Spirit Run Read online

  This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s recollections of experiences over time. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

  Copyright © 2020 by Noé Álvarez

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-948226-46-2

  Jacket design by Nicole Caputo

  Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

  Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by

  Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019944451

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  To my Mia, mother and father, brother and sister,

  and all the working-class warriors hammering out

  a future for the rest of us

  Contents

  Outline of the Run

  Prologue

  WE

  1.Warehouse White Noise

  2.The “Palm Springs of Washington”

  3.Ganas in Carver Country

  4.Getting Out

  5.Walla Walla Walkabouts

  6.Cold Feet

  RUN

  7.The Arrival

  8.Tree Noodles

  9.“Indian Time”

  10.La Cruz de Campos

  11.Glacier Dip

  12.Washington Gray

  13.Goldendale

  14.An X-Man

  15.Apache Medicine

  16.Cougar Country

  17.City-Slicker Natives

  18.Tlaloc in L.A.

  19.Southern Fire

  20.Man in the Maze

  21.Running the Wrong Way

  22.The Devil’s Coffin

  23.El Chapito

  24.Deer Runners

  25.Chihuahua

  26.Touch of Treasure

  27.The Rebirth of Story

  28.Nayarit

  29.Mangoes

  30.Santo Coyote

  31.Hardware Store

  32.Weaving Words

  33.The Flying Men of Teotihuacán

  34.Descending Eagle

  35.Oaxaca

  36.Zapatistas: Rebel Country

  37.Acteal

  38.Guatemala

  FREE

  39.Old Orchard

  40.Today

  Acknowledgments

  Outline of the Run

  BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA: Prince George, Alkali Lake, Lillooet, Melvin Creek, Mount Currie, Whistler, Vancouver.

  WASHINGTON, UNITED STATES: La Conner, Coupeville, Port Angeles, Neah Bay, Rialto Beach, La Push, Quinault.

  OREGON: Portland, Eugene, Reedsport, Coos Bay, Battle Rock, Gold Beach.

  CALIFORNIA: Blue Creek, Klamath River, Weed, Mount Shasta, Redding, Covelo, Ya-Ka-Ama Forestville, Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland, Mission San José (Fremont), Watsonville, Santa Maria, Solvang, Santa Barbara, Montecito, Oxnard, Santa Paula, Piru, Pasadena, East Los Angeles, Anaheim, Chicano Park San Diego.

  ARIZONA: Yuma, Ajo, Tucson, Nogales.

  MEXICO: Magdalena de Kino, Hermosillo, Bahía Kino, Punta Chueca, Isla Tiburón, Pótam, Ciudad Obregón, San Miguel Zapotitlán, Los Mochis, Culiacán, Mazatlán, Chametla, Acaponeta, Huajicori, Tepic, Ixtlán del Río, Magdalena (Jalisco), Teuchitlán, Guadalajara, Tonalá, Chapala, Ajijic, Tuxcueca, Sahuayo, Jiquilpan, Morelia, Pátzcuaro, Teotihuacán, Amatlán de Quetzalcóatl, Cuernavaca, Taxco, Ixcateopan de Cuauhtémoc, Oaxaca, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Caracol Oventic, Acteal, Toniná, Cascadas de Agua Azul, Comitán.

  GUATEMALA: Huehuetenango, Zaculeu Ruins.

  Prologue

  2003. Among the pines of Bella Coola, in Canada’s British Columbia, Canadian authorities escort a seventeen-year-old mother, in handcuffs, to identify and unearth the site where she buried a baby son a few days earlier. The teenage mother’s name—Crow, of the Secwépemc Nation, whose full name translates to “Water Waves”—is reflected in her tears. The baby she buried was her firstborn son, pronounced dead at seven weeks old. For forty-nine days her baby lived with the power of a name, under the protection of Secwépemc tradition of caring for one’s own, blanketed with the dreams of a mother who sang to him until the very end, when he stopped eating. Fearing that the hospital would take him away, Crow wrapped him into his cradleboard and escaped with him into the forest.

