The Coyote's Bicycle by Kimball Taylor Page B

tour. They viewed local neighborhoods, artworks by renowned artists, and sites of infamous incidents. Fernandez told stories about her encounters with the crossers and the things they left behind. Once, on the Mexican side, she came upon a migrant camp that looked recently vacated. Searching for images to take, she spotted a bag with a young woman’s things tumbling out: lipstick, eyeliner, candies. Inside, she found a girlish diary, and turning to the last page, Fernandez read the line: “As soon as I get to America, I’m going to start losing weight.” On the American side, Fernandez encountered a man in his forties with his young son at his side. They’d come because the man’s father, a Mexican citizen now in his eighties, had traveled by bus for two days to stand alone on Tijuana soil and attempt a reunification through the fence. It was the father and son’s first meeting in thirty years. The grandson was introduced.
    â€œDo you see what you did for me?” the younger man said to his father. “You taught me to work hard, and look, here is my son—named after you. He goes to school and he speaks English, too.”
    For her German guests, Fernandez also explained her idea of the wall as a living thing, adding, finally, “But like any living, breathing animal, I want the wall to die as well.”
    The Germans considered this idea. One of them said, “You know, we didn’t think the Berlin Wall would ever come down until it came down all at once. The death of a boundary is possible.”
    â€œI hope it happens here, too. In my career,” she said.
    It struck me that Fernandez could have done anything with her time. She was a woman of class and means, and the border was neither a pleasant or safe place to be. Not only was Fernandez’s fascination with the wall odd, so was her relationship with it. She had dedicated her life to noting and archiving its various nuances. There was a heat and a passion to her work. And yet she wanted the wall to cease to exist as well. It was if she’d been inordinately enthralled by the growth and mutation of a tumor, had devoted her life to chronicling it, but desperately hoped for a cure at the same time. What would she do if this thing were gone? Twelve years of stalking a beast is time enough to fall for it.
    In the interim, Fernandez spent her days bent low, clicking the shutter on items like baseball caps in the dirt—likely lost in a sprint. Shoes were stuck in mud, or hung from the wall itself. Rope ladders were tossed aside. Handmade things that fit the bodies who wore them sat like empty shells. Her face to the camera, the lens to the wall, she always looked close.
    Maybe this is why the first few times she became aware of cyclists along trails in the distance, this chronicler of small detail didn’t stop to let the sight sink in. People on bikes, it’s an everyday occurrence. Maybe these riders were dressed like campesinos , Fernandez recalled, but . . . She did catch the curious sight of an adult pedaling feverishlydown a track on a child’s bike; the revolutions made by the grown-up knees and ankles on the tiny pedals and cranks came to her like an unexpected joke. But it wasn’t until Fernandez arrived at Border Field State Park—and found herself on the edge of a significant pile of bicycles accumulated in the dirt parking area—that one of the park’s staff ambled up to explain where they’d come from in the same measured, scientific way he might elucidate the sudden appearance of a whale carcass. Her latent memory of crossers on bikes came back to her then. This transnational cycling in plain view, so smooth and forgettable in its arrival, caused her to wonder if the activity was organized or spontaneous to the point of performance. Did its consistency signal something else, something bigger? Migrants, Maria Teresa Fernandez knew through experience, tended to do what