When you live in the desert, there is no sound sweeter than the gurgle of water—whether from a spring, a river, a pipe, a bottle, or even a 55-gallon water barrel like those we refill as volunteers with Humane Borders. It’s that deep-throated rolling sound that announces the flow of water from one place to another. A crisp sound, a cheerful woofling, a clear and noisy slurping that invites curiosity and excites desire. You are alive.

Well before dawn at 4:30 a.m., Chrysti and I met at the Humane Borders truck yard, loaded our gear for the day into the water truck, checked the tires, gas gauge and water tank levels, climbed into the truck and headed out to US 286 toward the border. We had the roads pretty much to ourselves.

Alone, but not alone. Perched atop an exposed, wind-blown ridge in the Sonoran Desert a few miles north of the Mexican border in Arizona, the graveyard resembles a sepia tone image from the 1930s—slate gray sky, brown land.