A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (31 page)

There are rumors that “in some places in the middle of the bog, the soft salty area in the bottom of the valley, a team of horses or a man walking have been instantly sucked down out of sight.” This bit of cheerful information comes from Daniel Cronkhite’s well-researched book
Death Valley’s
Victims
. The author acknowledges that the story may be apocryphal and goes on to quote Old Johnnie, who told of “finding a dead man’s face looking up at him out of the ground. ‘He was a Swede with yellow hair, and he stared at the sun. He sank standing up.’ ”

This is a report to brood upon when walking across Death Valley around two in the morning with a photographer from
Rolling Stone
. You want to crack-splash through the steaming mud about thirty feet apart, so that if one should go down, the other can more efficiently panic and go lurching off into the desert night, hands in the air, screaming and gibbering.

When the photographer, Nick Nichols, and I reached what we supposed was the nadir of life in the United States, the absolute pit, Nick also discovered that he had dropped his strobe, “back there.” He began trudging along our back trail, muttering malign imprecations and leaving me standing knee-deep in hot, salty mud. There was no place to sit down, unless I wanted to take a scalding mud bath, and the Van Gogh stars spun madly overhead. The desert sky was impossibly clear, and I could make out the colors of various stars and planets, so that, glancing up, I felt as if I were stranded in space.

Thick, muddy water was draining back into our posthole footprints—it was a sick sort of squishing sound—and the dead of a Death Valley night swallowed up Nick’s receding light. Alone, in the darkness, I stared down at the unbroken salt crust of the valley floor. There were innumerable pillars of salt standing in inch-high clusters. Some formations, like certain tropical corals, took on the shapes of crystalline flowers, and they wound about in baroque curlicues, snaking across the floor like endless meandering rivers.

The mountains—waiting to reveal themselves in the light of the rising moon—whispered to one another in warm, gusting breezes that swept across the valley. The hot salt crust of the valley floor, under the cold light of swirling stars, emitted a faint glow, like the radium dial of a watch. The world was an ocean of salt and sand, so flat the eye saw a ridge, nuclear white, that rose on all sides.

I stood stock-still, wondering if I was sinking any deeper. The hot mud had been knee-deep on me, or so I thought, but now my legs felt braised to midthigh. It seemed hard to breathe out there, alone, in the middle of the night. I felt slightly faint and realized that in this condition I could very well commit philosophy.

Every life offers certain challenges that require grit, intelligence, spirit, spunk, careful planning, and nifty interpersonal skills. Try cashing an out-of-state check in New York City on a Sunday. Buy a used car from a friend of your brother-in-law. Ask for a promotion. Or a divorce.

Few of the challenges we face every day, as a matter of course, are physical, however, and a growing number of people seem to feel that lack keenly. Some have taken up individual sports as a kind of antidote to physical stagnation. People run marathons, they compete in triathlons, cycle the breadth of the country nonstop, or attempt to get their names in the
Guinness Book of World Records
by doing cartwheels across the state of Nebraska.

My problem with most athletic challenges is training. I am lazy and find that workouts cut into my drinking time. The thought of a new personal best no longer fills me with ambition or a burning desire to win. I need incentives.

Consequently, every once in a while, I like to flirt with some physical challenge in which the price of failure is death. Amazing how easy training becomes in such a situation, how carefully one plans, how intently the mind focuses.

Over the past decade, I’ve jumped out of quite a few perfectly good airplanes—“When the people look like ants,” my first instructor said, “pull the chute; when the ants look like people, pray.” I’ve been diving with tiger sharks on the Great Barrier Reef and have crawled creepy damp through caverns half a mile below the surface of the
earth; I’ve run some nasty rapids, climbed a few mountains, traded bolts of red cloth for food in the Amazon basin, and surfed my kayak through ice floes on waves thrown up by calving tidewater glaciers.

