Writings of Jeffrey Lazos Ferns

  Monsoon Light, Borderlands Time We were halfway between storms when it hit me that the weekend was already ending. The light was doing that strange desert trick—one side of the sky ink-dark, piled high with thunderheads, the other side rinsed clean and glowing. The skyline was monsoon rain in hypnotic arcs as we headed north, and if felt like drifting between seasons, still tethered to the borderlands we’d just spent days walking through. Traveling with Lorraine Garcia-Nakata meant the trip never stayed on the surface for long. You don’t just “visit” the border with someone who has spent a lifetime in the work of art, culture, and community; you end up in conversations about memory, about who gets named and who gets erased, about what it means to carry places inside your practice. What started as a simple meeting and work itinerary—Tubac, Naco, Bisbee, Tucson—became a series of scenes that stitched together into something like a love letter, or maybe a field report, from the ...

  We left Tucson in the soft blue of early morning, that liminal hour when the city hasn’t quite decided to wake up. Lorraine and I pointed the car southeast, I‑10 unspooling ahead of us, Naco and Bisbee somewhere past the horizon line and past the familiar routines of Tucson life. Monsoon had already done its good work—desert soils briefly forgiving, ocotillo flushed green and reaching, whole fields painted in that impossible, temporary color you only get when water remembers us. Driving into the borderlands The closer we got to Bisbee, the more the landscape opened itself up: isolated stretches where it was just us, the road, and a ring of mountain ranges holding the sky. The Mule Mountains started to come into view—one of the Madrean sky islands that rise like interrupted sentences out of desert grasslands, linking Chihuahuan desert scrub, semidesert grasslands, and woodlands in one vertical story. To the south, beyond the line on the map and the more literal line of steel, ...

  Leaving home, following the Sun We ease onto the freeway around 11, the sun already baking the asphalt into a mirage so bright it feels like driving through a kiln. As we pass Gila River Indian Community, I find myself doing what I always do with visitors: narrating the land, pointing out where water still remembers its old paths, tracing out communities and plantscapes like I’m reading a living map. In my head, I’m always holding the O’odham, the Huhugam, the river people whose agriculture and seed work turned this region into some of the oldest continuously farmed soil in what’s now the United States. The heat forces a slower pace, even inside the car. I joke about desert choreography—how we’ve learned to move from shadow to shadow, picking out mesquite, creosote, and palo verde like old friends we lean into for shade whenever the sun pushes too hard. It’s the kind of humor that only makes sense if you’ve done summers here, the kind of heat that dictates your tempo and your...

  The canal woke up before I did. By the time I reached Arizona Falls, the sky was still holding onto indigo, that deep pre-sun color that makes you whisper even if you arrive with a head full of work tasks, inboxes, and unfinished story narratives. The water rushed through the concrete throat of the falls like an old story being retold—not quite river, not quite machine, something in between that only exists because humans argued with gravity, water and growth long enough to extend life. I unclipped and stood there, a six foot three two-legged desert animal in Lycra, listening. The air smelled faintly of wet stone and hot dust waiting its turn. Twilight—or sunrise, depending on who you’re asking, balanced on the lip of the horizon like a coin that hadn’t decided which side to land on. The light touched the edges of the railings, the power lines, the metal—ordinary things that for a few minutes pretended to be sacred. The invisible border On the way back, I rolled toward th...