump sees before him a concrete wall morphing into a fence morphing into steel slats morphing into a paling morphing into anything, anything he can point to and claim protects America. Anything at all. And I doubt it would bother him one bit if there's a dead body propped up against it. Maybe in his mind that's the only way you can know it's working.

The Great Wall of Trump

I have a minor, geeky point to make about the mythical wall that Donald Trump seems to believe he can build along the border with Mexico.

Put aside the huge cost of building and patrolling such a wall, independently estimated to be at least $25 billion just for the construction (and rest assured, Mexico will NOT pay for it). There’s also the actual geography of the border to consider.

One geographic reality of the Trump Wall in particular seems to me likely to force the US to effectively give up control of some its territory for long stretches of the border. I’m talking here about the Rio Grande.

I have crossed the US-Mexican border only a couple of times in my life. One of these was at the Boquillas crossing on the Rio Grande, the river that for some 1200 miles (1930 kilometers) forms America’s southern border. The river, in fact, makes up almost two-thirds of the total length of that border.

At the time (1985), Boquillas was an “informal” border crossing, way off the beaten track. My future wife and I happened upon it during a pre-Christmas get-away to Big Bend National Park, a national treasure nestled, you might say, in that large “S-shape” on the bottom of Texas where the Rio Grande curves north after flowing southeastwardly from El Paso. In other words, the “Big Bend”.

The pueblo of Boquillas del Carmen in the distance, as seen from the US. 

Photo: Texas.pics 

Big Bend, by the way is an amazing park, an outstanding place to visit, especially if you enjoy stark desert landscapes far from civilization. We loved it there. We did small day hikes, along the river and in the Chisos Mountains. We spotted roadrunners, coyotes and foxes near the campgrounds. I can’t remember if we saw any snakes, but no doubt they were nearby. We visited hot springs. And we got familiar with the river that forms the southern edge of both the park and the nation.

Along the park’s boundary, the Rio Grande is mostly flat and placid, and only about a hundred feet across. It cuts through at least three major canyons, but the part we saw mostly occupied a narrow flood plain between low banks of limestone. From our campsite at Rio Grande Village, we could hear roosters crowing from across the river. From riverside trails, we could see cattle wandering in and out of canebrakes on the opposite shore. And from the Boquillas Crossing, we made a short, undocumented visit to the other side.

This border crossing lay at the end of short unpaved road that reaches the river just upstream from the Mexican hamlet of Boquillas del Carmen. In the graveled riverside parking lot sat just a car or two, with a few enterprising local men lounging on the hoods. We paid one of them a couple of dollars to paddle us across the river -- and the US border -- in an aluminum johnboat. It took only a minute or two. Once on the other side, we could have paid a couple of more dollars to ride burros to the village about a mile away, but we chose to go along the rough road into town on foot.

It was the quintessential dusty one-street town. We looked around, had a relaxing lunch of tacos and cold beer under a breezy awning. We bought a couple of simple figurines carved from green onyx as souvenirs. I don’t recall seeing any other gringos. After a couple of hours maybe, we returned across the river, back to the United States.

Crossing the border at Boquillas was quasi-legal and essentially unregulated before 9/11, providing probably the main source of income for Boquillas del Carmen’s 300-odd residents. After the fall of the Twin Towers shook America’s sense of security to its core, this faraway river crossing was shut down. It was reopened in 2013, but now as an official, though unstaffed, Port of Entry with high-tech kiosks allowing visitors from Mexico to connect remotely to distant immigration officials. Its laid-back nature has been, it would seem, changed forever.

I’ve been recently reminded of Boquillas, and our long-ago crossing there, by all this talk of Trump’s Wall. Which brings me (finally) to my geeky point:  where exactly along the Rio Grande does Mr. Trump intend to locate his magnificent wall.

I assume the official border follows the middle of the river. And, I’m guessing that, for all kinds of engineering and hydrological reasons, you can’t erect a YUGE concrete wall smack down in the middle of a 1200-mile waterway.

Obviously, the wall has to be built on shore. On the American side, of course. I feel certain Mexico would not allow it on its side.

I also have a feeling it’s not practical to place a wall right on the water’s edge, which might vary anyway with spring floods, etc. That means the wall would have to be set back some distance from the shore, say two- to three-hundred feet. Depending on the local geography, an even wider buffer zone might be needed.

Rio Grande, international border on the edge of Big Bend National Park.

Photo: Glysiak

To me, this strip of land between the wall and the river would become a no-man’s land, mostly off limits for ordinary Americans, but accessible to anyone from the Mexican side to come and go as they please. The wall would replace the river as a de facto border.

