I got my rear derailleur replaced by a mechanic in Del Rio (locally pronounced “Del Ree-uh”) and finally bought new tubes. My plan was to leave the highway behind and take Old Mines road to Laredo, a 114-mile gravel stretch that cuts right along the Rio Grande, and I couldn’t afford to take any mechanical chances.
Later that day I received an email from Keith Bowden, the guy who canoed the entire Rio Grande river several years back and who I recently met by chance in the small town of Langtry. He offered to bring his camping gear and join me that night so I could “experience that stretch at night without having to … die alone.” He was also bringing a steak dinner, so I accepted his offer! Keith said he had nothing better to do, but I suspect another character I met in Langtry, my adopted grandmother E.J. Billings, had something to do with it.
The Old Mines road occupies a unique section of the border. US 83 curves away from the river, giving the Border Patrol less mobility, and there’s nothing but cattle ranches and hunting acreage between the well-guarded border towns of Eagle Pass and Laredo. If illegal immigrants can kick it down the middle between those two field goal posts, they can be picked up along a number of highways or reach San Antonio in a few days walking.
I biked 18 miles on pavement from Eagle Pass to the bombed-out town of Indio, but the path turned to gravel soon afterward. Signs warned me that the state of Texas was no longer maintaining the road. A Border Patrol car I’d seen earlier pulled up, and two agents rolled down a window to politely ask what I was doing and if I knew where I was going. They wished me luck, and I pedaled on.
The further I travel south, the greener Texas gets. There’s thick grass on both sides of the road now, and low gnarled trees have replaced the brown scrub. Dense plant life and rusted ranch fencing on both sides makes the Old Mines road a corridor with zero visibility to the left or right. At certain points the Rio Grande was supposedly less than a mile away, and I often heard trucks passing on the Mexican highway, but I never saw signs of either.
For the past several hundred miles I’ve noticed there’s typically a dirt road running parallel to the highway. I’ve recently learned these paths are used by the Border Patrol to study where illegal immigrants are crossing. It seems primitive, but they look for footprints in the dirt and then drag huge tires behind their vehicles to give themselves a clean slate again.
I gradually began to pick up on signs of human activity. Empty bottles littered the road. So did a toothbrush and tube of toothpaste. A torn blue windbreaker was left hanging on a fence post. There was a deflated inner tube reinforced with zip ties and a jerry-rigged hard plastic shell. Border Patrol picks a lot of this stuff up for the same reason they scrape the dirt road, so many of the objects I saw were dropped recently. What was most incredible to me, though, was the ranch fencing. Every 10 to 20 yards it was obvious someone had put their foot on one of the wires and bent it down climbing over.
After a very slow, very bumpy 20 miles, I flopped down on the side of the road and waited for Keith to show up. More Border Patrol agents had stopped me at this point to ask if I was lost or dehydrated. One agent, Donny, from Pennsylvania, said he expected illegal traffic to be low that night because the Zeta cartel had just had a shootout with the Mexican army, and that people would be keeping their heads down. Donny was, even to 23-year-old me, a fresh-faced kid, and seemed far too young to be entrusted with an enormous white and green pickup truck. Over his shoulder I noticed one of the Border Patrol’s blimps, an enormous balloon launched several hundred feet in the air loaded with cameras and sensors. Donny told me there were three of those on the border (I saw the first one outside of Marfa), and that there was a UAV that flies the length of Texas every night. Even so, he said, los punteros, the cartel watchmen, “watch us a lot more than we watch them.”
Keith pulled up in his car and got out to greet Don and I. Don suggested we camp at a livestock enclosure about a mile up the road and said we’d have plenty of space to pitch our tents. We made camp and started fixing dinner immediately. I say we, but I really mean Keith, who brought a cooking fire to life with the skill of someone who has spent a lot of time out in the middle of nowhere. He cooked the steak, beans, tortillas, avocados, split the whole mess up on two camp plates and had forks and jackknives for each of us. After that tedium we split the 12 pack of Tecate.
I learned more about Keith’s English class at the Laredo Junior College. Teaching there, he said, was an eye-opening experience about the problems on the U.S.-Mexico border. Whenever he got a student that had been busted for drugs and was enrolled in his class as part of some kind of prison program, he would ask if he knew anyone in the Border Patrol who could smuggle someone across the line. “Yah,” they would say, “when you wanna go?” Keith would then ask, hypothetically, how much it would cost him. The answer was always cheap and immediate, something like $1,500 at the time.
Talk to people here about Border Patrol and you will often hear about the new vs. the old agency. The old guys, I’m told, were generally mean and racist. Kenneth Halfmann, a trapper that I talked to who grew up in Sanderson, said he remembers driving with his father-in-law on his ranch and spotting a five-foot rattlesnake on the side of the road. The older man told him to get out and kill it. Kenneth did but was surprised to find that the snake didn’t have a rattle on the end of its tail. It had been removed. The next day he was telling a group of border patrol agents about this snake he’d found. “That was probably mine,” one of the agents said, explaining how he cut the rattles off and released the snakes because “It’s a hell of a lot easier … to do a toe tag than it is to do the paperwork, give them free meals, and ship them back.”
Anything would be an improvement on the old, but the new guys seem to be well-regarded in all the border towns I’ve toured so far. I had good interactions with the dozen or so Border Patrol agents I met along the Old Mines road. After Keith and I said goodbye the next morning, I began the real challenge of getting to Laredo. I don’t have any way of knowing how many miles of gravel I traveled, but I do know that I got on the bike at 8:15 a.m. and didn’t arrive until 8:00 p.m.
Keith brought enough water to fill up the two bottles I carry in cages on my bike, and he gave me an extra bottle to carry just in case, but it wasn’t enough. It’s God’s goodness that I spotted a red and white flag off to the side of the road attached to a blue barrel. The barrel was filled with water jugs and messages in Spanish telling me my GPS coordinates and telling me to call 911 if I needed help. I saw two of these blue barrels. Apparently the local church keeps them filled.
Miles and hours went by. At one point I looked down at my arm and was surprised at how well I was tanning. I looked a little closer, scratched with an overgrown black fingernail, and realized that layer upon layer of sunscreen, slathered with layer upon layer of dust from the road had created an adobe-style faux-complexion that an archeologist might find interesting.
Border Patrol vehicles sped by more frequently. Several of them stopped to ask if I needed water, and to give me a quick 101 course on heatstroke. One particularly concerned agent said they’d already had “a lot of casualties” because of the heat and gave me packets of electrolytes to put in my water if I felt lightheaded. This was sobering news.
In 2017, Border Patrol reported that 294 immigrants died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Since 1998, Border Patrol estimates the number is 7,216. They’ve put up signs that warn migrants in Spanish “Caution! Do not expose your life to the elements. It’s not worth it!” but the success of urban border security pushes people out into the deserts and mountains. Border Patrol has its own search and rescue units that were formed in response to migrant deaths in 1998.
I biked over a low hill and was surprised to find a bunch of people staring back at me. Nine guys were standing in the shade of a Border Patrol vehicle’s open trunk, being watched by one agent. The agent, a specially trained EMT, said that a truck driver had spotted these guys and called the Border Patrol. He said it was fortunate agents were able to locate the group because they’d already been wandering around lost for three days without water, and had only survived because they found a tank of water meant for cattle. Apparently one member of the group went missing, and if he wasn’t located that day he would probably die. I thought back to the snake I’d seen earlier that day, the buzzards, and the thick fields of thorns and underbrush and wondered how anyone could survive such a trek.
