The current issue of Impact Magazine, a sports and fitness bimonthly published in Alberta, features a story about my running of the Sahara Marathon – 10km of it, anyway – while visiting the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria in 2008. The story, titled “Sand Blast,” is a tiny excerpt from the first chapter of my upcoming walls book. It also represents the first and likely the last time any magazine will publish a story about me doing something athletic.

(The issue also includes a workout section featuring a personal trainer who is an old high school mate of mine, making the magazine the first time two members of St. Francis’ Class of ’91 appeared in the same publication since the yearbook.)

You can read “Sand Blast” here.

In today’s Haaretz, journalist Jonathan Pollak writes a compelling story of the death of one such stone-thrower, Mustafa Tamimi. Pollak writes:

Mustafa died because he threw stones; he died because he dared to speak a truth, with his hands, in a place where the truth is forbidden. Any discussion of the manner of the shooting, its legality and the orders on opening fire, infers that the landlord is forbidden to expel the trespasser. Indeed, the trespasser is allowed to shoot the landlord.

Pollak’s story is gorgeous and sad. Read it here.

From The New Yorker “Culture Desk“:

“Too often in politics, very complex subjects are being turned into sound bites, so it’s easy to take them apart,” says Christoph Niemann, this week’s cover artist. In “Promised Land,” he says, “I draw a parallel between current immigrants and early settlers—the hope is that it will provide context, to help keep things in perspective. Cartoonists, not politicians, should be the ones who condense political discussions into simple images.”

Reading this I can’t help but wonder: What does the Wall represent if not a complicated political discussion condensed into a simple image? What can be simpler, after all, than a wall. What is easier to grasp than Us and Them? Here and There? The Walls, on the U.S.-Mexico border and elsewhere, discard nuance and eliminate the need for discussion altogether.

And before I forget, Happy Thanksgiving America!

The current issue of Geist features my essay about the l’Acadie fence that stands between Montreal’s Parc-Extension neighborhood and the Town of Mount Royal. TMR erected the fence in 1960 to protect the Town’s children from traffic on  the newly extended Boulevard l’Acadie. But since the fence stood between wealthy TMR and the working class immigrant neighborhood of Park X, the fence quickly became a hated and enduring symbol of class division. More than half a century later, the fence still raises the ire of Montrealers, especially those on the ‘wrong side’ of the fence.

Anger over the barrier seethed hottest in Parc-Extension, where residents believed the fence had been built to keep them out. “A lot of people were incensed,” Nick Semeniuk told me in his home on the east side of boulevard de l’Acadie. The house, which used to belong to his mother, faces directly across l’Acadie, and Nick was living there when the fence first went up. “I was quite mad, too. They wanted to keep out the riff-raff.” For Nick, the fence expressed in galvanized mesh a rivalry that always smoldered between the Parc-X boys and the “Townies” on the other side. Not outright warfare—Montreal is no Belfast—but the rather more benign enmity of teenagers from opposite sides of an economic line. Neighbourhood toughs from TMR hung out at the corner store near Nick’s mother’s house and picked fights with the local boys, and Parc-X kids felt unwelcome in TMR. “You couldn’t go to their parks. They would chase you out and say ‘You’re from Parc-X and you don’t belong here,’” Nick said. “So we beat them up.”

Thanks to Geist for once again making my photos look better than they actually are. The magazine can be found on newsstands around Canada.

You can read the story here.

About a year ago I traveled to Arizona to write about the U.S.-Mexico border wall. There I met Glenn Weyant, a musician who ‘plays’ the border wall and makes strange and fantastic recordings of what the border sounds like. I played a ‘duet’ with Glenn in Nogales, Arizona and wrote about it here. I also spoke about Glenn’s work during my TEDxCalgary talk.

A few months after I left Arizona, the U.S. replaced the old border wall in Nogales, built of rusty helicopter landing mats recycled from the first Gulf War – seen above as Glenn plays it with a cello bow – with a more modern construction of bollard pipes filled with concrete slurry that looks something like this:

The new wall allows Border Patrol officers to see through the barrier and spot anyone approaching it. The new construction also inspired drug-traffickers to change their tactics and produce bundles of narcotics just small enough to be pushed through the pipes. The old wall failed. The new wall fails.

