Looking for trouble in all the wrong places: Car camping in the combat zone

By M. John Fayhee

There were two main reasons that I moved back to Southwest New Mexico after 24 years in Colorado: the climate and the fact that, a few miles north of the town in which I live is located the massive, astounding, wild and unpeopled Gila National Forest, home to almost a million acres of legally designated wilderness, and home also to the first legally designated wilderness area in the world.

But a funny thing has happened in the year-and-a-half I have been back in Gila Country: More and more, as I stand atop the little knobs that pass for peaks close to Silver City, I find myself looking at least as much toward the southernmost part of the state, known, but not really known, to locals as the Bootheel, the geo-cultural sphere of influence of which extends from the Land of Enchantment a few miles into Arizona. This is some seriously lonesome country I’m talking about here. There is not one town — not so much as a cluster of houses — below the east-west axis that marks the northern border of the Bootheel, though Rodeo comes close, as do the blink-and-you-miss-them hamlets of Animas and Hatchita.

All told, I’d be surprised if more than a few hundred people call this Delaware-sized part of the country home. (Delaware has almost a million people.) Even though I consider lonesomeness to be a perfectly valid reason in and of itself to visit any place, there are two other things to note about the Bootheel region: 1) This is some U.S. Grade-A stunningly beauteous terrain and 2) A serious percentage of that beauteous terrain is located on public land that is open and available to Joe Blow the Ragman and his pack, bike and cooler full of beer.

“Who wants to go hiking in a place that bears signs warning visitors of the potential for violence?”

And yet no one comes down here to recreate, to hike, to bike, to bird. Part of the reason that so few folks venture forth into the Rub’ al Khali of the Bootheel is that much of the public land thereabouts is owned and operated by the Bureau of Land Management rather than either the U.S. Forest Service or the National Park Service. The BLM, though part of the same uber agency — the Department of the Interior — as the Park Service, is not exactly in the business of providing recreational experiences for America’s hiking and biking masses. Their mission has always been to apply a big ol’ dollop of Vaseline to their own posterior regions and bend over for the nation’s extractive industries, which, in this neck of the woods, consist almost entirely of ranchers, with a culturally captivating side order of mining, timber and gas-and-oil interests. When you pull out your handy-dandy Rand McNally Road Atlas, you will rarely notice any BLM lands adorning the maps therein presented. You will see plenty of green swaths on National Forest and Park lands, but the only BLM land you will see on those atlas pages take the form of occasional stand-alone wilderness areas off by themselves and looking for all the world out of geographic context.

Yet the BLM administers 261 millions acres of public land, compared to the Forest Service’s 193 million acres. Those stunning figures aside, you will rarely if ever find BLM maps in gear shops — and this is not because they do not exist. They do, and, in most cases, those maps are better than their Forest and Park Service counterparts.

So, when I stand atop Gomez Peak or Boston Hill and eyeball the vast expanses of the Bootheel country, I conclude that it is little visited at least partially because people don’t realize how much of it is public land and, even if they did, it’s hard to get enough information about the area to plan a backcountry-based trip.

But there is more to it than that. A lot more. And that “lot” is centered not just on the loneliness of the Bootheel area. Down there, of course, lies “the border” — ground zero for the much-ballyhooed immigration war that has bled its way from the lonely lands of the Southwest to the presidential podium. Down there is where the moving vans first get filled with documentation-challenged folks looking for a better life in El Norte. Down there is where 500 people a year die trying to walk through the desert in search of a better life. Down there is where there are so many attempted incursions into the U.S. by drug-runners that public roads are now being gated and locked down. Down there is where environmental regulations are suspended in the name of national security. And down there is where more than 6,000 armed agents of the U.S. government, including hundreds of totally armed National Guard members adorned in full camo-combat regalia, drive Humvees, fly helicopters and man portable radar stations in hopes of catching those making their furtive way up the arroyos and through the rugged mountain ranges that bear names that even those of us interested in mountain ranges have never heard of.

Who wants to go hiking in a place that bears highway signs warning visitors of the potential for violence? Who wants to risk being stopped by suspicious Border Patrol agents who not only don’t want you there, but can’t understand why you’d be there in the first place? Who wants to go to a place where the vibe is scary in an Old-West kinda way, a way that’s defined the outside perception of this part of the country since well before Geronimo and Cochise were wandering around, manifesting their own variations on the Homeland Security theme?

