ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN THE SOUTHWEST REVIEW

FAUX HAUBEAUX

We all loved being poor. My college pals and I drank Gallo’s Paisano wine, $2 per gallon jug. We drank the cheapest brand of beer, Grand Prize, though our mentor, an English instructor, made his own which we drank as if it were the tastiest mead from blessed bee honey and none of us could admit it tasted like a skunk’s bath water.

We relished our martyred indignation when we saw rich kids tooling about campus in cars their parents had bought them, when we passed the best restaurant on the square and saw them coming and going. We believed our deprivation was a sign of moral superiority. We stewed in our righteousness. We detested “fat cats,” Wall Street BigWigs, corporate tools and fools, General Motors, yachts, private golf clubs, banks and bankers, sororities and fraternities, cheerleaders and the jocks they cheered on, “fine” wines and those who cared about them, any event requiring a tuxedo and a ball gown, evangelical television preachers, “fascists” of all stripes, the Ku Klux Klan, the House Un-American Activities Committee, most all things Southern (except, of course, Delta blues), the FBI, society orchestras (Lester Lanin, Guy Lombardo), fancy food dishes with foreign names, the industrial-military complex, make-up on females and hairstyles requiring professional maintenance, all advertising, the business diploma and those who pursued it, the novels of Ayn Rand and Jacqueline Susann and their fans – and probably a thousand other items, now long since forgotten, all composing a nexus, a gestalt, about money, about chasing after it and using it to yield power over poor people such as ourselves.

We adored the quotation we attributed to Walt Whitman – “When the rich fly the flag, it means power and order, that all is under control; when the poor fly it, it means danger, anarchy.” We loved Steinbeck’s dirt-poor, hard-bit Joads from The Grapes of Wrath who had to migrate from Oklahoma to California during the Dust Bowl. We loved Woody Guthrie’s song about Tom Joad -- so far as we were concerned, anybody poor who’d been in prison was a martyr, since presumably their poverty caused their incarceration. Well, we loved all of Woody’s songs, and Pete Seeger’s as well. We loved the Wobblies, Joe Hill, and Emma Goldman, the United Mine Workers; we loved labor strikes and Gandhi’s protest movement.

We loved the haunted faces of the rural poor in the photos from the 1930s taken by Dorothea Lange and Walter Evans and others working for the hallowed Farm Security Administration, one of the many agencies of the federal government we adored, such as the National Labor Relations Board, the Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps. Though we were students in the 1960s, we worshipped the 1930s. The Great Depression might as well have been called “The Great Time in American When the Rich Finally Went So Far They Brought Down the House and That Allowed All The Common Folk to Realize What and Who They Were and Turn to Mild Forms of Communism and Socialism and/or a Strong Central Government Thanks to Our Wonderful Leader Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

As to why we children of the 1950s attending college in the 1960s should have such a passionate attachment to all things of an earlier era, my guess may not be any better than yours, though I do have one. Our parents actually had to live and suffer through that decade of joblessness, hunger, and a terrible drought. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, World War II brought prosperity to America, but also social chaos, and at the end of it, they yearned for simple, secure lives: to have a steady job, to go to school on the G.I. Bill, to own a home (“houses made of ticky-tacky, all in a row”), have a family. After what they’d been through, they loved the idea of life as they saw it depicted on the covers of “The Saturday Evening Post” by Norman Rockwell. They loved the idea of accumulating wealth; they believed that the promise of America was wealth for those who worked for it. 

We had to rebel against their easy acceptance of authority and their passion for chasing the almighty dollar. They were doltish dupes of the capitalist system whose dangers they seemed to have utterly forgotten. “Never trust anybody over thirty,” was our generation’s mantra. The only elders from the era that we respected were those who had stayed true to the ethos of brotherhood and communitarian values – when JFK established the Peace Corps, it was as if the Republican Eisenhower years with their money-hungry hordes of middle-class parvenus had been suddenly swept away to make room for a new breed of liberal. Before we hated him for Viet Nam, we admired LBJ for the War on Poverty. (We never asked why we should want to make war on poverty if we admired that condition so much. Shouldn’t we have striven to perpetuate it?)

We were attending an unimportant state college in a small Texas town, cheap by any standard when compared to college costs elsewhere. So we could snarl with disdain toward those attending costly private schools, especially in the South, though certain Ivy schools such as Harvard (from whence came Kennedy and most of his cabinet) and off-beat liberal arts schools such as Reed College known to propagate hipsterism were exempt. Some of us had part-time jobs and small scholarships to supplement our expenses.

