It's six o'clock in the morning and the sun is coming up just over the horizon. An old pickup truck is barreling down Interstate 10 heading east, directly into the sun. There are eight men sitting inside the double cab and there are 20 men and women standing in the bed behind. They are illegal immigrants who have crossed the line at night, out in the desert, on foot, carrying one-gallon jugs of water and a small pack on their back. At 80 miles an hour the right front tire explodes. The truck swerves off the road and pirouettes into the air, tossing bodies into thorny bushes and small, sharp rocks in the sand. Traffic on I-10 is stalled for four hours in both directions while the emergency crews pick up the bodies.

I read this story in one of the Tucson newspapers when I first started working on a series about illegal immigration for NPR's "Day to Day" last summer, and it made me wonder, 'How can a pickup truck carry 28 people? Why weren't they stopped by the border patrol or the highway patrol?' The next week, it happened again on a road near the Tohono O Odam Indian reservation--a tire blew out, a truck rolled over, more than 20 bodies were scattered about the desert.

This place is not quite America, and it's not quite Mexico either. It's more a country, a world, unto itself. A book where stories begin and end at the rate of a hard boil, and the moral always feels like a cactus needle sticking in your leg. A gate through a time warp and the people passing through either enter a new life or they die.

Part of the series for "Day to Day" was an interview with Charles Bowden. He's a writer who lives in Tucson and is widely considered to be an expert on border issues. We drove sixty miles south and stopped a few hundred yards from the fence. It was close to midnight and so dark I couldn't see the microphone in my hand. I asked Chuck to tell me what's happening around us and in thirty minutes he gave perhaps the best summation of the social, political, and economic issues surrounding the border that I've ever heard or can imagine. His facts were right, his observations beyond doubt, his conclusions unarguable, and throughout you can hear a kind of fear in his voice, a fear that comes from knowing nothing will be done to solve this problem. At the time, I thought it was the best thing I'd ever recorded in 22 years of radio work.

But "Day to Day" wouldn't play the interview. I won't go into the many dimensions of the argument that ensued. Suffice it to say I lost the argument and the interview sat on my shelf for ten months until Karen Lowe from "Marketplace" called and asked me why I wasn't doing more stories from the border. I told her there were certainly many important stories that needed to be done, but I didn't want to go back because it seemed nobody would play them. To which she replied, "We'll play them."

I said something like, 'No, you won't, because they hurt to much to hear. Nobody will believe they are true.'

And she said, "We'll play them, just go back and get some more interviews and we'll run them as a series."

So I went back down to the border during the second week of April and traveled around with Julian Cardona, a photographer from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. He's spent the last fifteen years documenting what's happening along the border and considers his camera to be like a weapon, but really I think it's more like his wife. He knows the border because he was born into it and has basically never left. So he was my guide, my translator. When we came to a fork in the road, either physical or metaphysical, I looked to him and he pointed.

We spoke with people on both sides of the line--minutemen, immigrants, coyotes, home owners. Basically, what we heard were people expounding upon the points Charles Bowden made the year before, and the fear in Bowden's voice was echoed in the voices of the people who live on and pass through the border.

It's a war zone, right here in our own country.