Highway 2—the Mexican thoroughfare that shadows the U.S. border—took a wide, arcing turn north and east through the small town of Janos. As the sun set in brilliant purples and oranges behind the mountains at our backs, the road leveled out and finally pointed due east.
The two of us were in the Boat, along with our friend Richie. As Jordan jammed on the accelerator and looked down at the navigation, our conversation was terse. Out of the radio’s static emerged a country-rock station from El Paso, and we knew we were close.
Chris turned around and looked out the dusty rear window toward a mountain range. The sun glanced off its face, golden and brown like marbling. He furrowed his brow—not good.
The day before at a cigar shop in Tombstone, Arizona, Richie had told a man with a white ponytail and red Indianapolis 500 shirt that we had driven from Tijuana to Mexicali on the Mexican side of the border the day before.
“Really?” he said. “And you didn’t have any trouble?”
“None at all,” Richie said.
“And we’re driving to Agua Prieta today,” Chris added.
The man’s eyebrows shot up.
It was a common reaction. Don’t end up in Ciudad Juárez at night, we had often heard. It was a warning we likely didn’t need to hear more than once.
It was August 2018, and after departing on our latest road trip we had decided to drive south to the border. Our plan was to weave in and out of the crossings at Mexicali and Naco and Antelope Wells—passing from the United States into Mexico and back again—to meet those who made their lives on one side or the other. The trip would take us from San Diego to El Paso, exploring border towns along the way and leading us straight toward Juárez.
All we knew of Juárez was its violent reputation and the pace at which its journalists wound up dead. Chris had a distinct memory of one story. In 2010, after one of its photographers was killed, El Diario, a Juárez-based newspaper, had published an open letter to the cartels—a chilling assignment for any writer.
“You are, at present, the de facto authorities in this city,” it read, “because the legal institutions have not been able to keep our colleagues from dying. Tell us, therefore, what is expected of us.”
In Bisbee, Arizona, later that morning, before crossing back over once more, the three of us huddled outside a coffee shop.
“What we’re about to do might be dangerous,” Jordan said.
The concern among the three of us was palpable.
“So if you feel uncomfortable,” Jordan continued, “speak up.”
Chris and Richie nodded, and we drove on.
But things hadn’t gone to plan by the time we reached Janos. We were many miles past Agua Prieta and even the next crossing at Antelope Wells. At that moment, we were banking toward Juárez.
“Sun’s setting,” Chris said.
And the engine roared a little louder as Jordan pressed down on the pedal and the Boat lurched into the purple of the Juárez twilight.
* * *
We had met up two days earlier in a Glendale parking lot, where Chris had found Jordan waiting in the sweltering heat next to the Boat. Eight months had passed since our drive with Pete, so we embraced and caught up in the windward sweep of the San Gabriel Mountains. After graduating, Jordan had taken the California bar exam and Chris had returned to Berkeley to carve out a writer’s life. We were both looking toward the future, but first we would use what little vacation time we had to get out in the Boat for as long as we could before our funds ran low and our lives beckoned.
We planned to be on the road for at least five weeks, and Richie, a law-school friend, had asked if he could join us for a few days. Our plan had been to head northeast toward Denver, but Richie was flying into Huntington Beach, so we drove south through Orange County to meet him.
On the way, Jordan spoke up.
“I have a thought,” Jordan said as we drove south on I-5. “What if we go to Mexico instead?”
Jordan’s fascination with the country ran deep. Growing up, he and his father had bonded over annual fishing trips in the waters off Baja California. He loved Mexican culture, especially its food and music, and he was something of a Latin dance devotee, having spent a few years in a dance company in college. More recently, he had visited Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Guanajuato as part of a business-school trip.
Chris scrunched up his nose. The way Jordan had proposed it made Chris think his friend might harbor his own reservations. Cartels and coyotes must pass over those same highways on the other side of the border. But the two of us had long talked about exploring Mexico’s northern states, and this was our best opportunity yet.
“We could start in Tijuana,” Jordan continued, “and just pop out at the next border crossing if it doesn’t feel right.”
Chris tapped the windowsill.
“And Richie speaks Spanish, too,” Jordan said.
“Okay, yeah, let’s try it,” Chris said.
