Crossing at Nogales
“South of the wire the highway opens up and the desert does that thing where it pretends to be empty.”
The line at the border starts before dawn. I got there at 5:30 and there were already forty vehicles ahead of me, most of them semis carrying produce north. I was the only one going south with a surfboard rack.
The agent asked me three questions: where was I going, how long was I staying, did I have anything to declare. I said south, indefinitely, nothing that concerns you. He stamped my passport without looking up.
South of the wire the highway opens up and the desert does that thing where it pretends to be empty. It isn't. There are saguaros thirty feet tall that have been standing since before your grandparents were born. There are hawks. There is a quality of light that makes everything look like it was painted by someone who understood that stillness is not the absence of movement.
I stopped at a roadside stand outside Magdalena and ate something that might have been a gordita and might have been a quesadilla and was definitely the best thing I'd eaten in weeks. The woman running the stand asked where I was from. I told her I wasn't sure anymore. She laughed and refilled my agua fresca.
Day one. The road goes south.