Access to the river would be limited by the location of gates or portals built into in the wall. Maybe most of these would be only for Border Patrol agents to pass through. Most likely, only a few would be open for ordinary Americans.

In other words, only Americans with the right documentation could access the river at official border crossings (no undocumented Yankees fishing on the Rio Grande!). This would leave miles and miles of the Rio Grande difficult to reach for locals and tourists. It would greatly complicate commercial rafting operators, not to mention anyone else who wanted to have fun on the river.

And then there are the reservoirs. The Rio Grande is impounded by two dams on the US-Mexican border, creating the 65,000-acre Lake Amistad (ironic name, there) and the 84,000-acre Falcon Reservoir. These large bodies of water straddling the border are understandably popular with fishermen and other recreationists.

I can only assume that Trump’s Wall would have to be constructed along the entire long, convoluted shores of these lakes, essentially sealing these enjoyable waters off from easy access. To Americans, that is.

I doubt the average bass fisherman in Texas setting out to launch his boat at the Rough Canyon ramp, some ten miles north of the Mexican half of Lake Amistad, nowadays has to remember to bring along his passport (which 80% of Americans don’t have anyway). After Trump’s Wall goes up, he will.

Otherwise, how can he, as an American, be allowed back into the States after a day of fishing on one of Texas’ biggest lakes? Ironic, isn’t?

A wayward gringo enjoying a cerveza in Boquillas del Carmen.

Net Stupidity – The Mexican Wall Edition

The Internet meme below has recently popped up in my Facebook feed. As you can see, it shows a fence, topped with what looks like razor-wire, identified as “Mexico’s Southern Border”.

The point the meme is trying to make (in mostly fluent English) is that Americans should not be demonized for wanting a big-ass wall on the border with Mexico – the kind of wall that Donald Trump can’t stop talking about – since Mexico protects its own southern border with a “full border fenceline” complete with “barbed wire, armed guards, and towers”. In other words, the fence in the photo.

I can’t say I’m familiar with the Mexican-Guatemalan border, but the photo didn’t quite look right to me. You might expect a lusher, tropical look to the surroundings. But, what do I know?

So, I Googled the meme. What I found was an article on Snopes.com, the web site dedicated to fact-checking various dubious political claims. (Conservatives love to trash Snopes as being, from their point of view, liberally biased. I don’t know, maybe it is, though that doesn’t make it wrong.)

Snopes had not fact-checked this particular meme, but a similar one featuring a photo of a different kind of border barrier. 

Now, this photo is instantly recognizable as fake, in the sense that the fence is stretching across a parched, desert landscape, nowhere near the verdant Eden of Guatemala.

The ironic thing about this meme is that the “gigantic WALL” allegedly built by Mexico on its southern border – a formidable wall that the US should get off its ass and start building – is actually a section of the border fence the US has already built along the Mexican border.

(A murky detail about this meme: it was supposedly posted on the Facebook page of a “group” called “Americans for Common Sense”, which appears to me to be decidedly liberal-leaning. Also, the meme is no longer to be found on that Facebook page. Was someone punked?)

Anyway, to return to the first meme, it turns out someone on Facebook did some fact-checking of their own and identified the photo as originating from a Chinese manufacturer of wire-mesh fences.

Wire-mesh fences for prisons. Heavily guarded prisons. Let’s be honest, how unassailable would a wire-mesh fence like that be on the lesser-observed stretches of the Guatemalan border? With a decent pair of bolt cutters, you’d be through that thing in a Tijuana minute.

So, according the meme, America should follow Mexico’s example and secure its border by, if nothing else, erecting a mickey-mouse wire-mesh fence. Made in China, no less.

Now, you may argue that the real point of the meme is that Mexico has stricter immigration polices than America does (I don’t know), and this fact is represented by a photo of a fence, some fence, any fence.

Or the creator of the meme may be trying to highlight that Mexico has taken the issue seriously enough to at least build some kind of physical barrier along its entire southern border, though sadly you can’t find a decent enough photo of the actual fence to illustrate that point. At least they have a fence.

I’m not even sure that’s true. According to Wikipedia, Mexico has ten formal border crossings with Guatemala and 370 informal ones. In order to better stem the flow of illegal migrants, it seems Mexico is currently upgrading some of the informal border crossings to formal ones. There is no mention of a fence. Nada. A map published in the Economist last December did show a “fence” on Mexico’s southern border, but as one being “planned”, not “begun”.

So, I suspect that the US southern border really isn’t really less protected than Mexico’s.

Nice try, though, with the meme. 

Well, no, actually it was a pathetic try, but that doesn't stop it from being passed around constantly on the net. Of course, it doesn't.

The real Mexican-Guatemalan border.

Photo: Fernando Reyes