Nogales Rain …
Occasionally my work takes me down to the cities along the border between the US and Mexico.
Nogales is composed of two cities set in a vast desert. A small town on the US side and a larger city with a similar name, (“Heroica Nogales”) just over the wall in the Mexican state of Sonora.
The desert that surrounds Nogales is sparse, dusty and dry — and a hundred degrees hot for six months of the year.
Two thirds of the rain that falls in Nogales comes in July and August when monsoons roll in from the Gulf of California 150 miles west. I was wandering around the Nogaleses one day in August 2009 when a monsoon rain came through. …
11 August 2009 …
Yesterday it rained in Nogales and what a glorious thing that was.
We could see it coming all day. At 9 a.m. a darkness appeared over the distant mountains that loom over this hilly desert. The darkness grew and took on a hue of midnight blue. Around noon, I thought I saw lightning in the darkness that had enveloped the highest peaks. Something grand was afoot.
Still, in Nogales — this dusty, lively, colorful border town, full of Casbah alleyways and poverty rivaling India’s — in Nogales, the bustle and micro-commerce of taxis, street-side food vendors, trinket-sellers and beggars rambled on. On every hot, sun-baked day a living must be scraped together. Food and shelter must be obtained. Mouths must be fed. Respect must be shown between neighbors and friends and sons and mothers. And smiles, baring genuine and imperfect teeth, must crinkle out of sun-ravaged faces.
All of this … struggle … for survival takes place on la frontera of Mexico’s northern desert, two hundred (or so) miles from the Gulf of California, and on the border of the USA.
Nogales is a magnet for people from all over Mexico, according to the taxi driver who drove me through the town. He drove me past a 50 feet tall bronze statue of a thin, muscular, shirtless young man driving a sword through the throat of a downed and flailing eagle — to a bank near the fortress-like US consulate where I paid, in pesos, the equivalent of 470 US dollars to secure my Korean clients an appointment to apply for a visa to do business in the US, the next day. My clients remained comfortably ensconced in our Holiday Inn Express on the US side, with air conditioning and a pool, three miles from the chaos of la frontera, yet no less in the desert.
But this is about the rain. And oh how beautiful and drenching and cooling and cleaning that rain was when it finally crashed into Nogales at 16 minutes after 3 p.m. on 10 August, 2009. We all felt it coming in the anticipatory minutes just before it arrived. The hucksters in the streets felt it. My taxi driver friend felt it. The browned men who dug, and built, and smoothed, freshly-poured concrete for a fourth of the wage that they might command just a few miles north, smelled it coming, and waited for it with relaxed expressions. The policeman, weaving through the madness of the traffic with his sirens blaring felt it coming. The small distinguished man who insisted that I go in front of him at the bank caught the spirit of the rain’s impending arrival. It would be our reward. All of ours. Water from heaven to clean away the sin and misery — at least for the rest of the afternoon. Maybe even until tomorrow.
At first it was big drops that fell like Christmas ornaments and caused dust explosions on the dry ground. In minutes it was a downpour. A gushing torrent from the sky that darkened the town and dropped the temperature 20 degrees and sent ankle-deep rivers of rain rushing through the streets. The first drops materialized just as I was leaving the bank with my precious $470.00 papeles, which were protected only by my old worn leather backpack.
The deepest rain arrived fifteen minutes later as I stepped away from my taxi, a block from the border. The border’s normally unsympathetic crowd of pimps and hustlers now communicated the innocence of schoolboys caught in an open fire hydrant. Strangers shared a moment of awe.
The metal roof of the US Customs building rattled under the rain’s assault and people bottlenecked underneath after clearing customs.
I couldn’t wait to be in the rain though. I covered my backpack in my arms and walked the ten blocks to my car, feeling loved by the universe, all the while my tennis shoes filling with water.
When I reached my car I pulled my iphone out of my backpack. I’d brushed the phone while getting through the rain, and an app named “Beatitudes” (which my church-going girlfriend got me to download a few weeks earlier) was in the iphone’s screen.
The screen on my phone read: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
That might be nice.
