The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (30 page)

It's worth the trouble, and so I wonder why I still haven't run into any crossers myself. The wind eases a bit and I lean back into the stroller and start moving again. I've been hearing things all day, seeing things too, little murmurs behind me or blurs of fabric in the chaparral or footfalls on the other side of the fence. I'll stop and look and listen, but then everything goes still and blank.

Eventually I come to a spot where the road and the fence split: the fence continues east over some particularly steep and rocky hills while the road jogs north. I follow the road until it crosses an abandoned train track, and then bump along over the slats for an hour or so until I reach Old Highway 80, which takes me back south. The highway brings me to a long concrete bridge, and there's a good view of the fence coming down out of the hills to the west, back onto the flats. At the end of the bridge there's a big weathered green-and-white painted sign that says,
WELCOME TO JACUMBA
. A smaller sign hangs beneath the big one. It features a little drawing of a woman dressed in a 1910-style bathing suit and the words
JACUMBA HOT SPRINGS . . . ALL YOUR WANTS
.

The manager's smoking a cigarette outside when I get there, and there are plenty of rooms available, and he gives me the key to one and I go and take a shower and change, and when I come back outside, the manager's still standing by the street, smoking another cigarette. He's a skinny guy, maybe forty, maybe fifty, with a tight-cinched belt and a sort of permanent smirk. There's a convenience store—Mountain Sage Market—across the street from the hotel, and it's open, and so's the Laundromat next to it, but most everything else here on the main drag—a car wash, a gas station, an antique shop—has gone out of business. In a vacant lot near the shuttered car wash, a clutch of Border Patrol agents are milling around, waiting for something.

I ask the manager about Jacume, which is the town directly south of Jacumba, right across the fence. I'd read about Jacume. The
Los Angeles Times
calls it a “black hole,” says it's overrun by smugglers and that even the Mexican cops won't go near it. The manager tells me that Jacumba and Jacume used to be as close as their names imply, that before the fence went up, people from Jacume used to cross all the time to work day shifts and do their shopping here in Jacumba, and people in Jacumba used to cross all the time to eat or party in Jacume. Jacumba and Jacume, the way he tells it, used to be real border towns, meaning places where north and south sort of overlapped and mixed together. Now they're just towns on the border.

“I hear Jacume's real dangerous now,” he says. “But I don't really have any idea what goes on down there.”

A few minutes later, some sort of silent alarm must go off, because the agents in the vacant lot grab their M4s from the front seats of their vehicles and take off running toward the fence.

 

After Jacumba the fence road fades out again, and I have to stick to the asphalt. I stay on it for a week, averaging 25 miles per day.

Highways are their own sort of wilderness. They were never meant for walking on, and their unrelenting sameness, their day after day of minutely incremental progress, punches holes in your reservoir of memories, so that the narrative drains away and a whole week reduces to a dry heap of disconnected impressions.

The cherry-red semi that passes too close, too fast, and nearly pulls me into its wake.

The little leather pouch lying on the shoulder of I-8, the word
Columbia
stenciled on it, and the mix of pesos and pennies inside.

The flat I camp on off of Highway 98 in the Yuha Desert, and how long it takes me to find a clear spot for my tent, one without broken glass or bullet casings.

The days I take off in a hotel along the way, tending to my feet, hobbling back and forth to a Walmart pharmacy, trying Epsom salts, moleskin, Vaseline, duct tape, new socks, anything at all that might make the blisters hurt less.

The middle-aged guy in the hotel bar who proudly shows me his teeth, gleaming new crowns he bought across the border in Algodones for a third the price he would have paid in the States.

The bartender in the same hotel, who once spent a summer helping build the fence, telling a story about how the cartels cloned some of the vehicles and uniforms that belonged to one of the contracting companies, exact replicas, so they could drive their stuff freely back and forth, unsuspected, the whole time the fence was being built.

The Imperial Dunes, those odd chunks of Saharan desert on the eastern edge of California, buzzing all day and night with tricked-out hot-rod sand buggies.

The retired Border Patrol agent in Yuma who says he loved his job, then quotes Hemingway: “There is no hunting like the hunting of man.”

The way the road rubs the same parts of my feet the same way, hour after hour, and how finally the blisters on my heels get bad enough that I start jogging instead of walking, just to change the point of impact.