Well, me. So, a couple weeks ago, I packed up my old LandCruiser and headed down for a week of car camping in the combat zone.

 

If there is one part of this terra incognito that outsiders have maybe heard of, it’s Arizona’s Chiricahua Mountains, which are almost always accessed via the spectacular village of Portal from Rodeo, New Mexico.

The Chiricahuas, which reach an elevation of just under 10,000 feet, are among the most biologically diverse mountain ranges in the country. According to the Forest Service, more than 300 species of birds either call this area home or pass through on their way to better paying gigs farther north. As well, there are 1,400 species of plants and 500-plus species of vertebrates, including coatimundis, black bears and numerous endemic varieties of your favorite creature and mine: the rattlesnake.

What is most captivating on the faunal front down here is that this is ground zero for Africanized bees. I really wish there wasn’t such a thing as killer bees. The farm upon which I was karmically sentenced to grow up sported many cultivated beehives. Except when he was actually removing the honeycombs, my stepfather could tend to those hives dressed in shorts and a T-shirt without worry of getting stung. The bees knew him and loved him. Yours truly however could be innocently walking 100 yards in the opposite direction and those little motherfuckers would seek me out and happily give their lives up for the opportunity to sting me, preferably on the face, neck and, yes, lips. It is accurate to say that I do not like, and I never will like, bees, or for that matter, any sort of stinging, flying insect. And here we have a particularly captivating variety of bee. These little cocksuckers not only have an inclination to swarm and sting anyone trespassing close to their hive, but they have the ability to sting multiple times. I know a lady in Silver City who was Gila Country’s first confirmed killer bee victim. She sustained 28 stings before reaching the safety of her parents’ home and described the experience to me as less than pleasant.

Whenever I hear scientists say something like, “don’t worry, when we visit Mars, we’ll make certain that we don’t allow any extraterrestrial pathogens to make their way back to earth ... trust us,” I’ve got just two words: Africanized bees. These buggers did not naturally evolve; they were genetically spliced together by, you guessed it, scientists (trust us!) down in Brazil and, in 1957, as a poster child for chaos theory, an employee accidentally let them out. (I sure hope he was given a firm reprimand.) They’ve been buzzing their way north ever since. The Forest Service propaganda warns visitors to avoid these bees, if possible (damn! glad they mentioned that!) and, by way of a defense strategy, to “watch and listen for concentrations of bee activity.” If you are attacked by a swarm of killer bees, the Forest Service recommends that most-tried-and-true of survival strategies: Run away! I can’t believe that some enterprising outdoor industry entrepreneurs have not yet developed and marketed Killer Bees Be Gone! or some such product.

There are few places in the West like Cave Creek, on the western side of the Chiricahuas. In addition to 1,000-foot-high rock formations that in and of themselves would merit a visit to these parts, this is a perennial creek, a rarity hereabouts. The flood plain boasts dense concentrations of a wide variety of trees, the most noteworthy species of which is the Arizona sycamore, the craziest-looking large tree imaginable. (For you fans of Star Trek: TNG, Arizona sycamores resemble rooted versions the crystalline entity.)

Even though it was early enough in the year that most of the trees were still leafless, temperatures hovered in the 60s and the myriad avian species that dwell here were out and about en masse. This is a place that attracts birders from all over the world. I still don’t know a goddamned chicken from a penguin on the bird-identification front, but I certainly do appreciate sitting there next to a babbling creek, smoking a cigar, soaking in the comfortable mid-March rays and watching colorful birds of indeterminate species going about their avian business.

In the Cave Creek area, you can only camp at designated sites. I landed a fairly secluded spot in Sunny Flat, where, this early in the season, there were few other campers. Though I’ve not been here in the summer, it’s my guess that, when temperatures rise into the mid-200s in Tucson, Cave Creek gets more visitation than any other part of the Bootheel area.

The night was peaceful and quiet and the stars on this new-moon night were so bright that it was hard to make out the major constellations. On the surface, it would seem that the best star-viewing would take place at altitude, and, indeed, up in the High Country, you can damned sure eyeball plenty of heavily objects (just remember to bring your coat) (even in July). But for reasons I assume center around a combination of a lack of localized ambient light and a lack of humidity, in my opinion, the best star-viewing takes place down in desert country. I have been kept awake at night because the stars were too bright. This is a place where it’s easy to envision Native Americans dropping peyote, looking up for long periods of time and actually seeing celestial scorpions and bears and dogs.

