A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg (32 page)
Read A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg Online
Authors: Tim Cahill
Some victims have been found with a quart or two of water in their possession. Apparently, they intended to save the water until they felt they really needed it. Staggering, suffering from dehydration or heat exhaustion or heat stroke, they fell unconscious, and the ground on fire killed them in a matter of hours. Other victims, too weak to walk, simply fell to the sand and couldn’t rise to their feet. In 1973, Death Valley killed three people this way.
Unpleasant thoughts. Huddled there in my small square of shade with the circumstances of various tragedies stumbling slowly through my mind like terminal winos, I began dreaming of the Man in the Freon Suit. What a guy! In Death Valley, certain legends exist and have the ring of truth about them because everyone knows them, everyone repeats them, and they are so poetically morbid as to live in memory, whether one wills them to or not.
Such is the tale of the Man in the Freon Suit. I heard it my first day in the valley, at Furnace Creek, a tale eagerly told concerning an unfortunate inventor who constructed a kind of space suit, using the tubing and coils of an old Frigidaire. The man ventured out into Death Valley, wearing his air-conditioned suit and pulling a battery behind him in a small wagon. The suit malfunctioned, however: it apparently began pumping out great blasts of freezing air. According to legend, the man couldn’t remove the suit. Perhaps his fingers had frozen beyond the point of movement. At any rate, he was found lying on the floor of Death Valley, lying there on the baking 180-degree plain, frozen solid.
Many people knew the story, though no one was quite sure when it happened. Most folks put the tragedy sometime
around 1950. One person thought he remembered the man’s name: John Newbury or Newhouse or Newton. Something like. Poor son of a bitch.
In point of fact, the story of the Man in the Freon Suit was first reported by Dan De Quille in the July second, 1874, issue of Virginia City’s
Territorial Enterprise
under the headline S
AD
F
ATE OF AN
I
NVENTOR
. De Quille’s story concerned a “man of considerable inventive genius” named Jonathan Newhouse who had constructed a “ ‘solar armor,” which consisted of a hood, jacket, and pants, of “common sponge,” all about an inch thick. “Under the right arm,” De Quille reported,
was suspended an India-rubber sack filled with water and having a small gutta-percha tube leading to the top of the hood. In order to keep the armor moist, all that was necessary to be done by the traveler as he progressed over the burning sands, was to press the sack occasionally, when a small quantity of water would be forced up and thoroughly saturate the hood and the jacket below it. Thus, by the evaporation … it was calculated might be produced any degree of cold. Mr. Newhouse went down to Death Valley, determined to try the experiment of crossing that terrible place in his armor.
According to De Quille, Newhouse was found the next day, about twenty miles into the desert,
a human figure seated against a rock.… His beard was covered with frost, and—though the noonday sun poured down its fiercest rays—an icicle over a foot in length hung from his nose. There he had perished miserably, because his armor had worked but too well, and because it was laced up behind where he could not reach the fastenings.
The story was reported as news worldwide, and the boys in the newsroom at the
Terminal Enterprise
must have had a good laugh over that one. De Quille, like his contemporary Mark Twain, could tell a story so patently false that truth smirked out from around the edges.
In my mind’s eye, I could see the foot-long icicle, blue white under a molten sun. Slowly, the thing began to grow, and it floated dumbly out into the shimmering salt pan of the valley floor, where it stood like a massive religious icon, a monolithic icicle plunged into the heart of Death Valley.
By nine that night it had cooled off enough to walk. Neither of us had slept for over forty hours. Worse, we had lain our boots on the ground to dry. The boots had been wet and caked with muddy salt. The ground on fire had baked them into weird, unfootlike shapes. Mine seemed to weigh fifteen or twenty pounds apiece. The canvas and leather felt like cement.
We hammered on the boots with rocks, cracking away the caked adobe.
“Leaving the boots on the ground,” Nick pointed out, “was dumb.”
There was poor planning involved, all right. The next water stash was only five miles away, at a place where a scrubby bush grew beside a rocky four-wheel-drive road. Unfortunately, in that area there had been a number of springtime flash floods. Water had thundered down the mountainsides in several temporary rivers, and each wash, in the light of our headlamps, appeared to be a four-wheel-drive road. We couldn’t find the water. Poor planning.