So we picked up Richie and set off for Tijuana, where we found a cheap hotel. It was our second August in a row in the city, and we were somewhat familiar with its boulevards and landmarks. There was the sprawling, divided Avenida Revolución, lined with bars and tiled coffee shops, brewpubs, and dance halls that, on clement evenings, pulsated with amplified music. On our first visit, we had driven through timid and unadventurous: we explored the Avenida, then scurried back into the United States in time to reach Phoenix the next evening.
This second time would be different. Not only had we been to Tijuana once before, which was enough to make us somewhat more intrepid, but we had been on the road taking in new places regularly by then. We were generally more gregarious. So with Richie, the three of us picked our way over tilted sidewalks, sidestepped exposed rebar, and watched the headlights of cars approach, fly past, and recede into purple eddies of smoke and smog.
We were headed for Avenida Revolución, which we knew was well-patrolled by masked police officers, the federales, when Jordan noticed something else.
“Look,” he said, “what’s that?”
Chris followed his gaze.
Down an alleyway were white string lights adorning what looked like a courtyard. Laughter filtered out. Chris inspected it from afar until he noticed Jordan already disappearing through the vestibule and into the oasis.
Beyond the wall was a luxurious courtyard lined with ferns and succulents, dozens of food carts, and a sea of white-tiled tables. It was late, perhaps eleven o’clock, and the entire place was awash in conversation.
We ordered carne and pescado tacos and drank local beers. A shy young woman in a red shirt and white jeans cleared the table, and when Chris asked what the place was called, she answered in Spanish.
I don’t speak English, she seemed to imply.
Richie, a barrel-chested man from Missouri, stepped in. The waitress and Richie went back and forth, one sentence flowing into the other.
As she walked off, Chris looked at Richie expectantly.
“Well? What did she say?”
“She’s not Mexican,” Richie said. “She’s Colombian. This courtyard is sponsored by a local company—Telefonica—and the carts are run by young people trying to get a foothold in the food industry. If they do well here, they can get a brick-and-mortar place.”
The scene was more reminiscent of Brooklyn than whatever half-baked expectations about border towns we may have still carried with us.
“The clientele is mixed,” Richie translated.
“Americans and Mexicans?”
“And others from across Central and South America.”
Once ravenous, then sated, we strolled through downtown and the red-light district just past the city’s iconic arch, which resembled a pinched version of the one on the Mississippi in St. Louis. We hailed a cab back to the hotel and rode through the streets with the thump of American heavy metal pumping through the car. Our driver whisked us past street vendors and churches with doors locked tight, the electric crosses above their doors doused.
At the hotel, even though it was deep into early morning, no one was ready to turn in. So we gingerly sipped tall shots of Don Julio tequila at the hotel bar while a round woman with a thin fuzz of dyed blond hair sang karaoke at full lung.
“Okay,” Chris said. “Tomorrow. What’s the play, gents?”
“I say we drive as much of it in Mexico as we can,” Jordan replied.
“Agreed.”
“Those are pretty heavy cartel routes,” Richie said, and we all nodded gravely.
Assessing the safety of driving across Baja, Sonora, and Chihuahua by car was beyond the three of us. Chris was drawn to the risk of it all, yet his mother’s voice always played across his mind at moments like this: Stay safe, be smart.
“And we don’t want to meet a crooked cop,” Richie added.
“I say we drive as far as we feel comfortable,” Chris said.
“That’s doable,” Jordan said, looking down at his phone.
As the only one with military training, Jordan felt responsible for the safety of the group. He wanted to balance Chris’s newfound adventurism with Richie’s caution. Jordan felt comfortable driving through Mexico during the day, but nighttime was different.
“There are crossings at Naco,” Jordan said, reading off his phone, “and Antelope Wells, and, well, Juárez of course.”
We all paused.
“We’ll drive and cross before sunset,” he said.
“Of course—nothing past sunset.”
“That’s right.”
“So there it is,” Chris said. “Juárez by sundown.”
“Juárez before sundown.”
A recorded trumpet wailed and the woman reached for a soaring note to meet it.
Chris shot his tequila and Jordan and Richie pushed their drinks away as the woman wrapped the final note and took an exhausted bow to a smattering of applause from the strung-out hangers-on who remained.