All was seemingly perfect, yet I still slept with one eye open. Even when you operate under the assumption that most law enforcement is generally inept, it’s hard to overlook the fact that, driving into the Cave Creek area, there was a sign designed to scare visitors away. It read: “Travel caution. Smuggling and illegal immigration may be encountered in this area.” (If they truly wanted to discourage visitation, they should have added a few lines at the bottom about killer bees.) Even with the usual government bullshit factor overlaid, that’s a hard notice to ignore, at least partially because, well, those few syllables bear the seeds of veracity. The night before I arrived at Cave Creek, 30 people were apprehended trying to enter the country illegally just a few miles south of Rodeo. Over in Tucson, a Border Patrol agent is on trial for shooting an alleged illegal in the back. (He claims self-defense.) Local ranchers estimate that thousands of people cross the border every year into Cochise County, Arizona, and Hidalgo County, New Mexico, and there is no arguing that violence and property crime are common and escalating. If a tenth of what you hear about life in these parts is even half-true, then the “Road Warrior” analogy recently used in a High Country News article is not too big a stretch.

At the same time, as many of my ne’er-do-well chums back in Silver City are quick to observe, the borderlands are essentially the private domain of the Homeland Security Department and that is not a department inclined toward wanting a whole lot of civilians wandering around unsupervised in the backcountry. After all, night-vision goggles and infrared radar can’t tell if you’re an illegal crossing into the land of plenty or a well-fed child of the land of plenty out in the woods for a little R&R.

By now, some of you are likely wondering what is possessing me to pen a story that amounts to a destination piece. That is the reason: I do not want this area to become (any more than it already is) a private hunting ground for Border Patrol, a law-enforcement entity that, where I live, is not exactly held in universal high regard, even by those who fundamentally agree with the notion of controlling immigration. My Hispanic chums look at Border Patrol officers, most of whom come from other parts of the country and therefore have no sensitivity toward the local culture, as an occupying military force that treats everyone with brown skin, and most everyone with white skin, with suspicion. And those of us for whom the Fourth Amendment still means something in these dark days of Bush and Cheney, bristle at the thought of these crosses between Barney Fife and Sandinista soldiers circa 1983 being able to stop us at will for nothing approximating probable cause. There are road blocks and traffic stops all the time all over the place here, and, even if you argue that, well, if you’re going to have Border Patrol, it’s presence is certainly going to be stronger near the, you know, border, it still chaffs my hide to be pulled over for no other reason that I am the lone car driving down a lonesome stretch of highway by some punk-assed pimply-faced kid from Florida who has received less training than most small-town cops wearing an ill-fitting uniform asking me what my business is and where I’m coming from and going. (These encounters never go smoothly for me, as I’m always inclined to invoke variations on the none-of-your-fucking-business-asshole theme.)

Nothing happened that night. And nothing happened the next day, which I spent hiking very much by myself up into the heart of the 100,000-acre Chiricahua Wilderness Area. You’d have to by one seriously tough and motivated smuggler or aspiring emigrant to make your way though the Chiricahuas, as this is a mountain range as rugged and strong as any you will ever see, and, you break your ankle here, and you might not be found for some number of months, and the person finding you might be named Ernesto from Tabasco and he may or may not feel inclined to help someone whose tax dollars go to pay for the high-tech operations of la migra.

As it was, the only Border Patrol agent I saw near Cave Creek was parked alongside the road, napping in his car. I felt like walking over and rapping on his window and yelling some righteously indignant verbiage about how there’s too much trouble around here for Border Patrol agents to be caught napping. Where are the Minutemen when you need them?

After spending another embarrassingly uneventful night in a Forest Service campground along the tranquil babbling of Cave Creek, I packed up and moved deeper into the combat zone, to a long dirt road named after the area’s most-infamous resident, a man who had the singular distinction of being an illegal alien simultaneously in two countries, while never having left his lifelong home.

 

There is no direct way to drive from the Chiricahuas back over into the Bootheel. The reason is that there’s one of those aforementioned mountain ranges you have never heard of, in this case, the Peloncillos, which form one of the longest ranges in the Southwest, spanning more than 100 miles from the border up north of Interstate 10. Along the crest of the Peloncillos can be found the Gray Peak Wilderness Study Area, the Central Peloncillo Mountains WSA, the Central Peloncillo Mountains Area of Critical Environmental Concern and the Antelope Pass Research Natural Area (and, in the immediate area, also are found the Cowboy Spring WSA, the Big Hatchet Mountains WSA, the Cedar Mountains WSA, the Granite Gap Area of Critical Environmental Concern and the southernmost several hundred miles of the Continental Divide Trail). All told, there are hundreds of thousands of acres of public land around here, and, at the moment I am making my way toward the village of Animas, I would bet the farm that there is not one single other person out there recreating, unless you consider sneaking your wary way up some arroyo to be recreation.

