Spirit Run

by Noe Alvarez

  The music stops and the screen door slams. Dallas walks out barefoot onto his porch in dark aviator glasses, a stained white shirt and shorts, and untangles a Texas flag from the front of his house. No wind to ruffle it. He scratches his belly under his shirt, strokes his handlebar mustache, and walks into the threshold of sunlight onto his front lawn with beer in hand. His long salt-and-pepper hair tumbles over his shoulders. He picks up a garden hose and squeezes flaccid city water from it over a flower bed of marijuana plants below the steps.

  Randy ducks out from under the small doorframe of his house and walks toward Dallas, slapping a pack of cigarettes. Barking wiener dogs escort him at the ankles. Guard dogs in the troubled neighborhood. Randy shouts, they quiet.

  Dallas calls out to me when I step outside. “Hey, ninja man!” and walks up to the edge of his fence, reaching into his back pocket. “Come over here, amigo,” he says playfully in butchered Spanish.

  I walk across the street while Dallas counts dollar bills from his wallet. Tito steps out.

  Dallas sets his beer and wallet down on the grass and opens the gate. “Whatsup, you little cabron?” he asks. He puts his fists up, fighter position, play punching and kicking at me despite the pain in his hips. “Show me what you got, little man,” and he puts me into a soft headlock, under his wet armpit that smells of the hops factories in town. The perspiration of beer. His toenails are cracked and yellow. My cheeks feel the abrasive callouses of Dallas’s fingertips—the tips of a musician. “C’mon, is that all you got?”

  Smiling, I punch Dallas in the belly and free myself, also getting into a fighter position.

  “Here’s the money I owe you from last month,” he says, and hands me thirty dollars. “Can you mow my lawn today?”

  I nod. Before I can run to collect my father’s lawn mower, he stops me.

  “Everything okay in the casa?”

  I look down at my feet and force a tight smile.

  “If you ever need anything, come to me, okay?” Dallas lights a cigarette and takes a long drag and long moment to look at me. “Tell you what,” he bends down to my level. “Wanna make some good money?”

  I don’t answer.

  “This is between you and me. No one else. Okay?” He tells me the plan. One that would make me big money.

  The days are lonely without our mother and I find myself often sitting on the front steps with my brother, hoping our mother would turn up again. It’s around this time that Tito really withdraws into himself, into his things in his room. Building gadgets out of collected trash, inventions, solutions to problems that no child could ever fix. Wings made out of cardboard, devices with wires, swords, slings, and weapons of sorts.

  On the night that I will carry out Dallas’s plan, I wait for my father to go to bed, then remove my bedcovers, quickly dress, and tiptoe through the house to a living-room window to inspect the night. All is still. I exit into the cool air and make a run for it through the street, around the block, and down through the back alley, as Dallas instructed me. The alley is unlit, tagged with blue and red graffiti. When I finally reach the garage, I pry the stubborn door open, and hide inside, where the air smells of gasoline. Slivers of moonlight penetrate the structure. There’s no turning back now.

  I grab the heavy gas tank from where Dallas said it would be, and I clumsily pour it in and around the garage, until it’s empty. A faint glow of morning pink creeps over the horizon as I stand outside beside the garage with a lighter in my hand. I turn, look at my blue house across the street, and finally at myself.

  20

  Man in the Maze

  Ajo, Arizona. Roughly 3,000 miles. Tohono O’Odham Nation.

  The heat waves in Arizona are suffocating and it feels like we are running through curdled air. We run eastward through dry country with salt pouches around our necks, which we dip into now and then to help keep us hydrated. The bottoms of my soles burn over the hot roads, so I run over the earth for relief, kicking up dust with horses behind me—tribal cowboys, Felix and Si, from San Lucy Village. The sunburning days coat me with dirt and doubt, and I’m not sure that I can go on. My friends are losing steam. Cheeto suffers from back problems and Refugio continues to rely on his vitamins to keep him going.