The relief when I finally get off the highway in Wellton, Arizona, and the other emotion when I look south of Wellton, at the desert, the mountains, and the beginning of the Camino del Diablo.

 

In August of 1905, a wandering prospector named Pablo Valencia departed from Wellton and headed south into the desert in pursuit of a lost gold mine. He was about forty years old, 155 pounds, rode a good horse, and carried along with him two 2-gallon and two 1-gallon canteens, for a total of 6 gallons of water, along with plenty of bread and sugar and cheese and coffee and tobacco and a sort of wheat meal called pinole. The first day he rode 34 miles and reached the spot near the southern tip of the Gila Mountains where the trail from Wellton intersected with the Camino del Diablo. Just to the west, a steep slope led up to a place known as Tinajas Altas, or High Tanks, where eroded stone basins usually contain pools of rainwater runoff. Tinajas Altas is the only semireliable water source along the Camino, and Valencia refilled his canteens there. As it happened, a self-taught geologist named W J McGee had set up a camp nearby, working on a summer-long project to monitor the heat and humidity of the surrounding desert. The two men dined together on jerked mountain-sheep meat before Valencia saddled up again and rode east.

Eight days later, just as dawn broke, McGee heard an inhuman sound, like the roaring of a lion, near his camp, and followed it to its source. He later described what he found in a paper called “Desert Thirst as Disease,” which ran in a 1906 issue of the
Interstate Medical Journal.

Valencia, who just the week before had been “of remarkably fine and vigorous physique—indeed, one of the best built Mexicans known to me,” was now

 

stark naked; his formerly full-muscled legs and arms were shrunken and scrawny; his ribs ridged out like those of a starveling horse; his habitually plethoric abdomen was drawn in almost against his vertebral column; his lips had disappeared as if amputated, leaving low edges of blackened tissue; his teeth and gums projected like those of a skinned animal, but the flesh was black and dry as a hank of jerky; his nose was withered and shrunken to half its length; the nostril-lining showing black; his eyes were set in a winkless stare, with surrounding skin so contracted as to expose the conjunctiva, itself black as the gums; his face was dark as a negro . . . his lower legs and feet, with forearms and hands, were torn and scratched by contact with thorns and sharp rocks, yet even the freshest cuts were as so many scratches in dry leather, without trace of blood or serum; his joints and bones stood out like those of a wasted sickling, though the skin clung to them in a way suggesting shrunken rawhide used in repairing a broken wheel. From inspection and handling, I estimated his weight at 115 to 120 pounds . . . The mucus membrane lining mouth and throat was shriveled, cracked, and blackened, and his tongue shrunken to a mere bunch of black integument.

In the long history of people running out of water on the Camino del Diablo, there are two things that make the case of Pablo Valencia unusual.

First is the fact that W J McGee, such a meticulous observer, was there to chronicle it.

Second is the fact that Valencia survived and eventually recovered.

I walk south from Wellton for a day and a half before I reach Tinajas Altas, where I leave my stroller on the trail and scramble up the rocks to the lowest tank. It's half full of greenish, algae-topped rainwater. A quarter mile away lies the
mesita de los muertos,
a little mesa topped with anonymous wood and stone crosses under which lie the bones of sixty or so—no one knows the exact number—men, women, and children. Some of their bodies had been discovered within sight of these tanks, some right at the base of this rocky slope, poor souls too weak to pull their own desperate husks up to the water above.

I head east from Tinajas Altas, onto the Camino del Diablo, with 8 gallons in my stroller.

The geography, the remoteness, and the challenges of the Camino have remained more or less constant since Pablo Valencia's time, though there is one new hazard he would have found bewildering: a big chunk of it runs through the U.S. Air Force's Barry M. Goldwater Range. To gain entry, I signed a liability release that read, in part, that I accepted the “danger of property damage and permanent, painful, disabling, and disfiguring injury or death due to high explosive detonations from falling objects such as aircraft, aerial targets, live ammunition, missiles, bombs, etc.”

The Tinajas Altas are less than fifteen minutes behind me when I hear a huge roaring sound. I look to the north and see, barreling toward me close above the desert floor, two F-16 fighter jets. Before they reach me, they pull up and shoot nearly vertical, chasing each other into the blue sky.

