Vultures are circling some carcass a few meters off the highway. Each city along this route from Culiacán to Hermosillo is topping some violent crime chart; if miles of sand didn’t stand between them, the road would be a blood-red river flowing North, to the border. An old man sits outside the toll booth and shakes a cut-open milk carton at the passing cars to collect tolls—the penalty for not paying is a muttered curse on your life. Considering the surroundings, his words are more daunting than a fine. Whatever minimal sum of pesos he gathers is certainly not funding the highway, which is more pothole than pavement. Half-kilometer stretches of speed bumps and jackknifed semi-trucks spanning both lanes make joining the gardens of burnt-out cars on the shoulder look appealing. Maybe the man is charging passersby to look at whatever concrete-hut town he’s sitting in front of, the only variation in the vista along this desolate expanse of road.
Driving here feels like staring into an exhibit; it is somewhere you shouldn’t end up and that belongs behind a glass plane. In the dry heat, the place where you came from melts into the mirage on the horizon, and you pray to find anything at the end of that stretch of burning pavement. It’s a prayer that will probably go unanswered because your God probably isn’t here, and you’ll look out the windshield to search for anything that moves just to know something can survive here.
Nothing about the toll man’s lonely village is pleasing to the eye. Dirt roads weave together an OXXO gas station, a church, and fifteen sand-colored crumbling concrete cubes topped with Roto-Rooter water tanks. At least the soil here isn’t hot and dry like the desert— yet only the desert could make a town like this, so desolate it offers no respite or escape.
Accepting death as a fact of life isn’t enough in Northwestern Mexico; you must learn to survive off it. This is why there are more vultures than people. Whether or not they realize it, everybody is hoping to get out of here. Perhaps the light of the burning sun obscures the beauty of this land from those driving through. The old man, who awakens to the light of it, praises his God for every grain of sand that makes its way down the boiling asphalt into his nearly-empty milk carton and the wet of his eyes.
— Gabriela Ewart