We were Frank, John, Gayla, Alan, Howie, Carol, Nancy, Ken, Alan, and others who came and went. Some were the first from their families to attend college, but most of us were secretly from families well off enough that none of us had to work full-time while taking classes. John and I played saxes in a band led by an old retired faculty member – “’Fesser and the Aces” it was called -- and each Saturday evening for an hour we Aces backed up talent acts in the school’s main auditorium, for which we were paid $15 apiece. Our other friends waited in the Green Room for us be to paid, at which point it was off to the nearest wet precinct in Dallas – beer money for everybody. I had worked summers in the oil fields to contribute to my college upkeep and to have my own spending money, for which I was inordinately proud. I was sure that I was blue-collar working class to the core. I was a character out of Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” stories.

What we never admitted, though, was that we weren’t really poor. That everybody had to empty their change onto the table so that we could order a pizza during a party might’ve seemed a sign of poverty and an admirable collectivist response, but we never missed a meal we wanted. We never had to drop out of school the way so many of our parents’ generation did at the start of the 1930s and work to help support a family. We wore our clothes a little tattered just to make a statement. Those parents whose ethos we had so assiduously shunned were perfectly capable of sending us checks when and if we needed something. None of us ever suffered from not having the money to visit a doctor or the dentist. We were college students, and that alone should’ve been proof enough we weren’t members of the proletariat. 

How did the Depression poor get about from place to place? Why, they “rode the rails,” of course. As described on the website livinghistoryfarm.org, as unemployment swept the nation, “More than two million men and perhaps 8,000 women became hoboes” whose only means of transportation in search of work across the country was hopping freight trains illegally. “At least 6,500 hoboes were killed in one year either in accidents or by railroad ‘bulls,’ brutal guards hired by the railroads to make sure the trains carried only paying customers. Finding food was a constant problem. Hoboes often begged for food at a local farmhouse. If the farmer was generous, the hobo would mark the lane so that later hoboes would know this was a good place to beg.”

 The lore was irresistible. There were dozens of “hoppin’ a freight train” songs, it seemed, such as Jimmie Rodgers’ “Waitin’ For a Train” and “Hobo Bill’s Last Ride,” and the music of that era’s downtrodden stayed high on our playlists. I could recall from my childhood reading William Saroyan’s “The Human Comedy,” a novel about a young fellow in Fresno, California, and his family – the cover of the novel shows a boy standing in a field waving to a friendly hobo riding a freight, and that image had stuck with me.

What boy isn’t fascinated by trains? In our town, freights passed through three or four times daily, usually bringing tankers and flatcars with racks of drill pipe and other oil field equipment. We relished playing on the parked strings of gondolas and flatcars, climbing up the ladders on the sides of the boxcars and strolling along the catwalks that threaded their spines. We found fascinating junk in the bottoms of the gondolas and in the empty boxcars – scraps of metal straps, a rusty wrench, some fellow’s old boot, a broken Thermos, a corn cob pipe, hanks of wood with mysterious symbols stenciled upon them. We laid pennies on the track when the trains passed and then ran to see how the wheels had flattened them to thin copper discs. The size of the cars, of the locomotives, inspired our awe and fear, and when you stood beside them while they were running, you could feel the engines rumbling under your soles; the noise of the diesels wrapped around you, and the heat of the engines swept over your tiny form like a squall brewed of thrilling industrial gases. You knew they couldn’t leap off the tracks, so to trot alongside an engine creeping through the rail yard felt daring, like running with a herd of bison who might trample you but won’t.

Unfortunately for my generation, postwar prosperity had brought the personal auto to Americans, so the national habit of hopping freights had long since died off by the time we were old enough to move about the country on our own. If you didn’t know someone who had a car, you could hitchhike. Hitchhiking was also a hallowed practice of the poor, and as putative members of the poverty-stricken class, my pals and I hitchhiked aplenty – to stick out your thumb on a roadside was like wearing a badge that you were a bonafide member of the proletariat, and part of the social contract obligated you to pick up your brethren when you happened behind the wheel of somebody’s car. Picking up a hitchhiker proved to yourself and supposedly to the recipient that you were brothers of the road. It was like a secret handshake.

Hitchhiking was far more common then than now (2015), not only because prosperity put more people behind their own wheels but also because, ironically, the richer we became, the more fearful we grew, and what was once sympathy for the poor, the down and out, has generally shifted in the national collective consciousness to become terror of the kidnapping sadistic rapist/killer.

