As I stood in my back yard last night a single bird crossed high above me to roost in a tree a few yards over. The flap of its wings cut through the silence and I was struck at the vast stillness of the evening.

My moment of awe was short-lived, however, as I realized with a snort of irony that the bird I was marveling at was in fact a young buzzard and the brood to which it was returning had probably just returned from ripping apart an unfortunate deer on the side of the Texas highway. How charming! The vastness! The stillness! The carcasses!

The highway aforementioned is one of exactly two highways that connect my tiny town with its nearest neighbors. And by neighbors I mean 65 miles away at the minimum.

Our nearest neighbor, actually, is Mexico, whose mountains are a barren blue on the horizon. My town is about 25 miles from the Rio Grande, which does not sound like such a long way until you drive down to it. It takes over two hours. The land on our side of the border is all privately owned and the only reason I was able to see the river was that my husband has access to the area through his work as a Game Warden. So after an hour of slowly trucking down dirt roads surrounded by flat, rocky land of cacti and creosote, the ground opens into canyons. A particularly beautiful canyon holds the Rio Grande, which at this point flows slowly but steadily.

The mountains on the other side of the river are in the Mexican state of Coahuila, which puts remoteness into an entirely new category. It appears that you would have to head about 80 miles south of the river as the crow flies to get to the nearest major road. If you left from the same point on the border that is closest to my town and headed north, you would have to walk 70 miles to reach I-10, our nearest interstate.

I point out all of this detail for this reason: people walk it.

I have no idea where in Mexico they start, as there are absolutely no roads for miles on the other side of the river, but they routinely make the minimum 25 miles to town. Some walk all the way to I-10. Some give up.

My husband and his partner were out driving the highway east of town during the summer when they were flagged down by four walkers who had had enough. The rest of their group had kept going. Another time my husband was surprised by a man by himself in the scorching heat way out in the middle of nowhere. He had been drinking out of a stock tank and was sick from either that or the heat.

You find evidence of the walkers scattered throughout the desert. Empty cans of food and discarded water bottles. And clothes. I guess they sometimes have to lighten the load as they go.

One time the other game warden in the county, who is a native Spanish-speaker, came across a hand-written cardboard sign at a hunting camp that intended to say, “Here is some food for your journey.” Apparently the writer mixed up the word for “journey” with a similar-sounding word and had ended up writing, “Here is some food for your old lady.” I hope that the walker who found that had a really excellent laugh. I bet he needed it.

Back in April some law enforcement happened across a group farther out west who was carrying bundles of marijuana. The wind was howling and the group walked right in front of the truck. They didn’t even hear it. The only reason they finally realized they weren’t alone was that one of them nearly stepped on a snake and so the group scattered, and turning, saw the truck. A chase ensued and most of them were caught. Two of them were fifteen years old. They said that they were informed by the others that they would be the lucky ones carrying the food and water packs on the journey. Their families would be at risk, they were told, if they refused to comply.

The others carried 50-pound bundles of pot in burlap bags that were tied with rope onto their backs as makeshift backpacks.

Not all the walkers are in the drug business. But they all have a reason that makes it worth it to them to risk death by heat, snakebite, exhaustion, and a number of other unpleasant fates to cross the border and walk miles, miles, miles into the United States.

It’s not like they can just apply for a green card and their problem is solved.

A local rancher refers to the walkers as zombies. They hide during the day and walk at night, he says. Some landowners leave their houses unlocked when they aren’t living here so that they don’t have to fix broken windows when they get back. The walkers come in for the water.

The Border Patrol calls them bodies.

“They got 15 bodies in the group!” I will hear. At first I was horrified. Bodies?! Yes, but the kind that are still breathing. And walking. Not the kind that the buzzards have gotten to. I guess we are all bodies if you want to put it that way.