I stayed awake and listened to the ghostly horn of the freight trains passing through town, warning people off the tracks, and thought about how this area was known to be spiritual. The nearby Chisos Mountains meant Ghost Mountains, and sometimes they were said to cast an eerie glow. Folklore said the devil lived in the caves and in the mountains. But the recent inhabitants had no idea what skittered across this land, whether ghost or devil.

Other people said that this land was primed for odd things to happen, for miracles. The belief was so strong that each night people clustered at a viewing station nearby and waited for alien lights to glow. They didn’t realize that what they saw was just car headlights weaving back and forth across the horizon from a border town sixty miles away. There had been decades of stories about people who sought religion in the hills around this desert. There were even churches built into mountains, and people said the sculptures of Christ sweated real moisture into the land. But mostly people just came here to get lost after their lives fell apart. It was a place where you could still get away with pretending to be someone else.

The next morning we drove past ghost towns in the desert, wooden posts made into crosses cascading over the sides of the hills surrounding them. I pulled the car to the side of the road, and we walked through a cemetery, past homemade headstones and rocks placed on top of dirt so animals wouldn’t dig up the remains of people who had lived and died here. I remembered a story I had read about one of these people in a local paper, the people who came to the desert to live their own way in adobe houses on unpaved roads called Easy Street and Utopia Road. The story was full of superstition, as stories about the desert always were. It went like this: