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Life on the Border
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LIFE ON THE BORDER

BORDERTOWN (Global News Service)--
Tokyo, Johannesburg, and Minneapolis are, as everyone knows, the hot cities for today's youth culture, and their influence on the music and style of adolescents around the globe shows no sign of fading. Largely unacknowledged, though, is a mecca of another sort, which for more than a generation has attracted an unprecedented and growing number of runaway kids. That unacknowledged focal point is Bordertown.

In spite of all the controversy that surrounds the place, little is conclusively known about the trading city on the mysterious Mad River's banks. It takes its name from the Border that frontier or gateway to what the Borderlanders, by general consensus, call the country of Elfland.

Elfland itself appeared -- some say reappeared -- half a century ago, around the time of the Disaster. That said we know even less about it then we know about Bordertown. Its exact location is problematical; the awkward fact is, Borderland can apparently be found by heading for the ruins of just about any large twentieth-century city. This reporter found it in the rubble of Detroit.

Like many of the runaways of so many previous generations, the youngsters who flock to Bordertown are lured by the glamour of the place. Much of this glamour is associated with the exotic members of the Bordertown population -- tall, pale, with distinctive silver-white hair -- whose ethnic origins lie on the other side of the Border. They call themselves Truebloods (as opposed to "humans," in their own terminology); the other locals call them, simply, elves.

For all anyone can tell, the human Borderlanders' term might even be accurate. The Truebloods have never been forthcoming with information about Elfland. And since no one from this side has ever been allowed to cross that Border which has been called the Iron Curtain of our century, we may never learn the truth.

In the meantime, large numbers of children come to the city on the Border. This has led to speculation that the Truebloods somehow entice them to Bordertown -- allegedly by magical means. Such is the fear and hatred of Borderland frequently expressed in the rest of the world.

A complex mercantile city with a rough frontier edge, Bordertown has dealt with the wave of runaways by bequeathing to them an entire section of the old city. Called Soho, presumably because it begins south of Ho Street, it is separated from the bustling adult commerce of Bordertown by an ancient graffiti-covered wall. Soho's problems -- drugs, hunger, violence -- are predictable; it is policed only by gangs of teenagers.

Like Johannesburg a century ago, before that city's renaissance, Bordertown is rife with racial tension -- in this case, between humans and elves. If that strife is to be resolved, music will play as important a role as it did in Johannesburg during the tumultuous years of the Integration. Music, as ever, is the irresistible common ground.

What's startling about Soho is that, in spite of the gang violence, and the destitute children holed up in derelict buildings like so many rats in the walls, there is hope here as well as despair. Human children run here looking for some version of Narnia, Oz, or Haight-Ashbury; elvin children run here too, though no human knows what it is they seek. If none of them find the glamour exactly as they imagined it in this outpost between two worlds, they nevertheless appear to be creating it for themselves out of their own desires.

The youth of Bordertown have a music scene, a street culture, and fashions that are distinctly their own, full of energy and life and, yes, a bit of magic. Life on the Border; it's not for the starry-eyed or the faint of heart. But for these kids, survival has become an art of its own.
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