Late one spring, just as the school term was finishing and before I was due to return home to work in the oil fields, John Scarborough and I decided one early evening on a whim to go to McCook, Nebraska, where two of my other friends had just gone to start a summer working for one of their fathers. We had no idea how far it was (650 miles), how long it might take us, what we might need on the road. Although I had spent years as a Boy Scout and considered myself a planner – or, at least, had been one – I had thrown over all those traditional virtues in honor of spontaneity and “creativity,” which, in this case, would mean traveling without a map or a budget, provisions, clean clothes, or even a means of transportation. Go like a hobo.

We got someone to drop us on the highway leading north out of Denton, Texas, where we thumbed successive rides for several hours in what was luckily balmy weather, one with a preacher who couldn’t resist an earnest but futile effort to save our souls, another by a taciturn fellow who had his girlfriend tucked so far under his arm that it took us several minutes from our back seat posts to realize that she was there, and still another by a garrulous old (to us) woman, a retired teacher who was embarking on a long-deferred trip to see her sister in Boise and was pleased to learn that we were college students. She was making a stopover in a little town up northwest of Vernon, and, since it was growing on to midnight, she let us off at a Dairy Queen there that was about to shutter. Though the grill was cold for the day, the two teen counter girls were kind enough to sell us big dipped cones, bags of chips, sticks of jerky, and go cups of ice water.

I’ve forgotten exactly where we were, and looking at maps has only been a limited help. It may have been the town of Panhandle. A summer weeknight, small Texas town, the only “restaurant” now closed, the only traffic we encountered while trying to thumb through the town’s main center and out to the other side were car loads of cruising teens utterly indifferent to our plight and our pleas or merrily hostile to them.

After midnight we’d run out of steam. We’d trudged to the outskirts on a highway leading north, we thought, and a stretch of street common in such places – used car lots, lawn & garden and farm supply houses, trucking company yards, stand-alone cinderblock insurance offices. The night was clear and cool – we were up in the Texas High Plains, where the elevation at around 3,000 made for pleasant nights even when the summer daytime temps lifted into the 90s. Lots of stars. But no traffic. The town had fallen asleep, at last. We were at a standstill. 

But we were also apprehensive. Two strange young men without luggage standing at the side of the road seemed an open invitation to an interrogation by local cops (fascist pigs) and maybe even to get a beatdown with a rubber hose for good measure: after all, we both had collar-length hair, a sign in those times that you hailed from the alien nation of the counterculture and not, as it is now, a sign that you might be a racist, tattooed meth head. I had a wispy moustache as well, so we were obviously “beatniks”, maybe even commie pinkos; we believed we might represent a rare opportunity for a Texas country sheriff to torment us as payback for how we’d spoiled his beloved nation with our mixed-race orgies, drug binge parties, and treasonous efforts to subvert American family values by helping Negro children attend white schools and their parents to vote. City boys, city notions. 

The only planning we’d done before leaving had been to remind each other that it wouldn’t be a good idea to carry any weed, not even a roach tucked into a match box. Night or day, rain or shine, hot or cold, John wore a long ratty charcoal-colored wool overcoat with many pockets – we joked that he lived at 666 Overcoat – and though he otherwise might’ve been “holding” something in one, so far as I knew he had only a jar of peanut butter and a pack of Marlboro reds that we were rationing.

Nonetheless, we had to get off the streets. Though an old motel’s blinking sign was winking at us from down the way, we had no extra money for a room. So we walked into a used car lot and slithered to the back in the shadows and started checking the doors until we found an unlocked car. John slept in the front seat; I in the back. I say “slept,” though our body heat soon swelled the temperature inside the car and we had to open the windows, and then mosquitoes poured in and they badgered us mercilessly all night. We couldn’t shut the windows then because so many were already posted on assignment inside. 

When I’d first lain my head gratefully down on the back seat’s dusty cover, I’d had a tiny worry that we might sleep past the lot’s morning opening and be caught snoring by a sales manager or watchman, but that had been a silly, wishful supposition: we were so bedeviled by the mosquitoes that we could hardly wait for the first glimmer of dawn to pile out of the car and get back on the road.