After my time with Glenn, I was less interested in how the new wall was working than how it sounded. I contacted Glenn and this is what he told me:

My first take was dull and dead compared to the old one which, as you know, was sheets of metal rather than slurry filled pipes. It’s an industrially produced medieval monster. However, I’m getting to know it and I’ve begun discovering “how” to play, amplify and transform it. I’ve also been learning where to place the custom mics i’ve built and where they pick up sound the best. Yesterday the wind there was real crazy and the wall was literally humming from the vibrations. That was a nice surprise. So it’s like any new instrument. There is a bit of learning curve, and it will require lots of practice and some seasoning over time, but I’d say it is already showing great promise as a multi-million dollar instrument rather than a symbol of fear and loathing.

Here is a fantastic article by Toronto Star writer Alfred Holden. Inspired by recent news that the United States is mulling the idea of erecting fencing along its border with Canada, Holden takes on the folly of walls in general.

Here is my favourite bit:

But the bigger picture — the tide of history — is another matter. The globe is littered with walls whose names now evoke ridicule and failure. Again and again, the fullness of time has revealed that larger, insurmountable forces were behind the migration or conflict that the walls were supposed to control, and couldn’t. There has also been the reality, through the ages, that physical barriers are more visual cues and mental concepts than effective stoppers. All along, notwithstanding the huge cost and formidable infrastructure, there have been bribable sentries, ladders, tunnels, and freeze-thaw cycles that turn stone to dust.

The full story can be found here.

Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa described the U.S.-Mexico border as the place “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” And the hemorrhaging was most severe in Arizona. America’s border walls stand on about a third of its boundary with Mexico. California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas have all erected barriers along parts of the international line, but nowhere is the border as fortified as in Arizona. More than half of America’s border barriers stand along Arizona’s desert boundary with Sonora, Mexico where nearly 500 kilometres of walls, fences and vehicle barriers bristle among the cacti and thorny mesquite. No place seemed as important to visit as Arizona, and no one in Arizona seemed as important to meet as Bill Odle. “A lot of people will tell you they live on the border,” Bill told me on the phone, “but I actually do.”

I waited for Bill in in the parking lot of an abandoned and shuttered steakhouse called, delusionally, The Brite Spot. It was late autumn, a sort of border season that draws an arid line between Arizona’s summer monsoons and winter’s gentle rains. Bill’s Dodge truck crunched off Highway 92 and into the gravel lot. National Rifle Association stickers were pasted on the back window and a red, white and blue bumper sticker declared ‘Freedom isn’t Free.’ The truck looked ready and able to devour my rental Chevrolet Aveo. Bill, in tinted glasses and a black cowboy hat, waved me towards the passenger side door. He said hello when I climbed into the cab; both his beard and voice reminded me of a lion. We rumbled back to the highway while I tried not to stare at the pistol strapped to the seat between us. As a Canadian, I possess a simultaneous fascination and repulsion with the American right to bear arms.

Bill veered the truck onto a dirt road heading south and we drove until we reached the border, here marked by a fourteen-foot high fence built with steel posts and panels of tight metal mesh. Bill parked the truck in the striped shadows the posts threw over the dirt road and turned off the engine. I would soon learn that Bill is hardly partial to long silences, but he sat quiet for a moment as we both stared up at the barrier. Then Bill sighed and said “Historically, defensive things like this – the Great Wall, the Maginot Line, the Berlin Wall – none of them worked. And they were all put up by losers.”

The Hidalgo-Guadelupe Treaty gave birth to the U.S.-Mexico border in February 1848. The two countries signed the treaty to end the Mexican-American War and drew a 3200 kilometre line between them. The border begins at the Pacific where it slices eastward across the beach between San Diego and Tijuana. The line severs California from Baja California, bifurcates the Sonoran Desert through Arizona and edges halfway across New Mexico. At El Paso, Texas, the border merges with the middle of the Rio Grande. The river becomes the border for the final 2000 kilometre stretch across the continent until it empties into the Gulf of Mexico.

