CUERVO, Niland, California I met Cuervo on my first trip to Niland when my friend Forest spotted a man in a kilt riding past the Buckshot Diner. The sun was too much. He led his mule and horse over to the shade of the grocery awning. I went inside to get us some big cans of cheap, cold beer, and we loitered for the next few hours. What began as a portrait turned into a years-long relationship. Cuervo, a lyricist, writes me every now and then of his unashamed draw to crystal meth and prostitutes. Now living in Mexicali, he shared this with me, and I thought it was beautiful and heartbreaking all wrapped up into one paragraph that could be a ballad: “A walk on the wild side is real in this border town, at 2am. Danger is in the air along with the smell of rotting des- peration that comes with being poor and bad water. The cantinas are blasting out that huge drunk roar like pus from a boil, while the sex workers lure their prey up the stairs of seedy hotels like the one my girl is commonly seen to be. But it does make the blood pump faster making for a time NOT to b forgotten. Surely. Hoping to see her graceful form there but someone has preceded me it seems, and it wrenches my heart to imagine her in the arms of another, but she did warn me not to fall in love, like everyone. But the heart gos its own way, it has its own agenda and nothing can stop it from doing so. And so be it!”
Portfolio: The People You Meet
One man's ongoing endless project to get to know his fellow travelers on the road. Photography of Elliot Ross
Elliot Ross was on an airplane when he first put a name to it, perhaps subconsciously borrowed from the movie Fight Club. He was deep in conversation with a stranger in the seat next to him when a flight attendant brought their meals. Look, he laughed—it’s a single serving meal, and this is a single serving friendship.
Single serving friendship. The phrase brought form to a practice he’d been doing all his life—meeting people, getting to know them for a minute or two, and sometimes taking their picture—and it made him want to do it even more. “I’m especially curious about identity,” he says, “and in order to explore identity you have to connect with people.” He make these connections while on assignment for some of the country’s largest publications, but also while traveling, where he seeks backroads and small towns and interesting people, using his profession as rationale to approach them.
The thirty-one-year-old is particularly curious about how Americans see themselves, primarily in
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