I eat a quick breakfast in Animas, where I make the acquaintance of a life-long local cowboy. When he sees me pull my BLM map out, he comes over to my table. There is nothing that lends itself so well to initiating conversation among small-town locals as unfolding a map onto a restaurant table or a bar. The man gives me not only a geophysical tour of the area, but also a cultural tour. He shows me on the map where his wife grew up. He shows me where his grazing allotments are, and which roads are open. I can tell he wants to ask me what I’m doing in a greasy spoon in Animas eyeballing a BLM map. I help him out.

“So, you know of any good camping spots near the Geronimo Trail up in the Coronado National Forest?”

“You’re going to camp up there?”

“Sure am.”

“ By yourself?”

“I prefer camping by myself. Less arguments.”

“Well … you know it can be a little dangerous around here, right?”

Despite the fact that I don’t always agree with them politically, I love talking with cowboys. I do not often subscribe to the Edward Abbey-an philosophy that those who speak the least most often say the most. Generally, I prefer the company of fellow gabbers. But I am amused by understatement. I am hyperbolic by nature and so are most of the folks I hang out with. Most people I know would go on and on for an hour reciting every single instance where that dangerousness was made manifest, clear back to the time when Geronimo was being chased through these hills by the cavalry. But cowboys, no, they will distill gun-battles and major drug interventions and Border Patrol helicopters flying overhead like it’s goddamned Baghdad to “a little dangerous.”

“I have been told by some people that occasionally there’s some excitement,” I said. (Always best to meet understatement head-on on its own terms. If you mix understatement with hyperbole, well, you’re asking for miscommunication.)

“There can be occasional unpleasantness and anxiety that is known to make its way up to where you’re thinking of camping.”

“Well, thanks for the advice. I’ll be vigilant,” I responded. He nodded, knowing that everything that needed to be said was indeed said, except that, a few miles up the road, I realized he had not answered the question I originally asked.

Forty miles south of Animas, just west of the towering Animas Mountain Range, almost all of which is contained within the boundaries of the famed Gray Ranch, now known as the Diamond A, one of the largest private land holdings in the country, the Geronimo Trail branches off and heads very circuitously through the Peloncillos toward Geronimo Pass and, eventually, to the wild border city of Douglas, Arizona. I had been told there is a hiking trail near the pass, so I drove slowly looking for evidence, like, you know, a sign. But the only signage again takes the form of those travel warnings. I make it all the way to the western boundary of the Coronado National Forest, turn around and drive slowly back. No trail that I can see. Still, I pull over often to ogle at the vistas, which offer up views of mountains so remote and rugged that my sphincter puckers. There are cliff faces, rock formations, drainages and pine-covered mountainsides in every direction. And I have only passed one other car: A Border Patrol vehicle driven by a young man so surprised to see someone else on the road that he almost goes off a cliff. Not that I wish bad on anyone, even someone wearing a uniform and carrying a badge, but, man, some sort of incident would be very welcome. Before I left Silver City to drive down here, I overheard my buddy Cameron telling someone that I was going to go out of my way to try to and stir up some sort of confrontation with the Border Patrol, which is the main reason that Cameron opted to not join me, as he is one of the few people I know who has a greater aversion to so-called authority figures than do I. And it was good that he recognized that his addition to an already potentially volatile psychic situation would do neither of us any good, as Cameron rarely travels outside his yard without carrying with him several extremely impressive handguns.

Just off the Geronimo Trail, I spy a nice car-camping spot and, even though it is only 1, I decide to lay claim to it. By dispersed car-camping standards, this place is not too bad. There’s a well-constructed fire ring that is home to only a small quantity of detritus. There’s a flat spot where I can sleep, and there’s a nice patch of sun where I can sit, smoke and read the afternoon away. And there’s a good view of the road, which, at this point, follows Clanton Gulch, which I assume is named after the same Clantons who earned infamy for their part in the OK Corral gunfight that took place in 1881 over in Tombstone.