* * *
The sun came up in a blaze over the city. Before we drove east, we had one stop to make: Desayunador Salesiano Padre Chava, a service center for the scores of South and Central American migrants who gathered in Tijuana each year. Visiting the center was our reason for coming to Tijuana.
The desayunador, or “breakfast counter,” was part of a larger Catholic organization that provided services for those without. Much like soup kitchens in the United States, it was run by volunteers who arrived before dawn and worked until well past noon in order to provide a meal to more than 1,000 people each day.
Much of the news that year had focused on those who had crossed the border and found themselves trapped in detention centers outside cities such as El Paso, San Diego, or Laredo. They were migrants, asylum seekers, and some combination of undocumented or illegal immigrants, depending on who was talking. There in Mexico, however, the people who came through the doors of the desayunador carried none of our labels—at least not yet.
We turned down a road in the shadow of the border and parked the car in the sparse shade. Outside was a long, unruly line of 100 or so people. A man holding a black-and-white photo pleaded with the guard at the glass doors.
“He’s looking for a loved one who he lost,” Richie whispered.
After a moment, the guard at the door turned to us.
“Hola,” Richie said, poised to explain our presence.
Before he could, however, the guard piped up in fast Spanish.
“Sí, sí,” Richie said, then beckoned us past and into the room.
“What did he say?” Chris asked as we walked into a cafeteria.
“‘Are you here to serve?’”
All around us, tables were set with plastic tablecloths. As the line outside hummed, the volunteers inside said a prayer and burst into a flurry of activity.
Nelson, a short Salvadoran with a goatee and a gray Dodgers hat worn backward, would show us our morning task: washing dishes. He led us back into the bowels of the kitchen, where we passed crates teeming with peppers, vats of simmering stews, and enormous insulated coolers of rice wafting with steam. With the doors thrown open, men in aprons spooned each out onto plates with practiced speed. People of all ages accepted theirs with nods and ate at long tables.
Every morning, hundreds of migrants and locals—the deported and the hopeful, the homeless and the otherwise down-and-out—walked through the center’s door to have a meal, make a phone call, get a haircut or a new coat, receive legal advice, or get a medical checkup. Some found work through the program. Others, like Nelson, got a bed in exchange for volunteer hours, working in the kitchen for weeks if not months.
In the back the three of us were handed aprons and directed toward large industrial sinks. Jordan started scrubbing dirty chipped plates yellowed with age and clear plastic cups with Sharpie numbers on their bases—they came in by the dozen—while Richie and Chris began drying them with threadbare towels.
Nelson directed our work with mute hand instructions as heavy Spanish-language music played over a stereo.
“Ask him if they ever play,” Chris hazarded, gesturing outside to a dusty soccer pitch in the back.
“He’s afraid to go outside,” Richie said, translating Nelson’s quiet words in halting phrases. “He doesn’t leave the center often. He’s too afraid of being deported.”
Nelson smiled at our simple, muttered attempts at Spanish. He took two cups and swirled soapy water in both before shaking them together like a cocktail.
“You gotta watch out,” someone said behind Jordan. “A dog took a bite out of my hand out there once.”
Jordan turned around to find a young man washing pots the size of blow-up pools in a deep sink. He had short-cropped hair, a pencil mustache, and tattoos up and down his thin arms.
“You guys speak Spanish?”
“Only him,” Jordan said, nodding at Richie.
“You need a Tijuana girlfriend,” the man said. “They’ll teach you.”
Jordan laughed.
Josh was a gregarious twentysomething who had grown up in Indiana. His family had settled there after crossing the border from Mexico when he was a young child, he explained. His father had joined the Marines and was stationed in Italy. Even so, Josh had been deported after getting a speeding ticket. He volunteered at the desayunador during the day, then worked nights as a waiter at the Hong Kong, a night club in the red-light district.
“All my friends are strippers,” he said, pulling out his phone to flick through photos and selfies. “Man, they work all day and make tons.”
Josh was headed back to the States soon, he explained. He’d had enough of Tijuana. Precisely when he would move back, though, was a detail he hadn’t yet figured out, he said, spraying charred bits off the bottom of a pot.
While Josh and Jordan spoke, Nelson began opening up to Richie—who, in turn, was translating for Chris.