  To beat this heat, we run in the early hours, from dusk to dawn. Some runners give up, others get injured, and the low water supply causes dehydration symptoms among several of us. But I am propelled forward. If my parents and other immigrants can endure treks into foreign lands, then I can endure a little pain. My struggle on this run is a small thing before the pain of my people.

  We sleep less and less, and run more and more, desperate to pick up the slack of injured runners. We now average four hours of restless sleep a night, falling behind on mileage goals every day. One runner gets lost in the desert and a search party is sent out for her—further stripping us of our confidence that we will persevere. Water is low, Trigger tells us, though he continues to secretly store food and water from us. I watch him do it on a regular basis—he stashes water in compartments he built with wood, and locks up the van. I tell some of the others but it’s not enough for anyone to confront Trigger about. He bullies me into running more, demanding that if I can’t handle the run then I should go home.

  Our destination: sacred Baboquivari Peak.

  My struggle to run is alleviated in the company of the two horses who must also endure the journey. We’re together in this. Like counting thunder, their hollow clip-clop over the road serves to measure man’s distance in life, drawing out invisible obstacles that have been corralling and preventing man from achieving his full potential. The horsemen notice my pain and counsel me on the proper way to run.

  “Man must learn to run like the horse, evenly and gracefully. Not too much weight on the toes or heels,” they tell me.

  I watch the grace with which their horses run, an empowering attitude toward life.

  “The horse has brought much healing to our communities,” they tell me. “It is because of them that we could hunt and trade over vast lands.”

  “But we do not own them,” they continue. “We partner with them. We are equal in our quests.”

  For miles, the vans move slowly forward over the scorched desert as the runners jump in and out of the doors, left ajar for efficiency. No air-conditioning. Several of us, including Refugio, Andrec, and me, are taking on too many miles without proper food, water, or rest. Still, Trigger pushes us. Tensions mount.

  “Get out and run, Noé,” Trigger insists one day, when the van is empty.

  “I’m taking this lap off,” I tell him, massaging my melon-size knees. Sixteen miles already under my belt today, but in Trigger’s eyes, we runners are not pushing ourselves hard enough.

  He hits the breaks and turns around. “Get out or I’ll get you out.”

  I grab my staff, sip the last of my water, and hop out. Dust clings to my sweat and my sunburnt shoulders hurt under the sun. I wrap my head in my shirt for protection and move forward as best as I can toward a van that quickly becomes a speck on the horizon.

  Suddenly, a bolt of pain, like lightning within my nerves, strikes my knees, and I fall to the ground. But I know that I cannot stop now, that my marker is ahead, and that I cannot appear too injured lest the run decides to eliminate me from the run. I’m too deep in this life now. I’d be nothing without it. I’m close now, I think, to Mexico, where the real adventure is. Mexico, where it all started for my parents. It’s there that I most want to run. There, where I most want to pray and where the stakes are much higher. With this in mind, I run and power through my pain.

  Running, I begin to learn the hard way, is a sacred motion—different from the assumptions I had of the act growing up, when the stories I knew were only of migrants running from immigration raids, and mass deportations. That, coupled with my own experiences, back then, of running from street gangs. The motion of running to me meant a defensive act, one that arose from the fear and desperation of a vulnerable people wh
o were running as a means of survival.

  Running on PDJ is helping me to see my life and family’s migratory experiences in a different light. To recognize its healing aspects, while also not overlooking the detrimental effects of it, like forced migration. It is a complex relationship.

  Running is rhythm connecting me to the wind, the water, the woods. It is about “belonging to the land”—a value deeply held among Native communities. It’s about performing the gesture that reminds us that there is always something bigger than us and to respect our environment. It calls on us to defend the land like we would defend our very own mother, and understand that we can never own it. I learn this in the act of digging my toes into the earth as I run barefoot through nature, attuning myself to vibrations bigger than myself. To run over the land is to run with attention.