Clambering out into a sunrise, I began to regret my easy dismissal of my previous virtues – the other fellow I had been would’ve brought along a back pack with a change of clothes, a toiletries kit, a map, some candy bars or jerky, a water bottle maybe. The other fellow I had been would probably have figured out a way to get a hot shower and a hot meal last night, topped off by a vigorous teeth-brushing, which I sorely needed and missed. I had sweat grit in my ears, hair and crotch, my eyes were stinging, my nerves jangly from missing a night’s sleep. Now the dark side of hobo life asserted itself – where hours before it meant freedom, adventure, a lack of ties and obligations, now it meant more what it must’ve meant to those real hobos back in the day: homelessness, a yearning to be someplace at least semi-permanent, somewhere you’re known, sheltered and fed. Now we felt stranded and more than a little sorry for ourselves.

We skulked quickly away from the lot and onto the street. Like my own hometown in New Mexico, this Texas version was clearly an oil patch burg, and that meant early risers and work force traffic. This boulevard leading out of town was already thick with vehicles; that might’ve given us hope, but the traffic was all commercial – trucks mostly, crew cab pickups, company cars with radio antennae – local folks going to local places or to work sites, and we felt conspicuous in our aimlessness and transience. I guessed that like my own town there was likely a local café with gum-smacking, wise-cracking waitresses jammed right now with crew bosses and their workers busy wolfing down foot-high mounds of pancakes, rafts of crisp bacon and slabs of ham, three fried eggs sunny side up please, hash browns, biscuits and cream gravy (I could even picture specks of pepper on the gravy), a sweating glass of ice-cold orange juice, a gallon of coffee. Guffaws, back-slapping, joshing, heads bent over plans for the day’s work, all taking for granted that they were here, belonged here, not even a question, being here in this little town at this time such a given that, like gravity or air, you wouldn’t even notice your hereness unless you were, like us, standing bleary-eyed on the side of the road hoping to find a way to move along, preferably north, toward McCook, Nebraska, which lay way on the far side of Kansas, still. Suddenly their citizenship in this heretofore grubby little Texas town was an enviable state.

Across the street from where we had posted ourselves, thumbs out, watching as vehicle after vehicle cruised by without any sign of stopping, a small rail yard had churned into life. Closest to the street, a string of empty box cars stood on a siding. Beyond them a locomotive trundled to and fro assembling a string, and it looked to us as if those box cars would be hitched up and pulled off, heading north, maybe. The locomotive slowly nosed a car onto the string, poked it, and the knuckles in all the cars popped one by one down the line like banging dominoes tumbling in sequence. Now and then a railroad employee in jeans and a yellow hard hat holding a clipboard appeared in and out of sight as he stepped over the couplings between the rail cars. In a lull between passing trucks we watched the work in the yard until I started to hear banjo music and the nasal twang of some Appalachian hillbilly in my head.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

“You wanna?”

“Why not?”

But we didn’t budge for a bit. Though the romance of the rails was calling me, I had read Woody’s memoir/novel Bound For Glory and had heard all the stories about vicious truncheon-wielding railroad dicks who beat hobos senseless and sometimes to death back in the old days. Aside from the fellow with the clipboard, we did note other workers strolling alongside the cars as the locomotive slowly chugged up and down the sidings. Now that it was broad daylight, we’d be at great risk of being seen as we hopped into one of those open boxcars. We might be bludgeoned at the worst or arrested at the least or both. It looked as if a train was being assembled to go somewhere, but – our other problem aside from our trepidation – we had no idea where. The tracks out of town seemed to point north, but the train could eventually head South instead.

We crossed the street, vaulted a short iron fence, then encountered sets of empty tracks between the road and the string of open cars. There was no point in trying to hide; we were walking in the open, and our posture here was that we were just passing through to elsewhere. If we were stopped, that’s what we’d say.

We hobble-footed over three or four sets of tracks – not smooth going – and came up beside the empty cars. We guessed they’d be hitched up next; we strolled oh-so-nonchalantly beside one, slowing as we neared the opened sliding doors, thinking that as soon as no one was looking, we’d hoist ourselves up and scramble in (did we never imagine that somebody might come along and shut the doors and lock us inside?)

We stood by the door for a few seconds. When the street fell momentarily empty and no bulls with truncheons were watching, I jumped up and planted my elbows inside the head-high doorway, wriggled up and in, then gave John a hand up. Inside the empty car, we were giddy with relief and hopped up on hopping the train, electrified by a thrill of the intentional misdemeanor, kids shoplifting on a dare.