A number of magazines have actually paid me to do these things, to realize a lot of adolescent fantasies. These stories want to write themselves, and the work seems effortless. Research, for instance, in a situation where shoddy research can be deadly is scintillating. On location, and at risk, the senses are bombarded, and the world seems to vibrate with color and sound and life. Impressions are hard edged, settling permanently inside the brain, where at odd and frequent intervals they combine to explode in star showers of adrenaline-charged images and ideas. Writing the subsequent article requires a good deal less head banging than, say, analyzing the national deficit. We are talking about adventure here, about fear recollected in tranquility. And fear—we’ve all felt it—is unforgettable.

One day last year I spoke with my editor about self-imposed physical risk in the natural world. In a nation where signs in the national parks warn visitors not to fall over the lip of a cliff, there is a sense of something sadly lost. Survivors of people who step out into space and go hurtling tragically off the tops of cliffs can file, and win, lawsuits. The Park Service feels obliged to install guardrails and erect signs explaining the concept of gravity.

Nothing is safe in a world where lawyers define what is dangerous. As it happens, a growing number of people have discovered that they enjoy a view unencumbered by guardrails and warning signs. These folks feel that they have enough sense not to fall off the nearest cliff. In point of fact, many of them search out spectacular cliffs for the sole and specific purpose of seeing them without plunging to their doom.

There is a whole industry that caters to the impulse. What I’ve been doing out in the jungles or in the Arctic is called “adventure travel” these days. My colleague Dave Roberts recently described the growth of the adventure-travel industry:

What I proposed to
Rolling Stone
was a series of articles about various natural challenges, taken to extremes, and written for the edification of adventure travelers and armchair adventure travelers. In one part of the series, I’d personally walk from the lowest point in the continental United States to the highest point. It was not an original idea—lots of peoples have maps and can see that these two extremes are separated by a mere hundred or so miles. It is certainly not impossible. Perhaps a dozen men and women of my acquaintance could make this trek at a dead run. But adventure is relative. I knew next to nothing about the desert, and unless I got into some kind of shape and learned a lot, real quick, death was one of the more extreme consequences.

“I know what you did,” Nick Nichols raged. We were kneeling on the floor of a hotel room in San Francisco, and topographical maps of Death Valley were spread out on the floor. The bed was littered with desert-survival books, wide-brimmed hats, long-sleeved shirts, heavy cotton jeans, homemade turbans, backpacks, cookstoves, canteens, and
cameras. “You were sitting in some editor’s office in New York and came up with this, this …”

“Idea?”

“This insanity. You can’t propose a story on the girls of Tahiti. Oh, no. Or the four-star restaurants of France. Or the grand hotels of Europe. You come up with this, this …”

I could tell Nick loved the idea. Together we have made something of a living working the adventure-travel beat. We’ve trekked through sections of the Amazon and Congo basins; studied and lived with mountain gorillas in the Virunga volcanoes of central Africa; swum in the pool under Angel Falls; flown with the air force into the eye of a hurricane; and made the first rainy-season ascent of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lost World,” Mount Roraima, in Venezuela.

Nick has made rafting descents down white-water rivers in Pakistan, cycled partway across China, rappelled nearly a mile down the face of a cliff in the Arctic—a world free-fall record that maybe ten people in the world know about—photographed fire dances in Suriname and been arrested in Zaire for reasons that have yet to be explained.
Photo
magazine calls Nick Nichols “the Indiana Jones of photography.”

We studied the maps for a while. The Park Service officials we contacted had actively discouraged the hike. We would be trekking through a blast furnace, they said. Late June was deadly in the valley. Why didn’t we hike from Mount Whitney down to the ocean?

Trekking from the highest point to a pretty low point, we said, seemed to lack the proper emotional resonance. Chief Ranger Dick Rayner sighed and said that we’d have to file an itinerary with him and that we’d have to have a support vehicle, a four-wheel-drive rig driven by a third party. If we failed to reach the vehicle at the proper points and times, the driver would report to the rangers and a search party would be dispatched.