After about three hours of reading Derrick Jensen’s “Language Older Than Words” (wrong book for sure given the immediate geo-cultural circumstances), I started to relax into my immediate surroundings. My mind ventured of its own volition away from the border and the combat zone and I started hearing melodic vocalizations sung by birds I did not know and I noticed an astounding rock spire across the valley. And, as soon as I realized that I was finally chilling out, a distant roar that was getting closer and closer and louder and louder caught my attention. At first I thought that maybe it was a poorly mufflered car driving down the Geronimo Trail. But, no, it was a pair of military jets, and for 15 minutes, they used my camp as an epicenter for an aerial tour of the Peloncillos. It doesn’t matter where you go, the long arm of empire will always find you and pay you a visit, just to let you know the score. I know there are plenty of people out there who would find such military overflights inoffensive, or a necessary evil, and I know there are plenty of people who would even find them comforting in a national-security kind of way. All I know was that there were two assholes up there wrecking my calm, and I didn’t give a rat’s ass about American military might or for that matter America or for that matter any other member in good stead of the nation state club. I know this is the sort of statement that can have serious repercussions, but I don’t have a patriotic corpuscle in my body, and it’s not just a matter of the U.S. It wouldn’t matter one bit to me if I were Finnish or Australian or Kiribatian. The whole notion of the drumbeat of nationhood makes me want to yak. I see the concept of countries as having caused at least as much harm as good because in almost all instances they exist for no reason save the preservation of the economic interests of a ruling class that in most instances needs to be lined up against a wall and forced to read “Nicholas and Alexandra” over and over.

 

Shortly after the jets left (they came back once more an hour later for an encore performance that had me wishing I had taken up my buddy Cameron’s offer to lend me one of his firearms), two cars drove by at a rate of speed that shall we say was not merited by the conditions of the Geronimo Trail. Though I had no better luck identifying their species than I did identifying the birds whose sweet vocalizations I heard before the jet onslaught, they were definitely of the Buick La Sabre-variety. And, when they crossed Clanton Gulch, which held water, they both bottomed out hard, but the drivers did not even ponder slowing down. I do not think those inappropriate automobiles were piloted by people whose mission was completely perfectly legal. What you hear out of border country is that smugglers of both people and illicit substances often steal cars to move their inventory. That way, when you beat your ride all to shit, you care not one whit, because, well, it’s not your car and, when your mission is done one way or the other, you’re going to abandon it anyhow. (Man, that must be fun.) My mind unavoidably wandered back to a conversation I had had a few days prior, wherein a chum told me that there were plenty of people down in the twilight zone of the border country who would happily dispatch me for my LandCruiser and its contents. And I’m thinking just how desperate things must truly be if someone would hork a rusted-out hulk of an ancient Cruiser incapable under any circumstances of exceeding about 50 mph that contained some of the grungiest, dirtiest, dustiest, oldest, stinkiest, crustiest camping gear this side of a Darfur refugee camp. But, since no one ended up killing me or stealing my gear, there must be some standards among the shadow residents of border country.

Just before dinner, I decided to stretch my legs, so I strolled up the road, hoping against hope that no more speeding LaSabres were on the horizon. Fifty yards from my camp, I noticed boot prints heading into the woods. My heart raced! Oh boy, thought I, a genuine illegal immigrant route! Maybe I would soon have the opportunity to make a moral decision that was more practical than theoretical! (Truth be told, I have actually helped transport illegal immigrants northward on two occasions, so I guess I’ve made that moral decision already. Both times, they were not illegal immigrants I was helping, but, rather, human beings in need of assistance, and I make a point of lending a helping hand to those in distress; no questions of goddamned nationality need be asked under such circumstances.)

I followed those tracks and, maybe 100 feet in, there was of all surprising things an official Forest Service trail sign. There was no indication out on the road that there was a trail hereabouts, and, a week after returning home, I asked a Forest Service friend why that likely was. She said, probably, Border Patrol removed any roadside evidence because they don’t want the greater world to know that, right there, is a nice, fairly well maintained trail just open for outdoor recreational use by anyone, including, but not limited to, backpackers, dayhikers, birders, illegal immigrants and drug runners. My FS friend told me she had heard there had been some internal governmental dialogue regarding pulling from the market all the BLM and Forest Service maps available for the border region, lest the wrong people get their hands on them. People, I guess, like me.

