I never tire of the landscape between San Ygnacio and Laredo, except at the point at which it changes radically after the last ranches disappear in the rear view mirror just before Río Bravo.

I don't mind the commute, a 40-minute trek that allows for a sorting and gathering of thoughts of things I must do at my office and at the ranch, things I must do as daughter and mother. Those 40 minutes give me reveries of prayer and rewind contemplations of events that have changed my life and change it now.

On this daily drive I feel my heart play out on a landscape that is ranches end on end, open country right up to the never-ending construction zone and the inevitable miserably thick northbound traffic squeezing through the one-lane and then the two-lane funnel of South Laredo.

I love the roll of the land that's visible to me as I leave our ranch and catch sight of the majesty of the sierra a few hundred miles away in Mexico. Some mornings the ridge of the saddleback is crisp and pronounced. I remind myself that not long ago I was on the other side of that range.

I catch 83 northbound at SY's only traffic signal. At 7 a.m., Pepe's store is a hub of commerce of oil rig workers in company coveralls having breakfast or filling coolers with ice and water for the long day ahead. San Ygnacio is a small, quiet place, about ten blocks along the highway and seven blocks deep to the riverbanks.

The details of a recent drive into town have stayed in my thoughts over the last weeks. I'd been home just a day from a visit out of town and was now heading out again on a road trip. I'd left the ranch early, a bit after sunrise, eager to hit I-35 and get safely a few hundred miles up the road.

I'd passed the scenic overlook and the pretty horses at Corralitos Ranch and was now driving in earnest when I came upon the next roadside park, the one that backs up to the onion fields. My eyes took in the sad spectacle of a corpse on the ground covered with blue hospital sheets, a small black pickup with its doors open, and an industry of Zapata County deputies securing the site and gathering the evidence of an apparent homicide.

That image remained with me throughout the day as I traveled north, and remembering it has evoked the substance of the stuff journalists cut their teeth on -- bodies on the roadside covered with autoclaved sheets, cordons of yellow tape that mark the tragedy of violent crimes and horrific accidents.

I was the first reporter at the scene when DPS Trooper John Reed mortally wounded Olegario (Prieto) Villarreal on Hwy. 83 in 1991. I'd seen the lights of the chase as it moved through San Ygnacio, Prieto's vintage green and white Lincoln followed by the trooper. It's a story that cleaved Zapata County in two -- just as the gunshots and the white strobes of the cruiser had sliced the night in two. There were some who sided with the trooper and others who believed the shooting was a travesty of justice.

In my capacity as a journalist in 1992 I once waited at the water's edge of the Falcon Reservoir with a woman whose husband's body was brought to her by boat in a black zippered bag at quite nearly the hour that divers predicted the body would surface. Though other bodies had been recovered from her husband's fishing party, she believed somehow that he had survived. I have excellent recall of the moment by those choppy waters in which all hope left her heart and she became a widow in the wail of his name, Alvaro. Gut-punched by the raw emotion of the moment, I could not raise my camera to shoot a blow-by-blow of the dénouement of this sad ordeal. It seemed indecent. But I had a story no one else had.

One night in the fall of 1992 I came upon a tragic alcohol-related accident in which the driver of one car, the one hit by a man so inebriated he believed his vehicle had hit a fixed object, was killed upon impact. Her husband and children who were passengers in her car were all injured, some of them with open head wounds. There was a madness and a great sorrow at that roadway strewn with broken glass and the steel and plastic parts of automobiles -- children wailing inconsolably, as they might for years to come, for their mother. There was that little boy with glass in his feet clinging to the neck of DPS Trooper Joseph Vaughan who handed me the child so that he could begin to sort through a mayhem of gasoline fumes, cries, and moans in the dark. The Trooper, along with EMS techs, county deputies, and fire department personnel, worked quickly to make sense of who lived and who did not.

In a 1993 incident, an inebriated lakeside resort owner who had killed a Zapata woman in a hit-and-run the night before killed himself the next day, holding himself hostage before a group of lawmen, a story far more tragic than the simple details I've offered. Before killing himself he'd returned to the scene of the hit-and-run. His bloodied, dented vehicle was an easy tip-off for those working the roadside for clues to the woman's demise.

The thread that ran through all these hard stories was the sudden senselessness of ruined lives, lives that met and changed at either end of a gun, lives that met in a hurl of steel on a highway, lives lost in a wind swell on an overloaded boat, lives of those left behind.

The good part of a decade has elapsed since I wrote those stories that were also chronicles of grief and remorse. It seems not long ago that these were the events that filled my reportage. By choice they do not now.