No country for old men?
Fulfilling a longheld ambition, Ed Vulliamy drives the 2,000-mile length of the US-Mexico border and discovers a land of beauty, poverty and paradox
Of all the enthralling landscapes in America - and there are a few of them - none is more beguiling and awe-inspiring than that seen from the balcony outside room 258 on the upper floor of the La Quinta motel on Geronimo Avenue in El Paso, Texas, with a six-pack of beers, a lime, hot salsa and big bag of tortilla chips for company. In the mid-distance runs the border between the United States and Mexico, in two forms: a harsh wall decorated with barbed wire, and the trickle of the Rio Grande. And beyond the boundary lies the factory smoke, the sea of lights, the lure and menace of the most charismatic, libidinous, dangerous and daunting city I know: Ciudad Juárez. The scene is especially cogent at dusk, when fleets of cast-off American school buses have done their rounds dumping off workers from the duty-free maquiladora sweatshop factories, so that a layer of grey, gossamer-thin dust wraps the lanes like snow, only the desert breeze is as warm as a hair-dryer.
This is the midway point of a journey I had always promised myself I would make from the Pacific to the Gulf, along the busiest border in the world, but a borderland that is a country in its own right, which belongs to both the US and Mexico, yet neither. I call this terrain - 2,000 miles long and about 100 miles wide - "Amexica".
Amexica is a place of paradox - of love and violence, opportunity and poverty, sex and cruelty, beauty and fear - and even the frontier itself is simultaneously porous and harsh. While the wall, patrols, customs and sniffer dogs endeavour to control drugs and migrants crossing the border, El Paso, like the other 13 twin cities of the US that face their Mexican neighbours across the frontier, is almost as essentially Hispanic as its counterpart. It is a border which 800,000 people cross every day. Families live astride - and workers commute across - the frontier; it takes 10 minutes to walk from downtown El Paso to main street Juárez, from what is supposed to be the First World into what looks like the Third, yet is not. The borderland has its own music, norteño, and its own Anglo-Spanish lexicon, spoken by both sides and written on the doors of bars: "Menores and Personas Armadas Strictly No Entrada".
Apocalypse in 2012? Date spawns theories, film
Just as "Y2K" and its batch of predictions about the year
2000 have become a distant memory, here comes
"Twenty-twelve."
Fueled by a crop of books, Web sites with countdown clocks, and claims about ancient timekeepers, interest is growing in what some see as the dawn of a new era, and others as an expiration date for Earth: December 21, 2012.
The date marks the end of a 5,126-year cycle on the Long Count calendar developed by the Maya, the ancient civilization known for its advanced understanding of astronomy and for the great cities it left behind in Mexico and Central America.
(Some scholars believe the cycle ends a bit later -- on December 23, 2012.)
Speculation in some circles about whether the Maya chose this particular time because they thought something ominous would happen has sparked a number of doomsday theories.
The hype also has mainstream Maya scholars shaking their heads.
"There's going to be a whole generation of people who, when they think of the Maya, think of 2012, and to me that's just criminal," said David Stuart, director of the Mesoamerica Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
"There is no serious scholar who puts any stock in the idea that the Maya said anything meaningful about 2012."
But take the fact that December 21, 2012, coincides with the winter solstice, add claims the Maya picked the time period because it also marks an alignment of the sun with the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and you have the makings of an online sensation.
Long Count 101
• The Long Count calendar was one of several created by the
ancient Maya.
• It consists of the following units of time:
kin = one day
uinal = 20 days
tun = 360 days (18 uinal)
katun = 7,200 days (20 tun)
baktun = 144,000 days (20 katun)
• The calendar shows the number of days elapsed since the
beginning date: August 13, 3114 B.C. (some scholars think
the date is actually August 11, 3114 B.C.)
• The dates are written as numbers separated by periods in
the following order:
(baktun).(katun).(tun).(uinal).(kin)
• July 20, 1969 -- the date of the first moon landing --
would be written as: 12.17.15.17.0
• December 21, 2012, would be written as 13.0.0.0.0 and the
day after that as 0.0.0.0.1
Type "2012" into an Internet search engine and you'll find survival guides, survival schools, predictions and "official stuff" to wear, including T-shirts with slogans such as "2012 The End" and "Doomsday 2012."
Theories about what might happen range from solar storms triggering volcano eruptions to a polar reversal that will make the Earth spin in the opposite direction.
If you think all of this would make a great sci-fi disaster movie, Hollywood is already one step ahead.
"2012," a special-effects flick starring John Cusack and directed by Roland Emmerich, of "The Day After Tomorrow" fame, is scheduled to be released this fall. The trailer shows a monk running to a bell tower on a mountaintop to sound the alarm as a huge wall of water washes over what appear to be the peaks of the Himalayas.
'Promoting a hoax'
One barometer of the interest in 2012 may be the "Ask an Astrobiologist" section of NASA's Web site, where senior scientist David Morrison answers questions from the public. On a recent visit, more than half of the inquiries on the most popular list were related to 2012.
"The purveyors of doom are promoting a hoax," Morrison wrote earlier this month in response to a question from a person who expressed fear about the date.
A scholar who has studied the Maya for 35 years said there is nothing ominous about 2012, despite the hype surrounding claims to the contrary.
"I think that the popular books... about what the Maya say is going to happen are really fabricated on the basis of very little evidence," said Anthony Aveni, a professor of astronomy, anthropology and Native American studies at Colgate University.
Aveni and Stuart are both writing their own books explaining the Mayan calendar and 2012, but Stuart said he's pessimistic that people will be interested in the real story when so many other books are making sensational claims.
Dozens of titles about 2012 have been published and more are scheduled to go on sale in the coming months. Current offerings include "Apocalypse 2012," in which author Lawrence Joseph outlines "terrible possibilities," such as the potential for natural disaster.
But Joseph admits he doesn't think the world is going to end.
"I do, however, believe that 2012 will prove to be... a very dramatic and probably transformative year," Joseph said.
The author acknowledged he's worried his book's title might scare people, but said he wanted to alert the public about possible dangers ahead.
He added that his publisher controls the book's title, though he had no issue with the final choice.
"If it had been called 'Serious Threats 2012' or 'Profound Considerations for 2012,' it would have never gotten published," Joseph said.
Growing interest
Another author said the doom and gloom approach is a great misunderstanding of 2012.
"The trendy doomsday people... should be treated for what they are: under-informed opportunists and alarmists who will move onto other things in 2013," said John Major Jenkins, whose books include "Galactic Alignment" and who describes himself as a self-taught independent Maya scholar.
Jenkins said that cycle endings were all about transformation and renewal -- not catastrophe -- for the Maya. He also makes the case that the period they chose coincides with an alignment of the December solstice sun with the center of the Milky Way, as viewed from Earth.
"Two thousand years ago the Maya believed that the world would be going through a great transformation when this alignment happened," Jenkins said.
But Aveni said there is no evidence that the Maya cared about this concept of the Milky Way, adding that the galactic center was not defined until the 1950s.
"What you have here is a modern age influence [and] modern concepts trying to garb the ancient Maya in modern clothing, and it just doesn't wash for me," Aveni said.
Meanwhile, he and other scholars are bracing for growing interest as the date approaches.
"The whole year leading up to it is going to be just crazy, I'm sorry to say," Stuart said.
"I just think it's sad, it really just frustrates me. People are really misunderstanding this really cool culture by focusing on this 2012 thing. It means more about us than it does about the Maya."