  She remembers that night in the mountains as very cold. The rain pelleted her as she and two others encircled the boy in a wall of ceremony before digging up a spot in the muddy earth with a shovel. The Secwépemc people bury their own. But on this February day the authorities unearth the body of the infant, Nupika Amak (“One Who Can Travel Between Two Worlds”), reversing the sacred order by which a Secwépemc mother makes peace with the loss of a son. They desecrate the earth in front of her—land that had laid claim to Nupika Amak’s spirit—and bring him back to this world to be processed, tagged, and issued both a birth and death certificate. Then, they take his mother back into custody for questioning.

  When asked why she didn’t register her baby: Because she wanted him to be a freedom baby. Free from government oppression.

  In 2004, in a salmon fish hatchery in Chickaloon Village, Alaska, where snow is still thickly packed onto the ground, and the air cuts a person’s face like obsidian glass, thirty-year-old Chula Pepper, a traveler from San Diego, California, stares into a mirror of a bathroom with a Swiss Army knife in hand. No job, no relationship, no home. She grabs her long hair and cuts, like sickle to wheat, long, black strands, before settling onto the cold floor. Nearly bald. She shivers over the few things to her name: a backpack, some clothing, a sleeping bag, rain pants, and a troubled past. Tomorrow, she decides, life will be different.

  In the small town of Smithers, Canada, nineteen-year-old Zyanya Lonewolf of the Gitxsan and Dakelh Nations quits her job flipping burgers at a McDonald’s and relinquishes her role as caretaker of a household in torment—an incarcerated father, a drug-addicted mother, and a murdered cousin along Canada’s Highway of Tears. Against her mother’s wishes, she withdraws what little savings she has from an ATM, purchases a backpack, and breaks from all she has ever known to join a caravan of Indigenous runners.

  Still farther north, in one of the coldest parts of the Vashraii Koo, or Arctic Village, Alaska, an elder named Ipana packs her life of sixty years into five oversize suitcases and travels to join the others—Indigenous runners from across the world congregating in Alaska for a race through North America toward Panama. In Fairbanks, Ipana, a leader in the Dené territories, a community aligned with the migration patterns of the Porcupine caribou, faces a wind and thinks about those ancient runners who had passed through these lands, migratory protectors of the sun who had moved with the herds of caribou.

  The time has come for Ipana to find within herself the spirit of those runners, the Sun People, to find the courage to leave home and spread an urgent message—the Arctic is dying.

  Around the same time, in Oakland, California, twenty-nine-year-old Cheeto awakes to the day on which his dream will come true. A dream of a run that unifies all the people of the world and that takes him far away from an area he no longer feels a part of, the Bay Area, to which he was brought over from Mexico when he was only two years old.

  He has quit his job at EB Games, said goodbye to his nieces and nephews, and scavenged the Bay Area’s thrift stores for warm clothing. He packs his backpack, takes farewell photos with family, then washes down a couple of Heinekens at a going-away party this afternoon. The next morning he boards a gray van, which will take him to Alaska.

  Alone in the Haslett Basin, in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains in Fresno, California, a man dials into his Apache and Purépecha heritage, beating a drum for guidance. Here, beside a fire pit among ponderosa pines, in ceremonial sweat, Andrec prepares himsel
f spiritually and mentally to colead runners through North America. He meditates for the courage and the clarity to lead Indigenous warriors safely across vast lands. He sings and stokes the fire, calling on the wisdom of his Apache mother and Vietnam-veteran elders who taught him about committing to things that are bigger and greater than oneself. He channels the wisdom of the medicine bag around his neck—“Apache protection,” he calls it—and drives a gray van all the way down to Los Angeles to pick up runners, before driving far north to Alaska, in search of that person that his father wasn’t.

  In Arizona there’s a man whose soul is branded by the tragedy of the copper mine strike of 1983. He, Pacquiao, the main leader of the run, was about ten years old when he witnessed his hometown of Ajo, Arizona, on lockdown, martial law enforced, the town besieged by bulldozers, snipers, police, and the National Guard. It was an event that displaced many residents, separated families, and converted the place into a near ghost town.