We hunkered in shadows at the front end of the car. The track curved just enough so that we could see the several cars hitched up behind us. Then the fellow in the yellow hard hat came around the end of the string. His lips were moving as he poked the air while he walked and inspected the flanks of the cars, apparently counting or committing something to memory. He halted momentarily and leaned up and gave a little hop on tiptoe to stick his head in the door of a car, then he eased back to his feet and moved on toward us. I heard someone at a distance yell, and he stopped and yelled something back. 

We were sunk. Possibly he might simply stroll by our open door and not give the interior that cursory glance, or possibly even if he did we were coiling ourselves into human cannonballs in the dark corner on the near side of the door – we’d be harder to spot than in the corner diagonal to his perspective. I broke into a sweat. I didn’t mind so much that we might be kicked off the train; I didn’t really think we’d be beaten by railroad thugs for this, but it was easy to imagine being detained for trespassing and questioned. We could easily become suspects in last night’s burglary or tire slashing.

We held our breaths as the worker strolled up to the door. Then, to my horror, he did hoist himself up to inspect the interior. His head turned our way. We froze, even willed our blood to stop flowing. Next thing he’d flicked on a big flashlight I didn’t know he’d had and the cold light of it doused our heads and shoulders.

“Hey!” he yelled at us.

Trembling, I looked up into the beam. “Yes, sir?”

Then he said – and I do recall this still with utter fidelity – “Y’all boys stay away from the door, ya hear?”

When he walked off, we unwound ourselves, stood and paced about inside away from the doors, whispering about our luck. We almost lit a celebratory cigarette but were afraid to push that luck: the next worker might not be so generous, and, really, we didn’t know if he’d meant keep back to be safe or to avoid detection.

Five minutes later the engine snatched up the slack in the string with a jerk that flung us to the floor. We were underway, and we both let out a breath we seemed to have held an hour. We lurked in the shadows until the train had rolled beyond the town limits and had parted company with the highway. Now it was trudging slowly through pastures and wheat fields and huge vistas barren but for distant jackknife rigs and clotted speckles of cattle gathering at a windmill’s far-off pond; the countryside gently rolled and gradually led away from cultivated sections that showed the hand of contemporary humans and deeper onto the great grassy plains, the old domain of the buffalo and the wandering Comanche whose winter quarters in Palo Duro Canyon lay only a day’s horseback ride to the south.

To our pleasure, this stayed a very slow train. We sat in the open doorway with our legs dangling. We smoked that celebratory cigarette. Every second or so that iconic clack of iron wheels crossing a rail joint marked the time like a loud lazy metronome and poked the undersides of our legs. The sun was full up now, the air was adazzle with its light, and railside grasses ticked and teemed electric with leaping grasshoppers, gnat swarms, coveys of quail bursting up from the scrub as if from a cannon as the train rolled up on them. On the cedar posts of barbed wire fences running along the tracks perched scissortails and crows, while in the top branches of lightpole crosstrees, hawks and buzzards watched us glide amiably by. Now and then the train eased through a copse of tall mesquite, and cool night air hoarded in the green bowers wafted against our welcoming faces. We got now-and-then whiffs of sulfur from gas wells vented in the distance.

I remembered then another time on a train. It might’ve been the only other time I’d been a passenger, though of course that will sound strange to anyone from the nation’s east coast or from almost anywhere else in the globe where trains are such a common way to get about. In my West, in my time, passenger service had altogether died except for a few routes of transcontinental service through a few big cities. My small town had an airport served by Continental Airlines but no passenger rail service.

When I was five, my mother and I took a night train from Nashville to Pensacola to see my grandmother. Our Pullman car reminded me of a long narrow room with windows on two walls and rows of bunk beds arranged end to end, with curtains dropped from the ceiling to the floor for privacy. I had an upper berth, and once we were underway, I discovered that one wall of my little room was a shade that I could roll up. Now I had a bunk bed with a window onto the world, and I lay for hours on my side watching as the towns slid by my gaze. It was like dream-flying, the way my window was a huge eye cruising over the darkened land and sailing past a red-lamped, dinging crossing gate where a lone truck waited with headlights fuzzing in the mist, past outskirts where houses were dim but for lights in their bathrooms and on their stoops, past strings of red-bricked, sleepy-eyed stores, and once past a juke joint in whose rocky parking lot a man and a woman stood kissing in the V of an opened driver's door. I recalled the black porters spiffy in their uniforms as they made ready the berths for sleeping. I remembered how I walked the aisle agog to see full-grown people, absolute strangers, strolling about in bathrobes. A bearded man in his pajamas yawned and scratched his belly button while standing in the aisle, then he climbed through the curtain draped over the mouth of his berth, and a moment later, his hands came back out and he set his shoes on the floor outside; a woman came out of the toilet with Pond's cold cream shining on her cheeks and forehead, her hair in a net, wearing a chenille bathrobe, and a porter set a little ladder beside her berth so she could climb up into it.