  For longer than I can remember, I was ashamed of who I was. I was ashamed for having no real sense of place or home, and it has taken this run across North America to learn that home is everywhere in movement. It is in my many steps that I explore my emotional replies to the land, different from how I experienced them as a small boy in the apple orchards where people like my parents were exploited for their cheap labor. I left that land thinking I’d never return to it for the stigma of what it meant to be a family of migrants in Yakima. And unlike those helpless migrants who tumbled from trees and dropped everything they had to run to safety, I ran away, knowing that I would do so on my own terms and with love—not fear. I would travel wherever I wanted, on my own terms. Confronting the unfamiliar and integrating the beauty of life with my very being. I’d conquer my fear of the unknown outside of the hills of Yakima.

  The evening skies thunder and the heavy rains finally arrive. I strip down to my underwear and shower for the first time in days.

  21

  Running the Wrong Way

  I’ve been on the run for what seems like forever when I reach the border town of Nogales, Arizona, roughly 3,200 coastal miles from Prince George, British Columbia, Canada. There, I come face-to-face with what has defined me my entire life: the U.S.-Mexico border. There is the absolute edge of my world; the border that splits me in two, between who I am in the U.S. and the people my parents were in Mexico. I approach the terrifying border, the swaths of graffiti, Spanish music reverberating from a long line of cars, and I present my U.S. passport to the border agent.

  “What will you be doing in Mexico?” the officer asks me.

  “Running.” I have given up trying to explain why I am doing what I am doing. Running. Across North America. Grasping for freedom. With Native Americans. For peace and dignity. “To Central America,” I offer.

  The border agent raises his eyes at me. “What are you running from?”

  No one has asked me this question before. “From nothing,” I answer, still jogging in place, because those are the rules of the run: to keep running no matter what. No matter the pain, no matter the risk, or no matter how sorry one felt for oneself.

  The officer flips through my passport again with more care, more doubt, then asks with a twist of humor in his voice, “But aren’t you running the wrong way?”

  I stop jogging and think seriously about the Latino officer’s question. I hadn’t ever thought about what was the wrong or right way to run. And now, when I need all of my courage to continue, when running matters most because it will take me into my parents’ homeland, something swells up inside of me that causes me hesitation: Was I really running the wrong way this whole time, thousands of miles and nightmares later, in pursuit of my parents’ past and to better understand them and who I am? I look at my knees—swollen like grapefruits wrapped in bandages, and I think about all the shit I put them through since dropping out of college and abandoning my parents who labored in the orchards and warehouses. My decision to run away from family dropped me into a life of daily, all-weather running, on a journey that is charted from Alaska to Panama where I camp outdoors, in community shelters, reservations, casinos, and eat mostly on the go like a fugitive.

  I look deep into the dust-plowed horizon to the north from where I came, into the mirage of all that I had conquered in my life laboring outside in los files with blistered hands, and am now conquering anew on blistered feet. Like my parents, I am a runaway from a life I didn’t choose for myself. I searched desperately for meaning across North America, in the wildest of wild regions, in ceremony with tribal elders, some anarchist Natives, peyote, and predatory animals. I then look in the direction of the south, into the heart of the monster that is Mexico, and it fills me with terror. I tighten my shoelaces and look toward the land that my parents fled.

  The time to quit the United States has arrived.

  22

  The Devil’s Coffin

  Sonora, Mexico. The early days of August. It’s true that the land does not recognize national borders. My transition into Mexico feels familiar—nothing to distinguish it from the lands of Arizona, or even the desert of Yakima, besides the Spanish signage, archaic pueblitos, adobe structures, and undeveloped roads that sprawl from cathedrals, sacred centers of many Mexican towns. A lean man with long black hair, in seashell regalia and running shoes, receives us in Mexico, near the border. His name is Mazat.

  “Hello, brothers and sisters,” he speaks in Spanish. “It is an honor to receive and welcome you into our community.” I feel that the run has shifted dimension again, plunged us into a world south of the border where the rules will be different. Where the food, language, and harsh terrain will test us. As Mazat speaks, his voice carries the weight of something spiritual. It reminds me of the voices of elders. “We are a people who follow the warrior path,” he says. “Our names have never been erased by the weapon.” I know then that Peace and Dignity Journeys would represent for me the beginning of a new tradition—to remember our place on this earth, to break away, by the drumming of our feet, from the rhythm of old patterns.

