"Border Showdown"; Outside

The first words I associate with national parks: serene, beautiful, vacation, American. Violent, dangerous, drug wars, deaths do not make the list until I read Bruce Barcott’s “Border Showdown,” featured in Outside's February 2003 release.

Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is a 330,690-acre national park in Arizona that includes 30-miles of Mexican border. It may be a “swath of beautiful, heat-blasted Sonoran Desert,” but the park has, as Kelly Clarkson would say, a dark side, which Barcott’s descriptive, active language effectively conveys throughout his article.

Imagine six men protecting an area “twice the size of greater New York” with revolvers. Now add an annual “onslaught of 300,000 illegal immigrants and drug smugglers equipped with automatic weapons, night-vision goggles and 4X4 SUVs” to the mix. No wonder the park made the 2002 and 2003 top 10 most dangerous national parks lists, and was closed to the public for 10 years, reopening in 2012.

“Border Showdown” is not my favorite article; it would not make my must read list, but it has many commendable assets. Barcott portrays the park ranger experience in terms people can relate to. He describes Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in terms Americans can visualize. More than that, he takes an iconic lifestyle—working as a park ranger—and casts it in an uncommon light. I often associate park rangers as living the dream, strolling through days of interaction with tourists and elementary-aged children on fieldtrips, but clearly, the job is not always a walk in the park.