The evaporative wind had cranked up to about forty miles an hour. This was serious. We retraced our steps, searching for the stash, walking like a pair of Frankenstein monsters in our adobe boots. We both were developing severe blisters, but there was no stopping now. Finding the water was more important than some little excruciatingly crippling pain.
About 2:30 that morning we stumbled over the water and
food. We had been out on the Valley floor for twenty-six hours, in temperatures sometimes exceeding 120 degrees. My feet looked and felt like I’d been walking across hot coals. We both carried extra boots, but walking over ground on fire makes feet expand. Mine looked sort of like big red blistered floppy clown feet. My second pair of boots simply didn’t fit, not even a little bit. Another bit of poor planning that meant I’d have to walk forever in cruel shoes, limping pathetically.
We’d made too many mistakes, Nick and I, and the errors had compounded themselves exponentially, so that we had completely lost the will to push on. In the distance, seventeen miles away, we could see the lights of Furnace Creek. We doctored our feet—break the blister, apply the antiseptic, coat with Spenco Second Skin tape—and discussed complete capitulation. In our condition, with blisters and thirty-pound packs, we could probably make two miles in an hour. It would take six and a half hours to walk to Furnace Creek just to surrender.
On the other hand, the next stash was three miles away, in the Panamint Mountains, at an elevation of 2,300 feet. Say, four hours to cover eight miles, and give it another hour for each 1,000 feet of elevation. The stash was about six and a half hours away. It would hurt just as bad to give up as to push on, and it would be ten or fifteen degrees cooler at 2,300 feet.
Still, if blisters and exhaustion kept us from reaching the rocks before noon, that could be fatal. We decided to gamble and headed for the high country, hoping the idea of death could save us.
We were perhaps 1,500 feet up into the Panamints, walking up a long, bare slope littered with sage. There was no shade anywhere on the slope. We had miles to walk before the rock would rise above us and provide some protection from the sun. Quite clearly, neither of us could survive another day crouched under a space blanket.
Nick was wearing shorts, and I could see the muscles in
his thighs twitching spasmodically. It was only two hours until sunup. There was a full moon that night, and in its light I suddenly saw, sloping off to my right, a long, narrow valley. In that valley, almost glittering in the moonlight, was a town full of large frame houses, all of them inexplicably painted white. The houses seemed well maintained but were clearly abandoned. There was nothing on the map that indicated a ghost town here in Trail Canyon.
“Jesus, Nick, look.” I pointed to the ghost town, perhaps 250 feet below us.
“What?”
“We can hole up down there.”
“Where?”
“Down there.”
Nick stared down into the valley for a full thirty seconds. “You’re pointing to a ditch,” he said finally. “You want to hole up in a ditch?”
I squinted down at the ghost town. Slowly, it began to rise toward me. The neatly painted white houses became strands of moon-dappled sage in a ditch perhaps five feet deep.
“I been having ’em, too,” Nick said.
Nick wouldn’t say what his hallucinations were like. I had to coax it out of him.
“Graveyards,” Nick said finally. “I been seeing graveyards.”
An hour and a half later we sat to rest. To the east, over the Funeral Mountains, on the other side of Death Valley, the pale light of false dawn had given way to a faint pastel pink. The sky suddenly burst into flame, filling the high canyons with a crimson that flowed down the ridges and flooded the valley floor with blood. Then the sun rose over the Funeral Mountains, fierce and blindingly hot, like molten silver, and its white heat scattered the crimson, so that for a moment the full weight of the sun lay glittering and triumphant on the great lifeless salt pan below. It was still cool—perhaps 85 degrees—but, within a matter of hours, the temperature could rise to 120 or more.
It was the first time in my life I’d ever found a beautiful
sunrise terrifying. It was like seeing a huge mushroom cloud rise in the distance, that sunrise.
