The Migration of the Cranes
The gray flocks of birds are undocumented border crossers, in a blissful state of ignorance.
I heard the cranes a few days ago at daybreak, less than a hundred feet above my house. When their trills stirred me out of my sleep, they sounded as close as if they were in my backyard.
The sound they make is like a pearl necklace being dropped on a counter or table, or like the pretty interrogation kittens or cats make when they want something out of you—prrr-rt—but without the rise in tone.
In February a few hundred Sandhill cranes made a temporary home about a half-mile away from me in a chile field near the end of my street. They rise in a big cloud late in the morning and wheel collectively in the sky, thinking about where they will go. Then platoon after platoon of them break apart as if by a central command, and head to fields to the northeast. It's as if they were all part of one brain.
This display is a much smaller event than the huge gathering at the Bosque del Apache in November, where thousands of cranes congregate, but it's as if these cranes here are holding their own fiestecita in my neighborhood. They create excitement with the striations of flutey sounds they make and the way they look like confetti in the air.
Sandhill cranes are light-chameleons. They're basically a pewter gray color, but when turning in certain directions they are a soft seashell pink. When facing the light, they're a white blizzard. When they shift collectively toward another direction, they look just as if they're passing through a shadow (as if there could be shadows in midair on a cloudless morning).
They have a knack for hiding in a wide-open sky. I'll hear them from inside my trailer and then go out and peer all over the sky and not be able to find them. Sometimes they really can't be seen because they're on the ground or so far away, and all you hear is the ruffled curtain of music they create.
I first heard and saw them a month or so after I moved to Deming, before anybody had told me about Sandhill cranes. They were so exotic to me that I wondered if they had migrated from Japan. They were uncannily like the origami cranes I made when I was little, with their neat triangular wings and outstretched necks. Or I thought just maybe, with any luck, they were snow geese.
At first I saw just a few at a time, but then I started seeing the long lines they formed as they returned south right at sunset. Necklace after necklace of them, often with 50 or a hundred cranes each, made their way south each night.
The most cranes I've ever seen close-up was just north of the entronque (crossroads) a half-hour south of Palomas, in Mexico. Great crowds of cranes were doing some low-level flying back and forth, and you could hear their wings beating like the rustling of the skirts of 19th-century gray silk dresses. Several people got out of their cars to look at them.
Last summer when driving back from Chepas, a little hamlet west of Palomas, I saw a few winging their way south across the border at sunset. I couldn't help but think how easy it was for them to cross. I'd be willing to bet that more than one Mexican border crosser has wished he had wings like theirs.
The cranes are basically oblivious of borders, and coast above all the human tensions below. They don't feel the wrangling of opinions in Deming over the presence of the National Guard. They aren't aware of the differences between the two countries. (The border may as well be termed the "US-Mexico cliff," because of the heart-wrenching difference in income levels.) They fly where the migra can't reach them and the viboras don't bite.
Cranes spend so much of their time hundreds of feet up, they probably can't even distinguish humans from cows or horses in any practical way—the way I can tell sparrows and cactus wrens apart, but it doesn't make any difference in my life.
How sweet to be cranes. They don’t feel the tragedy of the border crossers when they are found dead or half-dead or with scrambled brains from sunstroke. They’re above the desperately evil violence of the narcotraficantes, and don’t know about the employers on this side of the border who exploit Mexicans at work or the Ku Klux Klanners with video games where they shoot pregnant women border crossers.
I'm not someone who imagines that opening the border to all would solve the problems there. I have said as much to my friend Manuel in Palomas, who agreed with me that if that happened, there would be a line of cars down to Durango the very next day. His wife added, "They'd be down to Chiapas!" (the southernmost state of Mexico). I think you could also say "to Punto Arenas, Chile" or "Beijing, China."
It seems obvious to me, for the sake of common justice, that there needs to be some kind of broad-based program like the 1942-1964 bracero program where Mexicans and other foreigners can get papers to come and work legally. With about six million of them in jobs in the US, we already have a well-established addiction to their cheap, non-organized labor that's not going to go away overnight, or in a decade. We don't have the manpower to get rid of them.
Workers have some basic rights, and one of them ought to be that they should be able to get to work without dying from exposure to the elements. Another is that they should be able to work and travel without fear of being whisked away from their jobs, or sometimes their families, by the authorities.
But cranes don't fuss about issues like that. They are themselves undocumented border crossers with the incomparable advantage of being in nearly frictionless atmosphere, besides being in a blissful state of ignorance about the existence of any border. They're made for migration, not like us humans with two leaden feet tied to the earth by gravity.
I frankly yearn be like them sometimes, skimming over the top of border troubles.
You can't help wishing that some day all our differences and inequities would resolve themselves into nothingness the way they already appear to the cranes in their primeval ignorance.
What freedom, what peace.
Borderlines columnist Marjorie Lilly lives in Deming.