“What I want is not for me,” Richie said, listening to Nelson speak as he worked, his eyes on the sink the whole time. “My dream is not about me.”
“When I was growing up in El Salvador, it was a hard life,” he continued. “We didn’t have enough. I was raised by my mom. My dad was in Los Angeles, but he died of an illness. Because we didn’t have our own house, we moved a lot. My sister and I would go to the market during the rainy season when we couldn’t sell water, and we’d take tomatoes, green peppers, and onions out of the trash to eat.”
Nelson seemed to be at confession.
“Do you want your own family?” Richie asked.
“Of course,” he said, drying his hands. “I left a girlfriend in El Salvador. She was crying. ‘When are you going to give me a child, Nelson?’ she said. I don’t have a place to stay. I don’t have work. How can I bring a kid into this world?”
So Nelson went north and lived in fear of being sent back to El Salvador.
“The first time I traveled here, to Mexico, was 2015,” he said. “I was 22 years old. But I didn’t make it far into Mexico before they deported me.”
This happened half a dozen times, leaving him exhausted. But he kept at it, hoping one day to cross into the U.S. He kept making the trek north—back to Tijuana.
“If they arrest me they’d deport me back to El Salvador,” Nelson said, “and I wouldn’t try again. I would have wasted so much time trying to get to the U.S., I couldn’t do it again. I’m still in a hurry, I really want to get there, but I’ve gotten used to life here, so I can wait to go when it’s right.”
A friend of his had tried, he told us. He died in Arizona, and his body was never found. Nelson fell quiet for a moment. Sunlight slanted through the window as it heated the city outside.
“Now I’ll tell you my dream,” Nelson said.
He had started off bashful but was soon vulnerable and open.
“My dream is to go to the United States. I don’t want to live my life there—just 10 or 15 years. I want to buy a house for my mom wherever she wants to live. And I want to buy a house for myself.”
Jordan turned around to listen. Regardless of his position on border enforcement, he found himself rooting for Nelson.
“I have to work hard,” Nelson continued. “Money is not happiness. Happiness is being with your family. Now that I’m here, I feel so alone. I’m missing out on the care of my mom, and time with her. She always took care of me and fought for me when I was younger. Now it’s my turn to fight for her.”
Creedence Clearwater Revival came on over the speakers. First it was “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” The rest of the album, Pendulum, followed track after track.
“I’ve lived more than an old person,” he said. “So many things have happened to me. But I don’t want to forget any of it. That keeps me going. That reminds me of why I’m doing this, why I keep going, why I’m fighting. My mom—she’s why I keep going. That’s why I don’t go to the club, or drink; I don’t want to lose these thoughts. I don’t want to forget my family. I can’t forget them.”
“Why do you wait?” Chris asked.
“I’m waiting for when it’s really foggy,” he said. “So they can’t see me when I cross. If it gets foggy, I’ll do it immediately.”
The day had started out overcast, but the gray only skirted the mountains and did not descend into the streets, so Nelson stayed put that morning as it burned off.
Chris’s heart ached for him, and he knew Jordan’s did too as his friend wiped his eyes.
“I’m not telling you this for pity,” Nelson concluded. “It’s just my story.”
Afterward, we ate breakfast. Nopales, chicken, rice, and peppers with beans—the same food they’d served the migrants and wayward folk minutes before.
“Will you join us?” Jordan asked Nelson before we sat down.
“No, no,” he said. And with that, Nelson went through a doorway and disappeared.
* * *
After leaving the desayunador, we drove east. All day the border fence rose and fell along the slope of the mountain like a layer of rust on beige-colored sand. It was the same fence we had seen a year earlier from the other side when we drove to Phoenix. We passed whole communities cut out of hillsides. Around noon, the three of us huddled over a bench alongside scores of sweating travelers in a Mexicali taqueria and ate tortillas piled high with charred meats.
The roads were clear as we took the crossing at Calexico and stopped for the night outside Tucson at a motel with cheap chenille blankets.
We spent the next morning driving toward coffee in Tombstone, Arizona. From there we would head south and pass back into Mexico at Naco, entering the Sonoran Desert—a major thoroughfare for smuggling into the United States. Back on the Mexican side of the border, we would head east toward Juárez, then make it back to American soil by nightfall.
