A truck is coming

Wool socks do not keep your feet dry when the water is pooled in your shoes. Jeans do not keep you warm when the thin fabric is soaked through after five hours of monsoon rainstorms. A jacket (if you have one) only keeps the cold at bay for so long if it is not terribly windy, the rips in synthetic fiber are not leaking, you are not sweating from walking then cooling your body to the point of numbness when you stand shivering under a tree. 

My hair is plastered down my sunscorched face, my white pruney hands shoved into whatever pockets they will fit into as the darkness descends on the valley. There are no city lights on the horizon, the stars and moon obscured by thunderclouds, a rocky path lined with thorny mesquites and skin-ripping cactus leading my way through the desert. I am starting to panic as my group asks me how I am in that concerned-but-trying-not-to-freak-out-the-victim voice, telling me my lips are deep blue, saying the truck will come soon to pick us up out of this relative wilderness. I shiver and watch the last wisps of orange clouds fade to black. I am not scared for myself. Yet. Because I know that I will not be spending the night cold and shaking on the desert floor.

There is a truck coming! I have been hiking migrant trails all day, all week, half the month. We have left food, water, socks under trees and next to boulders on the trail. I am wet, exhausted, slightly dehydrated, hungry. I am worried about the blisters on my feet opening up in the damp muck inside my hiking boots. But the truck will come over the next hill and power through the flooded washes, crush rocks and scorpions under burly tires, shine lights into juniper bushes and past the cow trough where we stand huddled and ready to make ourselves known. We will pile in the car, scream up and slide down muddy hills and onto a highway. We will pass through two checkpoints where we will state our citizenship to men in drab green uniforms, dogs howling and jumping at their feet. We will not smile but we will pass through un-harrassed. The heat will warm our stripped bodies and we will eat a hot meal when we get back to camp twelve hours after beginning our hike that day. We will sleep in tents and dream of milkshakes. We will be safe. 

Eventually we will leave the desert and the thousands of people walking, running, hiding, hunted will continue their journeys past the emptied (or slashed) water bottles and torn backpacks that the thousands before them have left. We will not know their fate.We will not know if they (wet hungry exhausted) stepped up into a truck leading them to a friend or family member, a sympathetic hand and heart, a safehouse, or in handcuffs headed back south or into humiliating detention. 

We can only huddle in our truck, dry off, get some sleep, and continue to do the work in the desert that we came to do: Food, water, socks. Repeat. 

(and dream of the day when the repetition, the trucks, the mission is obsolete)