  Before we break into relay-style formation, en route to Punta Chueca via Magdalena and Pótam communities, Pacquiao selects two new Mexican runners to join us, Mazat and his brother Greñas. From Nogales we proceed through the municipality of Hermosillo, into the coastal town of Punta Chueca, through a rugged landscape of volcanic rock called the Cajón del Diablo, “the Devil’s Coffin,” and farther through the towns of Guaymas, Pótam, then into Los Mochis.

  I take off on my first run in Mexico under the intense heat of the sun, along a highway lined with trash—yet this soil feels sacred. The day drags on and my knees are in agony. Sometimes I slow to a power walk, but I don’t stop. My parents’ history comes to me in the fragments of each step. It gives me the strength to push myself. Here my people will welcome me.

  But this feeling is struck down by a rock thrown at me by a figure in a passing truck. It knocks the air out of me and I crash down. A man in the passenger seat flips me the finger and drives away to where he will do the same to other runners, leaving us welted and bruised.

  We slip through one small town after another, as strangers through border communities scarred with violence: immigrant deaths in the desert, cartels, and corruption.

  Meanwhile, up ahead in the volcanic fields of El Tecolote Cinder Cone, Zyanya Lonewolf has been carrying the Father Staff over a road that seems to boil under our feet. This world looks like a coral reef. The rocks and boulders are large enough to dart behind, provide us cover during bathroom breaks, and we need them, with our upset stomachs, infections, and dehydration.

  On this day, Zyanya Lonewolf, charged with leading the run for the day, gets lost. A fork in the road takes her down a barren dirt path and she pushes forward for miles. Far off in the distance she notices a group of laborers. She presses on, continues through a field of more and more rock, when from the bushes, a man jumps off his bicycle and approaches her, shouting something in Spanish at her. A language she does not understand. He grabs her arm and tries pulling her toward the bushes. Instinctively, Zyanya Lonewolf hits him in the face with the staff and runs as fast as sh
e can in the opposite direction, back toward the highway from where she veered.

  Some time later, Pacquiao’s car finds Zyanya Lonewolf. Pacquiao, seeing the lost runner holding the Eagle Staff, loses his shit. The Father Staff must always remain ahead of all the other staffs. Pacquiao is a two-hundred-pound man, a lifelong athlete who has been shaped by the codes and constraints of boxing, hard living, and community organizing for farm laborers in Arizona and California. Labor movements defined him. This was the man who threw a rage at discovering that a runner, the run, the greater vision of PDJ, had been assaulted. Pacquiao asks Zyanya Lonewolf to point him in the right direction, and he and Andrec chase after the guy on the bicycle. Zyanya Lonewolf runs the rest of the way alone.

  The day grows late. Hours pass. Andrec and Pacquiao go farther down the road questioning anyone they see about a guy on a bike, while I and the other runners converge for Circle only to compare the welts on our backs from the rocks thrown at us.

  Already Mexico is testing us.

  23

  El Chapito

  We finally reach the Pacific Ocean, where the breeze gives us some relief, and the runners rest. There, we are greeted by an elderly Indigenous man from the Fisherman People of the Seri Nation, named Chapito, a shaman with deep knowledge of medicinal plants and of the old ways.

  Chapito accompanies us on a motorized raft to Shark Island, where he was born. The raft bucks across the ocean while Chapito stands well-balanced on the bow. He rides it all the way while holding the Father Staff and singing. For a few moments, I forget my aching, swollen knees. This man, full of life, knows these waters well. Through tobacco smoke he sings the “Andaleteo” song, a song that describes the ocean’s battle between happiness and sadness. Later, through an interpreter (Chapito doesn’t speak Spanish), Chapito tells me that the road to happiness is also the road to sadness. “To be happy,” he says, “one must be sad.”