When we stopped for gas just outside Bisbee, the last town before the crossing at Naco, Jordan asked a bearded attendant if it was safe to drive to Naco and beyond.
“In Mexico?”
“Yes.”
“I hear they have terrible roads.”
“In what way?”
“Just bad.”
“Like get shot up bad?” Jordan said.
The man laughed.
“No, man—potholes and stuff.”
At the border crossing, we followed a trickle of pickup trucks through a maze of concrete blast walls and inscrutable signs. As we tried to navigate the labyrinth, a man in a combat vest on the Mexican side of the border stepped forward and beckoned us over to an inspection station. He had a round face and cheeks smeared white with sunscreen. His colleague in a flak jacket slipped on gloves, while the first man opened the driver’s door and began flicking through our bags, asking questions in Spanish.
We clustered around a metal inspection table with the white-cheeked man, who hauled over our bags and poked through them. His bearded partner asked us to open our trunk and hood.
“He wants to know what we’re doing and why we were going from Naco to Agua Prieta,” Richie said. “And he asked if there was anything in our car.”
Jordan and Chris exchanged a knowing glance. It felt like we were back in Idaho, being interrogated by the trooper, except now Chris was calm and performing his best Jordan impression.
Our conversation, clipped at first, became more natural once introductions were made. The man with white cheeks was Ivan. The other was Noel. They were Mexican customs agents.
“What are they saying?” Chris ventured, but Richie pushed on until Ivan muttered something and they both laughed.
“He said you look like Kurt Cobain.”
Everyone looked at Chris. His tousled auburn hair pooled in locks around his shoulders. He had on a T-shirt and skinny jeans, and his cheeks were unshaven. This had become his road-trip uniform—more disheveled than rock star.
“What?” Chris asked, looking down at himself.
Ivan kept speaking to Richie.
“Oh, no, no,” Richie said as Ivan made a pistol with his finger.
“Military guys come down here with guns all the time,” Ivan said in English. “They forget their guns are in the car. Were you in the military?”
“No,” Richie said. “Pero el era,” he said and pointed at Jordan.
Ivan glared at Jordan, and after a moment made a circle with his finger around his ear.
“Crazy,” he said. “All crazy.”
Jordan smiled at him, but the customs agent didn’t return the look. Chris laughed nervously.
A moment later, the two agents completed their inspection. Noel stuck around to talk while Ivan retreated into the shade of their outpost, where a radio crackled.
“Americans don’t like immigrants, right?” Noel asked. “They’re pretty racist?”
Richie explained that it isn’t like that. Not for most people, at least.
A few feet away, Jordan bristled. Just because many Americans—especially Republicans—wanted increased border security didn’t make them racist.
Noel, for his part, admitted that his only interaction with Americans was with the daily grocery shoppers from Arizona who crossed the border to buy cheap products on the Mexico side. Every once in a while, a group of boisterous young men or military folk would come through the area.
We asked him if they ever interacted with the U.S. Border Patrol or American customs agents, who had an office just a stone’s throw away.
“No,” Noel explained. “Never.”
Odd, Jordan thought. They work so close to each other but they’re complete strangers.
Some of them are good guys, Noel said, but some are shady. So they stayed away.
“That’s true of any group,” Jordan retorted, and Noel nodded.
“I hate Americans,” Ivan said, wandering back over. “Why would I like anyone that treats my people so badly? Why?”
Chris smiled weakly.
“Even us?”
Chris wanted to find a connection, some sign that the gap between us could be bridged, but Ivan nodded and made the crazy sign by his ear again, nodding toward Jordan.
“Todo.”
Noel wasn’t quite as adamant as Ivan. He didn’t think all Americans were bad. He had family around Los Angeles and San Diego. The antiguo Americans—the older generation—might be racist, he explained. They thought the two of them, customs agents, would try to rob them or hurt them. But the younger generation was better.
Ivan nodded reluctantly.
“How are the migrants viewed by the locals here?” Richie asked.
“We don’t have problems with migrants,” Noel said. “We see them as people.”
Southern Mexico was a different story, though, he admitted: They are less tolerant and try to keep Central Americans out. But in the north, they help the migrants. They offer them food and shelter—and treat them like humans, he said.