  For four days and four nights Pacquiao—of Yaqui, Tohono O’odham, and Ópata heritage—submerges himself in ceremony in an arid region of southern Arizona. He sweats, fasts, and prepares himself to carry forward the immense weight laid upon him two years prior by the elder Gustavo—his mentor, a prominent labor-movement leader, and the founder of the sacred ultramarathons across North and South America, held every four years, known as the Peace and Dignity Journeys. Pacquiao co-organizes, with Andrec and Chula Pepper, a safe route across North America, starting in Alaska.

  After securing and loading up the vans, Pacquiao leads a caravan north to Chickaloon, Alaska. On the way, he gives lectures and picks up runners.

  In Sonora, Mexico, two Yoreme Nation brothers—Mazat, also called “El Que Corriendo, Mata,” or “He Who Runs, Conquers,” and his older brother Greñas—take leave of their families and university studies to hitchhike several days north to the U.S. border. They journey to fulfill an obligation to their elders: to surrender to the run and embrace the way of the warrior—those committed to the protection and preservation of the land, animals, and their people’s culture.

  These are only some of the marathoners of Peace and Dignity Journey 2004. They are ordinary people proud of their heritage, summoned by a call greater than themselves.

  And then there’s me.

  WE

  1

  Warehouse White Noise

  Even the sun yields to the massive gray structures dominating the small town of Selah, Washington. They are fruit production and distribution centers—empaques as they’re called in Spanish—that confine migrant labor inside, as prisons might. Here, apples, cherries, and pears are packaged for delivery across the globe.

  These warehouses stand only five minutes from my house in Yakima. Here, and throughout the rest of the Yakima Valley, men with guns—hired policemen—idle at the front gates of the private property. At shift change, security personnel in reflective vests direct the flow of employee traffic by flagging figure eights in the air like on airport tarmacs. Day and night, semitrucks bearing hillocks of apples grumble in and out of the premises. Towers of apple bins—twenty-five-foot beacons branded with the company logo—stand in the sun waiting to be loaded. They slice shade from the unrelenting heat and, each day, a little bit of dignity from the backs of the laborers. This shade sundials onto the blistered hoods of cars that Mexican migrants carpool inside of in 110-degree weather. Boys, almost men, operate beeping forklifts, hauling fruit cargo in haste. Parched winds whip against a limp U.S. flag the size of a large billboard, as if to remind us whose land this really is. Summer heat waves lean into the backs of working men, women, and minors like me, employed for the summer—sixteen-, seventeen-year-olds—as they exit the sauna of packed cars and swarm the fruit-packing warehouse for a chance at a meager paycheck.

  At shift change, the people in their company lime-green shirts burst out of the warehouses. Among them is my mother, Carmen, whom I accompany for the first time the summer of 2002. I’m seventeen, a junior in high school, and in this part of the country, kids much younger than me are expected to work. Some drop out of school to support their families. This summer my mom and I work the day shift together, although she usually works nights. When people scurry past me, I look into the harried faces of the working class, my people, Mexicans and non-Mexicans. We are united and divided by our condition. There’s nothing uplifting about this kind of work. I look at myself and my green shirt. I’m not any different. To be young and in high school means nothing to a place like this. Soon, I fear, it will consume and trap me like all the rest, my dreams of ever leaving Yakima ending here.

  My mother’s identity, in her decades working here, seems to have been reduced to a company shirt that clings to her skin in dark shades of sweat. ID badges hang around our necks. A pass to work—to exist. We hurry inside, where deafening generators run and metallic sounds reverberate, throbbing in our heads long after shift has ended. The place is a confusion to me, a complex mess of man and machinery designed only for one thing: to package fruit. The by-product: the erosion of the minds of the people working here. We walk through an invisible wall of icy air that sends chilly beads of sweat down our bodies. My mother pinches her shirt and fans it in the cool air, but the cold quickly consumes her in a shiver and she puts on her sweater. We split off, men and women to separate quarters of the building. Like sleepwalkers, people take their stations. Gray walls and blinding commercial lights around us direct people’s gazes downward. My mother, a sorter, slouches over one of the many conveyor belts of fruit, shoulder to shoulder with other women, in a valley of mothers, grandmothers, and even great-grandmothers all conditioned to believe that this is all they can do with their lives. Little by little the company has stripped them of the things that identify them as individuals. They have removed their watches and jewelry. Their hair is tucked beneath blue hairnets. They do this until their individuality is largely erased. They become one monotonous shape, the shape of a worker. The conveyor belt flows with apples, pears, and cherries, depending on the season. Delicate fingers sort the fruit picked by the hands of mothers who live all across the Yakima Valley, fruit that ends up in stores, farmers’ markets, and ultimately in homes across the globe.