 

It's early afternoon, my third day on the Camino, and the sand on this part of the trail is too deep for my stroller, so I'm up on the thin crust of the surrounding desert instead, navigating around the cholla spikes and the ironwood stumps, my feet or tires or both occasionally dropping down into a rabbit hole, when I hear something behind me and I turn and there's a Border Patrol truck coming, kicking up dust. I stop and watch it approach.

Two agents. Both Hispanic, early thirties. Neither is wearing a uniform. The passenger gives a curt nod in my direction, but the driver offers a big smile, asks what I'm doing out here, and where I'm going.

I tell him.

“Ajo!”
he says. “That's a long way away.”

They drive off and I keep walking, and pretty soon I've fallen back into my stupor, not thinking anything at all, until about a half-hour later I notice that, way ahead in the distance, the same Border Patrol vehicle is stopped at a bend in the trail, just parked there, idling.

Your head does funny things.

You're all alone for hours at a stretch, except for the fighter jets and the occasional long-eared Sonoran rabbit, and you might think the solitude and the biblical terrain would lend itself to deep contemplation, but it doesn't, not really. You mostly find yourself falling into half-trances of no thought at all, just the constant plod, until some unexpected stimulus intrudes and seizes hold of your mind.

I start thinking about the guys in the truck. Why weren't they wearing uniforms? And why was the passenger so curt, so unfriendly? And why, for that matter, was the driver so friendly? Then I start thinking about the cartels and how good they are at cloning vehicles.

I move a little ways farther off the trail, though it seems a pretty futile gesture. People say things like “There's nowhere to run” all the time, but right now, besides me and these two guys there might not be another human being for 40 miles in any direction.

When I'm even with the truck but about a hundred feet off the trail, I look over and the driver is still sitting in the driver's seat, and he gives me another smile and a wave. I don't see the passenger for a moment, and then I notice that he's lying next to the truck, partly beneath it, looking at something on the undercarriage, and there's a little toolbox next to him.

More hours, more miles. When the sun starts going down, I'm in a Martian landscape of jagged orange-black rocks, the Pinacate lava field. It's cold, below freezing, a lot colder than it's ever supposed to be in Arizona. By the time I've got the tent set up, my blood has slowed and the air is numbing my fingers. I eat quickly and then get into my bag wearing everything but my shoes, a wool hat pulled down over my ears.

I sleep for a while, until the wind wakes me.

The wind is amazing. This is a three-person tent, and I'm lying in the middle of it, and there would usually be plenty of floor space to my right, but now the wind has lifted up that whole side, ripping out all the stakes, and is blowing so hard that the floor has doubled over like a taco shell, coming down on top of me. It's a wonder the tent poles haven't snapped. I unzip my bag enough to get my hands out and push the floor up off of me and the wind whips the polyester around my hands, and if someone were outside watching the tent right now, I bet I would probably look a little like Han Solo stuck in the carbonite. Eventually the gusts die down and the floor settles and I zip all the way up again and try to sleep, but then I realize I need to piss.

It's 1
A.M.
and the rocks don't look orange-black now. In the moonlight they just look gray, like everything else. I notice that a water bottle I left outside is iced up. The wind starts up again while I'm pissing, and I have to hold on to the tent with my other hand to keep it from tumbling off across the lava flow.

There's a red light throbbing in the distance. It's maybe a couple of miles to the north, just above the top of a mountain, and at first I think maybe it's a radio tower or something, but then I look at it longer and it doesn't look like a radio tower. It looks like it's floating. Like it's some sort of orb floating there above the mountain, stationary, throbbing, red. Another night I saw a different mysterious light, but that light was on the ground, and it looked like a flashlight beam, and I thought it was coming my way, and it scared me—because who would be out here and why would they approach my tent at night?—and so I had grabbed my satellite communicator and held it with my thumb poised over the SOS button and watched the beam until it disappeared behind some rocks in the distance. But this light tonight, this throbbing, floating, luminous orb, what the hell is it? It's not scary. Just intriguing. My camera's in the tent. I should get it, take a picture. But by the time I crawl back inside, I'm so cold that the idea of going back out into the wind, even to photograph a UFO, is just too much.