Frank Frost, a Northern California photographer, agreed to drive the support vehicle, and we were in business. Dick
Rayner had said that natural springs in the valley were undependable and fouled with diarrhea-producing giardia. It was best to stash water, to bury it in plastic jugs. We should plan on two gallons a day, minimum.

Nick and I formulated a set of rules. It was okay to make our packs as light as possible by burying food along with the water. We’d avoid roads and bushwhack cross-country as much as possible. Since the Park Service required a support vehicle anyway, it was okay to pack it full of cold water and iced beer.

“This one ranger I talked to,” Nick said, “he told me that a couple of groups a year try this trek, and they’ve had to rescue a few of them. The guy said he had been in Death Valley for several years, and he never knew anyone who made it. Ninety percent of them, he said, quit the first day. He said it was psychological. Either that or poor planning.”

“We’re pretty psychological,” I pointed out.

Nick didn’t reply. He was studying a copy of
Death Valley’s Victims
, looking at the photos of desiccated corpses baking out on the valley floor.

“We’re going to die,” the Indiana Jones of photography said.

We managed to slog through the crusted, steaming bog before dawn, according to plan, and found the water and food Nick had buried. Our campsite was Tule Spring, on the valley floor, at the foot of the Panamint Mountains. We pitched the rain flies from the one-man tents we carried and settled down for a long, mindless sleep. The tents would provide shelter from the sun: we had tested them out on the grass at the Death Valley Visitors Center, in the village of Furnace Creek. The temperature inside the tents had been twelve degrees cooler than the outside air.

By eleven that morning I felt like a side of beef, and my skin was the color of medium-rare prime rib. The pores on the back of my hand were the size of quarter, or so it seemed, and dozens of tiny but cruel dwarfs were building
a condominium inside my skull. The thermometer registered 128 inside the tent. The record high temperature in the United States is 134, recorded on July tenth, 1913, in Death Valley. If it was 12 degrees hotter outside of the tent—140 degrees—I was dying through the hottest American day on record.

But I found the temperature outside was only 113. It didn’t make any sense. I laid the thermometer down on the ground, next to my boots, and the mercury pegged at 150 degrees. The thermometer wasn’t made to measure temperatures any higher. What we’d failed to consider, Nick and I, is the fact that gravel and sand—like white cement highways under the summer sun—get hot. Real hot. A lot hotter than grass or even the air itself. The Indian name for Death Valley, Tomesha, means “ground on fire.” In 1972, a record ground temperature of 201 degrees was recorded on the valley floor.

Instead of protecting us from the 113-degree outside air, the tents were concentrating the 150-plus-degree ground temperature and literally baking us. Nick and I moved outside. We sat on foam pads, under lean-tos we had made with space blankets. With the noonday sun directly overhead, the blankets provided perhaps two square feet of shade. It was now 121 degrees. Hot air, rising off the superheated sand and salt, scalded our lungs. Sleep was impossible.

“The tents were a dumb idea,” Nick said.

“Poor planning,” I muttered.

Then we didn’t say anything for nine hours.

I could feel the hot air rising all around us. The laws of physics demand that heavier, cooler air should fall from the heavens, and that is what happens in Death Valley. It falls, comes into contact with the ground, becomes superheated, and rises. The mountains surrounding the valley allow no air to escape, so that as the day wears on, the upper levels of air—which have made several passes over the ground—are not really cool anymore, only less hot than air at ground level. In effect, the valley is a giant convection oven.

All this rising and falling air whistles across the valley floor in gusting waves of arid wind that suck the moisture
out of a man’s body the way a hand wrings water from a sponge. You sweat, of course, but you do not feel sweat on your body in Death Valley, even at 121 degrees. The killing convective wind will allow no moisture to form, but all that rapid evaporation is a cooling process, so the wind feels good, almost pleasant, as it desiccates the body. And that is why people who die in the desert are often found naked, lying face down on the skillet of the valley floor.