The Best American Travel Writing 2012 (31 page)

At dawn the light is gone.

 

The Camino del Diablo is older than America.

It extends from Tinajas Altas for a hundred miles, straight through the lava fields and sand dunes and cholla beds of the Sonoran Desert. Nobody knows who created the trail, but a thousand years ago it was already ancient, and young Papago Indians would make holy pilgrimages on it, testing their manhood. A regiment of conquistadores in pursuit of El Dorado may have ridden here in the 1500s, but the first Europeans who definitely set foot on the Camino were Jesuit missionaries in 1699, on the expedition that established the first overland route to the Spanish colonies on the West Coast.

It earned its name during the Gold Rush, in the 1850s. Hundreds of ill-prepared miners and their families dried up and died here, trying to reach the gold fields of California. The arrival of the transcontinental railroad in the late 1870s made the route obsolete, and hardly anyone else set foot in the wilderness around the Camino until recently, when other groups of strivers began to pass this way.

The Camino runs parallel and close to the border for most of its distance, and from the Camino north to I-8 there is an average of about 40 miles of open desert. As border security has increased around the more densely populated zones to the west, the Camino area, despite its challenges, has become a popular thoroughfare for migrants and smugglers. On a Saturday in May 2001, for example, fourteen men—a mix of former coffee farmers, citrus-plantation workers, Coca-Cola plant employees, and high school students—were dropped off near here, near where Mexico's Federal Highway 2 skirts the very edge of the border, and told that if they walked north, across the Camino del Diablo, across this desert, they would reach an American highway. And so they walked north. That evening they came up against the Growler Mountains, which they tried and failed to cross. They walked north along the edge of the range for most of the next day, and then for some reason they turned almost 180 degrees and walked southwest across the valley that divides the Growler Mountains from the Granite Mountains, walking all the way to the southern tip of the Granite range, back near the border, before turning again and heading northwest.

If you look at their route on a map, if you trace their increasingly lost and desperate wanderings, which lasted a total of five days, it looks like the stem of a weak seedling, the way a weak seedling rises up, doubles back down toward the earth, and then tries to rise again, reaching hungrily toward the sun.

Of course, they had more than enough sun.

And not enough water.

And when Border Patrol agents found them, there was little they could do but collect their remains and their belongings—the blue jeans, the belt buckles, the white shoes, the combs, the fake silver watches—and turn these things over to the Mexican consulate.

They had individual names—Julian, Arnulfo, Reyno, Claudio, Mario, Lauro, Enrique, Reymundo Sr., Reymundo Jr., Abraham, Edgar, Efrain, Lorenzo, Heriberto—but there were so many of them that it was much easier simply to refer to them as a collective. The Yuma Fourteen. None ever made it to Yuma, but Yuma is the nearest big city.

As in the case of Pablo Valencia a century before, there was nothing unique about how the Yuma Fourteen ran out of water or what happened to them afterward. More than a hundred people had already dried to death that year in this same desert.

But the sheer number of deaths, all at once, was impressive, and there was pressure to do something about it, to respond in some way.

Camp Grip, which was built in 2002, is one of those responses. The “Grip” stands for the forward operating base's mandate, which is to “get a grip” on this stretch of the border.

I see Camp Grip's radio tower come into view first, then the trailers and the trucks. The trailers are new and clean and there's a barbecue going outside one of them, and when I get close I can smell hamburgers cooking and it smells good. I ring the doorbell. I wait a minute and there's no response, so I ring the doorbell again and knock too. The air-conditioning unit on the side of the trailer is on, and it's loud.

An agent eventually comes to the door. He looks surprised to see me.

We chat a bit. Camp Grip has been a success, in the sense that traffic is way down from the worst times, he says. But there's still plenty of traffic. I tell him about the red light I saw last night above the lava field. He shrugs.

“There was a big group crossed last night near where you camped,” he says. “We caught them earlier today, about twenty miles north. They could have had someone up in the mountains, scouting for them. That light might have been their go-ahead signal.”

He walks to the barbecue and opens it up and grabs a spatula hanging from the side and flips the burgers.

“They've got scouts all over the place,” he continues. “Camouflage. Radios. Binoculars. They're organized.”

He squints up through the smoke from the grill, toward one of the mountains nearest Camp Grip, at the craggy, distant peak.

“They're probably watching us right now,” he says.

 

The rising sun lights up the inside of the tent and makes everything glow orange, and I wait until the air warms a little and then I sit up and unzip my bag and look at my feet. Every morning, this is the first thing I do. The cold of the night keeps them pretty numb, so I can't tell until I see them whether they've gotten worse or stayed the same.