“Do you ever have issues at the crossing? Do you stop migrants?”
“No,” Noel replied.
“We don’t stop migrants,” Ivan cut in. “Mexico doesn’t judge people like that. They are humans, and we see them as humans. Americans don’t.”
The word racismo peppered their opinions.
It pained Chris to hear that Americans were viewed this way, but Jordan was less sympathetic. Noel had just admitted that Mexico was doing the exact same thing to migrants on its southern border. Couldn’t they see the hypocrisy?
As we chatted, Mexicans drove through with a wave, and a drug-sniffing dog barked somewhere nearby on the U.S. side of the fence.
“So do the young people give you hope for America?” Chris asked.
Noel nodded.
“Yes, a little hope for America,” Richie translated.
But Ivan shook his head.
“Why would I be hopeful?”
He looked away from us. The distance between him and Jordan seemed even larger as he left to inspect a white Cadillac that had pulled in. The driver wore a black shirt with CUBA printed across the chest. He looked at us askance.
“How do you choose who to pull over?” Chris asked.
“It’s random,” Noel responded. “But if someone looks suspicious, then we don’t care. We pull them over.”
“Suspicious like us,” Chris said.
“Sí,” Ivan shouted over. Noel smiled—and laughed a little too much.
We parted ways with handshakes. Noel took his hand out of his glove and smiled broadly. Ivan remained distant and reserved—his smile wan.
“So you like rock?” Chris asked as Ivan rounded the car alongside him. “Kurt Cobain?”
The officer nodded.
“You like the Black Keys?”
Another nod.
“Yes, yes.”
The two of them lingered by the passenger door.
“What do you think of Slipknot?” Ivan asked, and Chris laughed.
“So you really do like rock.”
Ivan nodded again. Perhaps it was the same as the desayunador: a genuine exchange could bridge any divide—even an exchange involving Slipknot.
As Richie and Jordan were saying their goodbyes with Noel across the way, Ivan placed his hand on the Boat’s open door.
“Want to come along?” Chris tried.
And Ivan’s officialdom snapped back. A familiar stern mien came across his features.
“You sure?” Chris said dryly. “We got room.”
“No, no,” he said. “He’ll kill me.”
And he pointed at Jordan and made the “crazy” hand gesture one last time before mumbling a Safe travels in Spanish and disappearing into the shadowed eaves of their office.
* * *
The streets of Naco were empty as we passed through, so we took off down the highway and began to climb through the rolling foothills and up through the mountains that sprang up out of the Sonoran expanse. Horses grazed the hillsides, and capillas—roadside chapels—offered a simple shrine every few miles or so. Their cracked plaster was adorned with graffiti. On each roof was a cross bent at strange angles, telling the course of prairie winds over countless seasons like a weather vane.
Our interaction with Noel and Ivan had made us more confident. Whether we understood one another or not, the conversation had been civil.
As we drove on, the desert stretched out before us. We stopped at a vista point and gawked at the sheer size of the valley below. Across it arched the border wall, a thin ochre ribbon like an unspooled line of yarn. Thousands of miles of open expanse and the only man-made mark on the entire landscape was nothing more than a strand of steel, cleaving the terra-cotta valleys of the Sonora in two.
We descended the mountains, down wicked hairpin turns and along smooth roads. So much for potholed streets, Chris thought as we glided across mile after mile of level lanes of asphalt.
As we took one long banking turn out of the Sonoran mountains, we came across something that took us all back. Chris drew a sharp breath, Jordan groaned, and Richie shook his head.
On the shoulder, in a shallow gully below a sheer wall of umber rock, was the ashen wreck of a big rig. It must have lost control on the last switchback and tipped in a fiery swoon, its brakes locked or severed, and crashed in a long, arching slide into the margin. There—shunted off to the side—it had smoldered, turning a sickly and twisted gray-black under the flames of its own engine.
Jordan hit the brakes and reduced our speed as we passed and took it in like a wake: the hull was scarred black. The cab was crumpled in on itself. Glass was flung everywhere in a savage halo.
“Landed square on the cab,” Jordan said.
“Driver’s side,” Chris added.
