A Different Definition of "With"

My father had a neighbor once who used to say, "I'll work with you on that," and what he meant was: I've already decided, and you're going to find out when the truck shows up. Took my father three separate fence disputes to realize the phrase had two meanings and he'd been hearing the wrong one.

I've been thinking about that ever since Pastor Holmgren told me about the time the county decided to run a drainage ditch through the back corner of the Lutheran church lot. This was fifteen years ago, maybe. The county engineer came to a Wednesday night council meeting and used the word "partnership" eleven times. I know because Holmgren counted. He counts things when he's nervous. The engineer said the county would "coordinate" with the church on alignment and timing. He said they'd "accommodate" concerns about the oak tree by the fellowship hall. He said all of it with the sincerity of a man who had already filed the easement paperwork.

The ditch went where the county wanted it. The oak made it, mostly. But what Holmgren said afterward has stayed with me. "He wasn't lying, Bobby. He just had a different definition of 'with' than we did."

Now, I'm not one to get too caught up in the weight of a single word. Aunt Vi would remind me that linguists have made careers out of that sort of thing, and she doesn't trust careers that develop indoors. But sometimes a word carries more cargo than it lets on. "With" can mean walking alongside someone, asking what they need, adjusting your pace to theirs. Or it can mean what a plow does with soil. Technically accurate, either way.

Take the Tohono O'odham Nation, which sits on 2.8 million acres of southern Arizona desert. Their land straddles the border with Mexico, and roughly three thousand of their members live south of that line, as their families have for a good while longer than there was a line to be south of. For twenty-five years, the tribe let the federal government use their reservation as a testing ground for border security strategy. Surveillance towers, vehicle barriers, law enforcement cooperation. They said yes to a lot. They were, by any sensible measure, working with.

Then the government decided to build a wall straight through it. The tribe sued, arguing the wall would cut across their ancestral land and breach their rights as a sovereign nation. The government's lawyers assured the judge that the Department of Homeland Security was engaging in good faith and would continue to coordinate. The judge found that convincing and declined to halt construction.

Eleven days later, at 4:59 in the morning, the Border Patrol chief sent the tribal chairman an email. Contractors were on their way. Work would begin in sixty seconds. That's not a heads-up. That's a receipt.

When the tribal police chief drove to the site, masked federal agents in tactical gear met him at a roadblock. A surveillance blimp sat overhead. Drones circled a prayer ceremony the tribe had gathered at one of their traditional border crossings. People singing prayers in the open desert, watched from the air by machines.

The tribe filed objections. A federal judge eventually halted the construction for an environmental review, though by then a hundred miles of wall had already gone in through their land and seventeen other protected sites. A court ruling in 2022 found the government had violated federal historic preservation law. The government largely continued the way it had been going.

None of this was unusual, which is perhaps the strangest part. The Tohono O'odham had experienced this kind of "with" before. Their land was divided without their consent when the international border was drawn in the 1850s. Their water rights were diminished across the twentieth century despite repeated federal commitments otherwise. They know what a partnership sounds like when it doesn't mean what it says. They counted. Like Holmgren with his eleven "partnerships," they kept track.

What gets me isn't the wall, exactly. People disagree about the wall. That argument's going to run longer than the Lindqvist twins' feud, and nobody even remembers what started that. What gets me is the 4:59 email. The roadblock waiting for the police chief. The drones over the prayer circle.

If you have genuinely been working with someone for twenty-five years, if you have genuinely been coordinating in good faith, you do not notify them in the last minute before dawn. You do that when you know you haven't been. You do that when the word "with" was doing work the other person didn't know it was doing.

Big Earl at the grain elevator likes to say that the commodity market doesn't lie to you exactly, it just tells you the truth it finds convenient at settlement time. Same grain, different price, depending on who filed first and who had the contract language. He's not bitter about it. He just reads the futures columns a certain way now.

I think the Tohono O'odham read the language the same way. They have to.

The honest version of "with" costs something. It means the outcome isn't fully settled before the conversation starts. It means somebody else's oak tree counts before the survey stakes go in. Most institutions find that price inconvenient, so they use the word and mean the other thing, and they count on you not counting.

Holmgren still eyes that drainage ditch every spring when it takes on water. The oak held. He's never fully trusted the word "partnership" since, which probably makes him a more careful reader of the world than most.

There are worse ways to end up.

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