Next morning, at the crack of about 10:30, I donned my day pack and started hiking. Though hot, it was beautiful. In little more than a mile, I came across a signed intersection where three trails came together. I followed the one less traveled and, in another mile, came across yet another signed intersection. I pulled my subversive maps out and could find no evidence of the existence of this apparently extensive trail system. But I could find the actual geophysical features described on the trail signs, and, by simple extrapolation, I determined that there must be dozens of miles of system trails back here in the heart of the Peloncillos. What a find!

After eating a quick lunch in the shade next to a nice pool, I started back, when, suddenly, a heart-stopping thought dropped into my cranial mainframe like a laser-guided missile, and this is something I ought to have thought about before, and, quite frankly, I am stunned I didn’t. For some time now, I’ve been following the efforts to establish critical habitat for the endangered jaguar, and, despite the fact that I’ve penned a half-dozen or so stories on that subject, it astonishingly enough did not dawn on me until that exact moment, by myself on a trail few people know about two hiking hours from the only road for 50 miles, which is apparently used mainly by drug-runners with questionable taste in transportation, that the very place I was now standing was the exact freakin’ center of where the only known population of jaguars in the U.S. lives! I recollected as I sheepishly made my way back to camp how quaint it was that, only a few nights before, I was worried about dangers as relatively benign as killer bees.

I have encountered a very large male mountain lion in the wild. Captivating as that was on several neural-pathway and digestive-system levels, jaguars can get literally twice as big as mountain lions. According to researchers I have interviewed, there are likely only 4-6 jaguars on American soil, but, when push comes to shove, all you need is one.

And, I got to thinking how the anti-immigration people and the environmentalists pushing for protected jaguar land could work together, except for the fact that they hate each other so much. All that the pro-jaguar people would have to do is argue that, by reintroducing a couple hundred of the world’s third-largest feline species into the border country, you’d damned sure see a significant drop-off in illegal crossings and, voila!, you’d have the dweebs at Homeland Security scurrying to procure not only jaguars, but lions, tigers and bears as well. We could turn this entire area into the country’s largest large-carnivore sanctuary, all in the name of national security!

Just a thought.

I changed into slightly less disgusting clothes and drove as far south as I would go on this journey, down to the southernmost reaches of the Peloncillos, down to the old Cloverdale town site, which is maybe five miles from the border. There used to be a school, a store and several hundred residents living here, but, now, all that remains of a once-vibrant agricultural town is a boarded-up adobe schoolhouse and a few scattered ranch houses. This is literally the end of the road, borderland style. It’s 42 miles to Animas on the only road in and out.

I set up camp in the shade of an astounding oak grove (not many people realize how wonderful the oaks are in this part of the world) that afforded views of the massive, pine-covered Sierra San Luis, most of which lies in Chihuahua, and the Guadalupe Mountains, which form the northern part of the Guadalupe Canyon Wilderness Study Area, one of the least-accessible WSAs in the country. In this part of the Coronado National Forest, whatever trails might exist are definitely not part of any official system, and the only signage takes the form of a very unique oral tradition: the songlines of illegal entry.

I had been told that, all you have to do to find yourself on the receiving end of Border Patrol attention down here is to build a fire. So I proceeded to build perhaps the largest campfire I have ever built, just to see what would happen. But if anyone saw my flames, they did not act. The evening was as quiet and lovely and star-filled as a night can be. Coyotes howled. And two of the biggest owls I have ever seen — I have no idea what kind they were — flew by, roadkill entrails hanging from their beaks. And, in the deepest recesses of my psyche, several jaguars sat atop the closest hill and made their carnivorous mental calculations as I sat alone next to the red heat of the fire, smoking a fine Dominican cigar. I fully expected to sleep fitfully in my tent that cost more than most annual incomes down in Mexico. But, even though I could almost hit the border with a rock, I dozed off fast and slept soundly, a joyful rarity in my insomniac life.

Next morning, I left early, a plume of dust following me as I made my way home. On the way out, I passed going the other direction two Border Patrol SUVs one right after the other. They both slowed and scrutinized me in leaning-forward, squinty-eyed fashion. They may have turned around and followed me, but my dust wake was so thick, I could not tell. By the time I reached blacktop, the only thing in my rearview mirror was lonely expanse of the Bootheel dissipating into a distance populated by people who would give their left nut to be riding shotgun in my old beater piece-of-shit LandCruiser. I wouldn’t have minded the company one bit.

MG