In the rocks above the bare sage slope, we found a narrow S-shaped canyon, where we lay down to sleep. Throughout the day, the sun chased us around the bends of the S, but there was always shade somewhere. We shared the canyon with a small, drab, gray sparrowlike bird that seemed to be feeding on some thorny red flowers that grew in the shade. I loved Death Valley. It was, as the ranger said, psychological, this place. It slammed you from one extreme to another. My heart seemed to expand inside my chest, and I could feel tears welling up in my eyes. I turned away from Nick, and we sat like that for a time, back to back.
“Nice here,” I said finally. “Comfortable.”
“Birds and shit,” Nick agreed. His voice was shaky.
We slept for twelve hours, ate at nine that night, then slept until six the next morning. The swelling in our feet had gone down after twenty-one hours of sleep, and we could wear our extra boots. I felt like skipping. By noon that day we had reached an abandoned miner’s cabin where we had stashed six gallons of water.
“How do you feel?” I asked Nick.
“Real good.”
“Me too.”
“We’re going to make it,” he said.
“I know.”
It was cool enough to cook inside the cabin, and Nick was whipping up one of his modified freeze-dried Creole shrimp dinners when we heard the plane.
It was moving up the slope, circling over the route we had given Dick Rayner, and we couldn’t believe they were looking for us now that we felt like gods of the desert. It was still twenty-four hours to the first checkpoint. Why were they searching for us? I laid out a yellow poncho so the rangers could spot us. Beside the poncho I arranged several dozen rocks to read “OK” in letters ten feet high. The plane
came in close and dipped a wing. The pilot looked like Rayner. He circled twice more, then flew back down Furnace Creek.
It was an odd sensation, having them out spending taxpayers’ money searching for us. I felt like some boy scout had just offered to help me across the street.
We had, it seemed, acclimated to the desert. It was easier, now, to walk during the day and sleep in the cool of the evening. We took the Panamint Valley at midday in temperatures that rose to 115 degrees. The next day, climbing another range of mountains, we came upon a series of enclosing rock walls that reminded us of our good friend the S-shaped canyon. It rose up into the mountains, and there was a small, clear creek running down the middle of the canyon where green grass and bulrushes and coyote melons and trees—actual willow trees—grew. Ahead, water cascaded over some boulders that had formed a natural dam. The pool beyond the boulders was clear green with a golden sandy bottom. It was deep enough to dive into, and the water was so cold it drove the air from my lungs like a punch to the chest. Above, several waterfalls fell down a series of ledges that rose like steps toward the summit of the mountains.
The same sun that had tried to kill us in Death Valley offered its apologies, and we lay out on the rocks, watching golden-blue dragonflies flit over the pool. It was 111 degrees, and we were sunbathing.
The next day we made twenty miles overland. The day after that, almost thirty. We crossed the salt flats of the Owens Valley in the middle of the day, roared into the town of Lone Pine, registered with the rangers to climb Mount Whitney, and reached the summit in a day and a half. It is, perhaps, the easiest pretty high mountain in the world to climb: a walk up.
About forty people made the summit that day, but only half a dozen of us camped there. I was using the stove to
melt snow for drinking water and shivering slightly because my summer sleeping bag wasn’t keep me entirely warm. Nick was shooting the sunset over the headwaters of the Kern River far below.
“My fingers are numb,” he said. “It’s hard to focus.” The thermometer read sixteen degrees.
“Yeah, well, you know what they say.”
“What do they say?”
“If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”
“Nice view, though,” the Indiana Jones of photography said.
When we walked into Dick Rayner’s office, I had a copy of the
The Death Valley Gazette
under my arm. The chief ranger agreed that, yes, according to the plan we’d filed, we hadn’t been late. What had happened, he said, was that Frank Frost, in the support vehicle, had climbed to the top of a mountain with a commanding view of our route and had spent a day scanning the trails with high-powered binoculars. It was the day we had spent sleeping in the S-shaped canyon. Frank couldn’t find us anywhere.
He reported to the rangers, who had immediately set out to save our lives. The foul-up hadn’t been anyone’s fault really, and I suppose I was glad that the Park Service employs men like Dick Rayner who are willing to leave an air-conditioned office to save a couple of nincompoops like us.
Still, I couldn’t help zapping him a little. “The article says we were more than twenty-four hours overdue. I mean, look at our trip plan. We still had twenty-four hours to the first checkpoint.”