  The bosses are stationed above us, in mezzanine offices. They are vigilant. Some prowl the scaffolding with clipboards and walkie-talkies. A few senior-status Latinos are charged with supervising us, wearing a false sense of belonging and authority as though it were a badge. They pit us against one another, then reward us with company swag and lunch boxes.

  Many times this summer I observe my mother hard at work. Harder than any mother should be. I watch her going through the motions, planted among machines. Nothing I can do about it but hold out for the day I will graduate from high school and go off to college, become a small-town hero, return a different man.

  Until then, my jaws clench at the thought that my mother’s body is being molded by the demands of apple-orchard owners. Her feet, shoulders, and hands seek relief from her sinking, stiff posture, her aches and misaligned joints. Blood queues in her calves in the form of varicose veins, and she shrugs at the pinch above her shoulders where the muscle has thickened like a bull’s hump. A similar deformation is taking shape in her knees. Only now, this summer, do I learn the pangs resulting from standing for long hours in a factory. The uncirculated blood below the knees crushes my feet. I wonder how my mother has sustained this for as long as she has. Decades. I feel sorry for ever having been impatient with her, for not being more helpful around the house, and for not fully understanding what the warehouses were doing to her mental health. Years of toiling in these conditions has left her too beaten down to start anew.

  I now begin to understand why my mother didn’t want me looking for a job here. She was probably afraid of what I’d see or, worse, that I might view her differently.

  But despite her misgivings, as soon as I was old enough, strong enough, I insisted on working with her at the factory. I am hoping to alleviate some of the financ
ial pressure. Hoping, in my own naïve way, that I can do something to save our family, the unit that is clearly coming apart at the seams. What I am learning is that we aren’t making it as a family. I blame Yakima for stretching us too thin. For keeping us separated on holidays and weekends because bills needed to be paid and food needed to be bought. For years I avoided facing this, knowing that I might crumble beneath the weight. To delve into this misery was not helpful to surviving the years. But my parents have lost the spark between them. Love for them has become just another part-time job on top of two or three other jobs. The thing about love is that it doesn’t put food on the table. Working alongside my mother forces me to open my eyes. College will protect me. I have to save up enough money, somehow.

  I think of the moments when my mother called me at home after school during her lunch breaks. There’s food in the fridge, she would say. Not just the beans and rice we ate almost every day, or the tortillas lathered with butter and salt then scrunched into balls. Special meals that she cooked at night, at the end of her shifts, while I slept.

  When I can, I wave to my mother on my way to an even colder section of the building, inside the freezer, where the product goes for storage. Even I can’t escape the mark of labor tainting my shirt, soul, and mind. I’m demoralized by the images of my people almost prostrating before machines. I despise the way it touches me. The touch of toil. My eye sockets sink with exhaustion, fruit stains my clothes. My lower back aches and my feet feel hammered with nails. There are days that I can’t help but feel a certain shame when looking into my mother’s eyes. And it is for this reason that I hate the warehouses the most.

  I begin to doubt if I can ever free my mother from the assault of the fruit industry. The harder I work, the more I feed into the whole enterprise, the more tired I get of fighting, the more I hate who I become, and the more I become part of the problem—I become efficient at the thing that I don’t want to become efficient at. The harder I work, the more I begin to believe that I am only useful for my physical strength. I bottle up the worry for a later day, daydreaming about college counselors, financial aid, and course catalogs—when my time will come to do greater things far outside of town. I have to get into college. I have my high school counselors for guidance. I can pester them for information on colleges, financial aid, and tell them that the army is not for me—as is expected. Many here join the army in hopes of winning their citizenship.