Perhaps it was the smell of burned steel coming off the midden, but the odor of Pete’s Pall Malls occurred to both of us as we solemnly passed the remains.
* * *
The beige hills became green ones along the highway, and fields of peppers lined the floor of the deep, long vale we found ourselves in as we left the Sonoran mountains. The sun was slipping down behind us. Feeling confident, we had jetted past the border crossing at Agua Prieta. Mexico was too enticing to leave. There was another crossing at Antelope Wells about two hours east, and the sun was still high. We felt a rush to each mile, as if we were surviving a road we had no business driving. The border closed at 4 p.m., we had learned, and it was now a little past 1.
We pulled over at a truck stop for a late lunch and ordered plates of carne and glass-bottled Cokes. The tables were covered in blue-and-white plastic tablecloths, and our feet settled on concrete floors. The men in the room looked and talked and acted like many of the men we had met with Pete—gregarious and unassuming.
American, European, and Japanese cars crawled the highways just as they did in the U.S. It was a thoroughfare with unfamiliar signs but the same badges of industry and advertisement. The highway was not the outlaw den we had been told fables about. It was just a highway, same as those across the Arizona desert to the north.
We talked about how foolish it was for us to be worried about this side of the border. We talked about how distance, and the obscured nature of the place, bred outsize fears. We laughed at ourselves for being so naive. As we merged back onto the highway, we were even becoming a bit cavalier about it all.
Until Jordan twitched.
“Shit.”
“What?”
“The time change.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re in Mountain Time,” Jordan said.
“And?”
“And it’s an hour later.”
“Holy hell,” Chris said, putting it together. “Antelope Wells will be closed.”
A familiar, chastened silence fell over the Boat once more. We would have to drive to Juárez to get back over the border.
Jordan checked his phone. We would make the crossing in Juárez just after 7 p.m., around twilight.
“We’re doing this?” Richie asked.
“We don’t have a choice,” Chris said.
* * *
Outside Juárez, Jordan knifed down the highway through the descending darkness. Feeling uneasy, the three of us feigned calm. It felt like the time we ran out of coolant on that Dakota highway, when the rush of each passing semi had rattled the Boat. Whenever we found ourselves where we hadn’t intended to be, it felt like something menacing was following us.
The night went from pink to purple, and the mountains behind El Paso merged with the sky as we reached the outskirts of Juárez. Teenagers loitered on street corners. Drivers idling at traffic lights peered over the lip of cracked windows at us, and we stared back through grime-touched glass.
As we drove down narrow highways, Chris searched for Juárez on his phone, clicked on a U.S. State Department website, and read a recent travel warning: “The consulate reported that there were 179 registered homicides in the month of June, making it the deadliest 30-day period so far this year.”
He kept searching.
That weekend, gunmen had raided a house party and killed eight men and three women on grass-lined Oasis de Egipto Street in Juárez. The killers were reportedly settling scores in a simmering feud between crystal meth and heroin dealers. The bodies were found bound and tortured. The week before, 35 homicides had occurred from Friday to Sunday. El Diario reported that 200 people had been killed in July, and more than 700 since January.
The violence, some said, was reminiscent of the drug wars around the turn of the decade—a conflict that left more than 10,000 people dead.
Chris lowered his phone and closed his eyes. The border loomed, illuminated by the lights of the customs stations in the gathering darkness.
We pulled into the traffic lanes leading to the Bridge of the Americas. The squeal of brake pads and the groan of idling engines engulfed us. As we inched forward, our fear began to release. Around us, older men and women peddled trinkets, sun visors, and bottles of water with torn and flapping wrappers. U.S. Border Patrol agents in green fatigues answered frantic questions in Spanish and stopped the shiftiest of would-be crossers. Families, troupes of young men, and truck drivers in cowboy hats waited in the sluggish lines. All were bathed in the sickly rouge cast by the universe of flickering rear lights.
Jordan listened to the rush of wind as we spun into El Paso and took Highway 10 along a ridgeback overlooking the lights of Juárez. The Boat passed over the undulating hills of Texas, which descended toward the border and gave way to Mexico beyond the imposing fence.