Now our trundling old Texas freight moved up to an aging trestle across what I think must’ve been the Canadian River or a branch of it. Maybe to avoid breaking the old thing’s skinny shanks, the train shut down to a gingerly creep one foot at a time across the reach of the deep arroyo. Fine by us. Late spring rains had kept the Indian Paint, gaillardias, and something blue (not bluebonnets there, I think) blooming; braces of hardy small sunflowers and purple-headed thistles swayed rife along the sloping ruddy banks leading down not to a stream but to a broad span of rippled sand where veins of rawhide-colored water lay in rivulets. In the far distance a clutch of pronghorn antelope stood to their hocks in the sand drinking from the puddles. At that moment, hoboing it leisurely across the Texas Panhandle, I felt a pang of sorrow to have been born too late (or in the wrong place if not the wrong time). We’d lost train travel, and more was the pity – sitting in the open door of this box car, feeling the sun on my face and the cooling breeze through my hair as the countryside slid under my soles and across my gaze, I was sure I’d never have this experience again in my life. Crossing that arroyo on the rickety trestle at a pace we could easily match at a walk, I blinked like a shutter snapping a mental postcard and told myself to remember exactly this moment. 

We reached the outskirts of the next town – a bigger one than Panhandle and probably Borger. There we lost our nerve. The uncertainty of our train’s destination and the returning anxiety of being caught, as well as the triumphant feeling of having captured this adventure, moved us to dismount as the car was slowly arriving into a depot, leaping down, stumbling a bit, then pulling ourselves upright and, still trotting, we made for the nearby street. 

It was obviously the end of our ad hoc carny ride.

Though I made many train trips in Europe and Great Britain later, the one I stole from the Burlington-Northern-Santa-Fe line that summer stays lodged in memory despite the decades. But what made me recall it now and provoke me to record it here – and pinch myself hard for the pretense of poverty – has been the sobering pictures of thousands upon thousands (from 50-90,000) of children, many of them unaccompanied by parents or adults, coming to our southern borders from Mexico and Central America aboard the train they nicknamed la bestia – the beast. 

The children and adults who have come from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador have to wedge themselves into the crowd huddling on the catwalks or between the cars or hanging from the ladders, and they don’t do this to find the thrill of an exotic adventure. They crawl about on and cling to those cars for days on end more than a thousand miles up through southern Mexico and across the dangerous and often-fatal great Chihuahuan Desert that stretches for several hundred miles into the United States; they’re often bullied and molested by members of roving pandillas and narcotraficantes, often “taxed” at check points by gangs, extorted by the coyotes they have paid supposedly to guide them up to and across the border, often into the arms of the U.S. Border Patrol. 

They are coming despite all the dangers and hardship because they are poor. Very poor. Not play poor. They want to do well to help their families and to be with, rejoin, members of their families who are already here, and this train with its malevolent nickname is the way. You fall asleep and tumble off it, you might die under the wheels. You might go without water while the train traverses barren land baking under a merciless sun for hours on end without any shade atop the beast. You might strap yourself to the catwalk or a ladder so if you doze you won’t roll off.

A video clip on the evening news: a clearing near a mesquite thicket on our side of the border where a group of women and children have been caught (they weren’t running, they were most likely hoping to be apprehended) by the Border Patrol. For the sake of the TV reporter, an officer is interviewing a 7-year-old snaggle-toothed girl who has braved this trip with a few possessions in a kitchen trash bag.

“Are your mother and father here?” he asks the girl in Spanish.

No. She is travelling alone.

“Where is your mother?”

She hunkers down and paws through the items in the trash bag, eager to produce something for the agent, but she grows increasingly alarmed as she can’t seem to locate what she’s looking for, obviously something that would answer the agent’s question. The camera closes on her panicky face. Her chin quivers. But then relief washes over her features like welcomed palms full of warm water. Having suddenly remembered, this little hoboette reaches into the hip pocket of her jeans, draws out a slip of paper and passes it to the agent with a sheepish grin.

He reads it and turns to the reporter. “North Carolina,” he says, and hands the paper back to the girl.