Scenes from an end-of-summer reading list

Luwi, who is fifty-seven years old, took up journal writing at the urging of the Nobel Prize-winning pediatrician and virologist D. Carleton Gajdusek, whom he described as “Father of America.” Gajdusek lived in Papua New Guinea while researching kuru, a fatal brain disease that existed only in the country’s eastern highlands. Until the nineteen-thirties, the people there remained unknown to the outside world. Luwi and his friends used to crowd around Gajdusek’s typewriter, their hands on his shoulders and thighs, as he documented their lives: the insects they ate, their moods, the way they sang to birds. Gajdusek wrote six hundred thousand pages of journals, beginning when he was thirteen and ending weeks before he died, in 2008, at the age of eighty-five. Luwi keeps a copy of the journal in which Gajdusek recorded his birth. “When I was born, Carleton was there to bring me out into the world,” Luwi told me.

I first heard about this flight on July 29, a day before it took off on July 30, from immigration attorney Keith Hilzendeger, whose client, a 19-year-old asylum seeker from Nepal, had been told he was going to be removed to the Central African Republic, an isolated and impoverished country that has been in a near-constant state of civil war for more than a decade. A motion for a temporary stay had just been denied, Hilzendeger told me, but he’d filed an appeal. Could I scan public flight data and see if any ICE charter planes were near the Dallas-area ICE camp where his client had been moved a few days earlier?

Unfortunately, there was one, an Eastern Airlines Boeing 767 parked at Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport.

The crisis starts in the mountains. A few dozen miles north of the New Mexico state line, in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, the headwaters of the Rio Grande form early each summer when the snowpack starts to melt. Creeks appear on steep mountainsides like dense sets of braids, trickling down and collecting into the master stream. In June of last year, I hiked through these mountains, sleeping at the edge of swollen creeks and trekking across ice fields. 

Even in early summer I got hit by snow flurries, as thunderstorms rumbled through the alpine. For thousands of years, the peaks of the San Juans have scraped the undersides of clouds traveling east from the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California, releasing the torrent of rain and snow that turns into the Rio Grande. But the world has changed. At the turn of this millennium, a record-shattering drought took hold in the American Southwest. This drought has refused to break. The snowpack in the San Juans has shrunk to a fraction of what it was in the twentieth century. Last year its level was just 56 percent of its historic median. This year it was a terrifying 8 percent—the worst in recorded history.