Perhaps it didn’t feel like bedding down after humping through Afghanistan, but a familiar relief flooded Jordan’s senses. He had learned to manage fear and uncertainty—through training, the tales of heroism that inspired him to join the military, and, of course, his responsibility for the men and women who relied on him to conquer it. But Jordan had been a civilian now for nearly as long as he’d been an active Marine, and Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, and Officer Candidate School in Quantico were feeling more distant by the day. As fear crept back into his bones, it reminded him how far away it all was.
Around midnight, we piled into a pizza place in El Paso for a meal and a drink to soothe our aching adrenal glands. Jefferson Airplane played in the background, and a liquor rep named Lindsay passed around tequila shots in high-rimmed shooters.
When Chris heard the first plaintive notes of “Comin’ Back to Me,” a favorite, he finally let the tension of the day go. He zoned out and realized how much he loved the travel, the camaraderie, the happenstance. There at the bar, his earlier feelings seemed foolish. His spasms of fear out on the highway had felt like a matter of great import simply because the territory was unknown. Ivan’s circling hand motion played across his imagination—maybe Jordan wasn’t the only crazy one in the Boat.
All of us felt humbled to have seen Juárez instead of just hearing the stories people carried back. We may always fear people, places, and ideas that we don’t understand. But that fear shouldn’t stymie curiosity. We had to see a thing to begin to know it, and in doing so, we opened our aperture just a little bit more. Fear, for us, had led to misunderstanding.
Jordan shot his tequila. Richie considered it. Chris muddled a lime on the lip of his, dropped it in to sip, and kept taking in the music.
* * *
We crossed back into Juárez at sunrise to see what we had passed through the night before. We drove past the headquarters of El Diario and took in La Equis, a giant steel X painted red and visible from El Paso. The monolith is said to represent Mexico’s merging of two cultures, the indigenous and the Spanish. It was a symbol of welcome for travelers. Downtown, we walked around a bustling central square and stared up at the cupola of a cathedral.
Juárez was a city, same as any other.
The night before, we had spoken at length with Mark, a bartender, and Lindsay, the liquor rep, at the pizza parlor. El Paso and Juárez were sister cities, they explained. They blend into each other. Americans in El Paso crossed over to get cavities filled and crowns installed by Juárez dentists. American teenagers walked across the bridge for wild afternoons free from their parents’ dictates and even their country’s laws. Residents of Juárez crossed for work inside El Paso malls and for courses at the University of Texas at El Paso or to visit emigrated family. The two cities merged at their edges.
At various points throughout our journey, we had marveled at how two cultures could be physically so close yet so far away on other fronts. Less than 100 feet separate them but it might as well be 100 miles, Jordan had thought at the border crossing in Naco. But even at a remove, we can see and harbor profound truths about one another.
Stepping outside the U.S., we were struck by the lasting quality of a peculiar dream. Despite what Ivan and Noel believed about America, something still drew people north. Migrants from all over the continent make for Tijuana and elsewhere, because the United States still represents something. Less and less the promise of wealth and more so the opportunity for a modest life—though a modest life is its own form of wealth when set to the lilt of Nelson’s Spanish. This dream remains a powerful lure, a spring of optimism so enticing that people pool like leaves at places like the desayunador in the lee of the border wall just to be close to it—just to feel like they are in concert with those who made it up the road to Los Angeles, El Paso, and more distant places.
This dream is complicated, much like the people who fashioned its myth and who redefine what it means every day. At its best, it is a vision for how life can be better for all people. It’s the raw material of the American conscience. And somehow, during our time in Mexico, we saw evidence of that dream along the way. We weren’t sure whether it would prove lasting, or if it was just the afterglow of something long since passed. But we had witnessed it being refashioned and newly articulated in an industrial kitchen, the smell of bleach and lard in the air, by a man who perhaps knew it as a sueño. A man who believed in it so much he would hazard everything for it.
With a last look, we set our sights north to drive back through El Paso and on toward Santa Fe. Chris squinted up into the sun and wondered what the weather was like in Tijuana. Had the sun risen bright and clear that morning, or had the city awoken to a day shrouded in that unseasonal mist? Chris thought back to those lonely, unbroken stretches of highway the three of us had just driven across. Had the fog crept down over the hills? Had Nelson served breakfast that morning? Or was he perhaps somewhere out in that vast wash, trudging north, with only his dreams to keep him company?