“Are you going to put it on our side of the river? Are you going to give Mexico our river?” asked one woman.
“They’re not going to let you build it on the Mexican side, no matter what he says,” said another woman, referring to the new President’s claim that Mexico would build and pay for the wall.
“So,” said the first woman, waving her binoculars in the air, “you’re going to build it in the middle of the river? A wall, in the middle of a river? And what about the lake? A wall in the middle of a giant lake?”
I didn’t have a response for her. Absorbing complaints is sometimes the role of a federal employee, especially when you work in a place of contention, in this case Amistad National Recreation Area, a dam and reservoir (known by locals as “the lake”) on the U.S./Mexico border.
It was the winter of 2016 and 2017, when a new President of the United States was preparing for his inauguration, and I–a national park ranger–was bombarded with questions about how his policies would impact our park’s section of the border.
Donald Trump had campaigned on building a border wall. There were already sections of high fencing by the border crossings in the nearby town of Del Rio, Texas, and there were similar fences in other parts of Texas, in Brownsville or El Paso.
In our park and in other places where the border has a natural, physical boundary–like our wide river or lake with high canyon walls on either side–and where people don’t cross over because there is nothing but desert for miles, there was confusion about building a wall.
Hiking with local birders after the election, I listened as they demanded to know where we (in this case and cases like it I as a park ranger was often viewed as a representative of the entire federal government) were going to build a wall.
I told them I didn’t know and kept silent about any thoughts I might have on the matter. That is also the role of a federal employee.
I may not have told visitors, but my thoughts at the time were of Big Bend National Park. The park is a four-hour drive west of where I lived in Del Rio, a long, lonely drive. I saw more orbs of migrating tumbleweed on that drive than human beings.
Big Bend is exactly as named: a place where the Rio Grande River bends and twists, drawing calligraphy on the landscape. The river is also an international border here, both splitting the two countries apart and binding them together.
The park is large and mountainous; the views reminded me of my time in Glacier National Park in Montana, except with a lot more cactus. It is not uncommon in winter to wake with snow on your tent in Chisos Basin, the park’s mountain campground.
I saw more vibrantly colored birds in the riverside Cottonwood Campground than I did in almost my entire two winters in Del Rio. I camped there under the nest of a vermillion flycatcher, a bird about the size and color of a large, red strawberry.
I had a friend who worked at Big Bend, and one evening she took me to a hot spring. A seam of hot water runs out of the ground and into the river, and long-ago settlers built a low stone partition to retain the warm water, forming a shallow pool at the river’s edge.
The spring is searing hot, and the nights can be as well, even in winter. The strategy was to jump over the wall and into the chilly Rio Grande whenever you needed to cool off, then hoist yourself up and back over the rocks when you needed to get warm again. Back and forth, hot and cold, spring and river.
The fact that the river at this spot was low and slow enough for me to swim across did not escape my notice. I could swim to Mexico, I thought. And then what? There was little on the other side except a few stalls for tourists and the homes of the folks who managed them. There was nothing for hundreds of miles on either side of the river but this park and the few of us in and around it. The harshness of the desert landscape kept out all trespassers.
When I thought of the absurdity of building a wall through the desert, I thought of that night in the hot spring. Did they intend to build a wall around the hot spring, I wondered? Through it? I thought of the man I had seen riding his horse across the river to retrieve some trinkets he had left for sale, then riding back to the Mexican side. Would they wall him off too?
In this place, so far from towns or cities, the few people on both sides of the river interacted with and depended on one another. There was not a problem here with immigration, but bringing in a massive construction force to carve the place up, to obstruct the views of Santa Elena Canyon, to destroy the calm of the nights by the river, to keep the people and anything else here from living a peaceful life–those actions to me seemed like a problem.
In the years after the 2016 election, the money and will for the wall project waned. I believe it was also explained to some of the higher ups in the President’s administration that it made no sense to build a wall in places where geographic barriers already hindered immigration.
Many of my fears and the fears of locals about wall construction did not come to pass, at least they haven’t yet. I guess we are about to find out now that Trump is president again.
What did happen along the border under his previous reign was horrific enough from a humanitarian standpoint—migrant children stuffed in cages, torn from their parents, abused, traumatized.
I read these stories after I left Texas and was at another park. Every child I pictured had the same fifth-grade girl’s frightened face, a girl who had once told me of her concern for butterflies.
I had met her and her classmates during a fieldtrip at Amistad.
We stood on a hiking trail lined with desert plants, like cacti, shrubs sprouting tiny, velvet leaves, and the armed and dangerous lechugiulla, a plant I affectionately thought of as “Murder-Agave.”
A lone monarch butterfly floated overhead, drifting toward the Mexican border.
We discussed how monarchs migrate south to Mexico for the winter, and this child with brown skin and a Mexican accent approached me.
“Ranger Stephanie, I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“The butterflies,” she said. “I don’t understand how they cross the border.”
“They fly,” I told her.
“But don’t the police stop them?”
I stood for a moment on the trail, too shocked to speak. I had a sudden mental image of nets and cages crammed with struggling and broken-winged monarchs or of butterflies exploding into yellow dust as they slammed into a wall of metal that shot miles high into the sky.
“No,” I told her. “The monarchs are too precious to harm.”
Even the Trump administration knew not to mess with the timeless natural things that all Americans, regardless of their political party, seem to love, like the monarch migration. Like national parks.
But I’m not sure now that this is true. I’m not sure that I didn’t lie to that child.
Now that we are settling in for another round of President Trump, the same people who advocated for walls and family separation policies are being reinstalled in positions of power. All those threats return with them.
And human beings–park rangers and immigrants and frightened children–are not the only ones who will bear the brunt of the Project 2025 movement and all that is about to be enacted into law.
The parks, the peaceful, protected places of our nation, are about to be under threat in ways that they haven’t been for a very long time.
Project 2025–the written agenda of the people who are now in charge–states that they intend for the borders to be closed and for national parks and other public lands to be mined and stripped of resources, sold off to private companies, or given to already strapped-for-cash state parks departments. And they intend to eliminate many park employees (“Personnel Changes” is what they call it).
What happens to that child’s butterflies then? What happens to the calm river or the prickly desert or the silent mountain carved for millennia by ice? What happens to the quiet places where we seek serenity and where birds and butterflies and lechugiulla live out their lives?
Precious things require protection. We may take for granted that national parks will always be around, but that is not the case, not when the people in charge of our nation don’t want them to be. And not when people who care for them don’t fight for them.
Now is the time. Now is the time to fight for national parks and for the rangers that protect them.
The people who are taking over the US government are saying that they are going to dismantle parks. But I think they underestimate the power of such places and the power of the people who love and support them. I think they underestimate just how many people love national parks–people across the political spectrum.
I think they misjudge the spirit of our nation, which navigates, like a bending river in search of the ocean, always toward the protection of our most treasured, most precious things. National parks are one of those things.
They will come for our parks. They may try to build walls; they may try do much more.
I’m no longer a national park ranger. I no longer have to keep my thoughts to myself. And these days I think: “Let. Them. Try.”
Do you have a story of working for or visiting parks from the first Trump administration? Do you have a fear or hope for national parks or park rangers? Share in the comments below.