For most of the border’s lifetime, only strands of barbed wire and the occasional marking stone defined Here from There. More substantial walls grew out of some stretches of the border during the 1990s, but not in the southern ranchlands of Arizona, and certainly not before Bill and his wife Ellen, fleeing the noise of San Diego, bought a fifty-acre plot here on the international line a decade ago. They constructed a home out of straw-bales, powered it with wind and sun, and faced the front window south so they could stare out over the rolling ranchlands of Sonora, Mexico. Their morning sun rises over the peaks of the Sierra San Jose and sets behind the Huachuca Mountains to the west. “We moved down here to get away from the city,” Bill told me, “and I liked the idea of living on la frontera.”

In 2006, President George W. Bush signed the Secure Fence Act into law. Lawmakers developed the Act in response to the vulnerability Americans felt in the wake of the September 11^th attacks. Even though none of the hijackers infiltrated the United States over a land border, the government’s preoccupation with border security boomed. The Secure Fence Act was designed to halt illegal migration, drug smuggling, and potential terrorist penetration across its frontiers. The Act charged the newly-formed Department of Homeland Security with maintaining “operational control” of America’s borders. The DHS planned to accomplish this through increased surveillance of the Mexican and Canadian border, and  the construction of over 1000 kilometres of physical barriers along the southern line. Bill and Ellen’s small share of the borderland was included in what the Act described as a “priority area.”

Bulldozers and dumptrucks rumbled onto Bill’s property in the fall of 2007 and tore into the ground of their desert idyll. The builders took five months to erect their fourteen-foot barrier. The wall, alien to the southwestern ideals of the open range, strains Bill and Ellen’s Mexican view through tight wire mesh. The wall enraged Bill, and the ex-marine and Vietnam veteran has become a much-quoted voice against the wall. “Hell, I came out here to get away from people,” he said. “Now I end up in books.”

In his truck, Bill told me “This fence thing, it doesn’t stop people. Flat out. That’s a given.” He told me about the countless migrants he has seen shimmy up one side of the fence and drop down into America. Some migrants use crude handmade ladders and ropes to get over, and Bill collects them as souvenirs like the Spanish border guards in Ceuta and Melilla. The more sophisticated human-trafficking rings on the Mexican side have purpose-built trucks with retractable metal ladders. Most migrants, though, don’t bother with such equipment. Any able-bodied person can scale the wall along Bill’s property without a ladder. The metal panels are easy to climb. Bill has watched women come over, even pregnant women, and children as young as four. He told me, too, that a Sierra Club volunteer from Tucson can scramble over the wall and back again in a minute and forty-eight seconds. “By the way, I am the official world-record keeper,” he said.

Supporters of the wall, especially those who live far from the border, don’t understand the impotence of the barriers. Raw steel bars look impressive on television newscasts but are easily defeated.“You got some lard-ass in Debuke, Iowa or some damn place,” Bill said. “And he’s got his big, fat, American ass sitting on an overstuffed couch, looking at a wide-screen TV, eating super-saturated fats, and he sees a picture of this fence and thinks, ‘That’ll stop ‘em.’ Well, it’ll stop him, but not some kid coming up from 500 miles south who is 20 years-old and wants to work. That kid is over.”

The video of my talk is now online. Thanks to the people at TEDxCalgary for producing and posting this video, and for honouring me with the invitation to speak at their event.

Here is an article from the Financial Times on travel writing. The piece, titled “The places in between,” is a little cranky – Paul Theroux penned it, after all – but interesting nonetheless. I especially love the line I quoted above, and the following bit:

So where are we now? Of course, many would-be travel writers are plodding in the footsteps of those who have gone before and repeating or correcting the impressions. An irritating tendency of those books, and of travel pieces in general, is the use of the present tense: “I am on a bus in Bhutan and the woman next to me is smoking a cigar … ” There is a new frivolity in travel books, there is mock-drama, there is obvious embroidering, there is the frivolous quest as a theme. Such books do not interest me at all.

I have a love for reading about a really difficult trip, even better an ordeal. Such books, written with skill and appropriate detail, will always find a public, because they combine travel with problem solving and endurance, and that I suppose is the human condition. These people are suffering for us.

You can find the story here.