Rachel McCormick

I spent my honeymoon in a tent in the desert alone.

It was the summer of 2010, and I had just married the man of my dreams.

He was funny, smart, and caring.

He didn't really speak much English, but I figured, hey, that was something we could work on.

We had met four years earlier on a soccer field in Poughkeepsie, New York, as I ate a mango on a stick and nursed a sprained ankle.

When the game was over, Idvi came up to me, and he heaved me over his shoulders so I wouldn't have to limp through the mud, and I was in love.

I later learned that Edavid had come to the United States from Oaxaca, Mexico, one week before September 11th, 2001.

And he had come here by crossing the desert between Sonora and Arizona on foot.

Because of this, some people call him illegal.

Other people say that he doesn't have papers.

I mean, he has plenty of papers, birth certificate, diplomas, tax returns, but none of those papers authorize him to live in the United States.

Because of this, Idvi can't travel.

He rarely leaves the confines of New York City because he fears deportation.

Fear is a big part of Edvi's life, and it's rooted in several near-death attempts to cross the border.

In the months leading up to our marriage, we would sit on the couch and he would tell these stories of having to drink all sorts of nasty things to stay alive in the desert, like water from car radiators and water from cow tanks and even water from his own pee.

He told this one story about getting lost in the mountains and having to slaughter a goat from somebody's ranch and roast it over tumbleweeds under the light of the moon.

Knowing all of this, a few weeks before our wedding, I told Idvi that I wanted to honeymoon alone in the desert, on the border, in the same place he had nearly died several times.

His reaction, like most other people's, was, why?

Well, on one level, I wanted to have one last adventure before I had a bunch of his beautiful babies.

And I figured that traveling to the desert was the only thing I could do ethically while my new husband stayed at home working 12-hour shifts as a busboy.