The worst blister is on the outer edge of the left half of my left heel. It looks sort of like someone cut a Ping-Pong ball in half and stuck it there, though not quite as round or symmetrical, and the fluid inside is not milky white like a Ping-Pong ball but is instead pinkish with streaks of brown. I pull out my medical kit and dig around for alcohol swabs and wipe off the blister and the tight red skin around it. I take some Handi-Wipes and lay them down on the floor of the tent and rest my foot on the wipes, then dig around in the bag again until I find the safety pin. Most of it spurts onto the Handi-Wipes as soon as I punch the holes, but I squeeze to make sure it's all out. I wipe it clean with alcohol again, wait a minute for it to dry, then smear on some Neosporin and cover it all up with a new bandage. Once I'm satisfied with my work on this one, I turn to the others.

Every day starts like this, and every day once I'm done, once I've pulled on my socks and squeezed back into my shoes, I try not to think about my feet at all until the next morning.

The trail arcs gently north from my campsite.

I get on it and start walking the final 16 miles to Ajo.

 

The New Cornelia Mine is an open pit a mile wide and a thousand feet deep, with an emerald pool of coppery rainwater at the bottom. I know that Ajo is just beyond the mine, but from the ground, approaching from the south, all I can see is a towering tailings dam, the junk rock left over from the ore-extraction process. It's the most massive dam of any sort in the country, 7.4 billion cubic feet of rubble, and it fills the entire horizon. For seventy years the people who lived in Ajo lived off the mine. They took from it what they could and piled the rest up high. Then copper prices crashed and in 1984 the mine shut down.

The trail has turned into a road, and I follow the road to the dam's leading edge, then around the dam to the northeast, until I reach the intersection with State Route 85.

I get on the shoulder and walk north. I'm looking forward to stopping for a while, to seeing my daughter, to letting my feet heal. I walk faster. Soon I'm on the outskirts of Ajo, passing by faux Spanish colonial buildings constructed during the boom years. They look a lot older than they are. When the men from the International Boundary Commission passed through this area a century and a half ago, mapping the new frontier, Ajo didn't even exist.

Behind me to the south it's a straight shot to the line, and there's not much between here and there except for the Ajo Border Patrol Station. The station opened on a patch of desert scrubland in 1987, when Ajo was just a backwoods old mining town with few prospects, and our biggest fears about Mexico concerned unfair trade agreements. The station looks a little run-down, a little overstuffed, too many cars crowded around too few buildings.

They've started construction on a new station, right next to the old one. Contractors from Tucson, soldiers from the Army Corps of Engineers, they're all down there now, clearing and grading the land, getting it ready. The existing station was designed for 25 agents. The new one will accommodate 360, with room for future expansion. When it's finished, next summer, it'll become Ajo's economic center, like the New Cornelia Mine once was. Soon one in four people living in Ajo will be either a Border Patrol agent, the spouse of a Border Patrol agent, or the child of a Border Patrol agent.

Twenty-seven miles farther south, the highway ends at the Lukeville crossing, and another new procession of steel and wire, built in 2008, marches east across the desert.

That's where I'll begin again, when I return.

FROM
Outside

 

L
OST IN A BLINDING WHITEOUT
on a frigid day in 1896, encrusted in ice, the two Norwegian brothers finally stopped skiing. Disoriented and directionless, Roald and Leon Amundsen decided to bivouac. They dropped their immense backpacks, stepped out of their 7-foot-long skis, and began burrowing into a snowdrift.

After digging two cramped holes side by side, like shallow graves, they crawled into reindeer-hide sleeping bags. They were shivering terribly. It was January in the mountains of southwestern Norway, when snow and wind, darkness and biting cold—the wolves of winter—conspire to kill the unprepared. Having skied for three weeks to traverse the 100-mile-wide Hardangervidda Plateau, wandering in blizzards and bivouacking repeatedly, they were thin and weak. Their stove was inoperable, and they hadn't had food for two days.

During the night, blankets of snow piled up on them, at first muffling the sound of the roaring wind, eventually extinguishing it. The moisture from the brothers' slow breathing iced the interiors of their snow holes. The snow's weight nearly cemented their bodies in place. They were almost buried alive.

The next day, when twenty-three-year-old Roald woke up, he found himself encased in ice, unable to move. But Leon, twenty-five, having kicked off the snow through the night with berserk exertion, was able to escape. Only the tips of his brother's boots were still visible. Leon dug frantically for more than an hour, pulling Roald out just before he asphyxiated.

Later that day the brothers skied south off the Hardangervidda. Frozen and hungry, they found their way to Mogen, a cluster of log cabins on the northern edge of a body of water called Vinjef-jorden.

“They were saved by a farmer just over there,” says Kjersti Wøllo, sliding homemade reindeer sausages onto my plate and pointing through a steamed window at the spot. Wøllo and her partner, Petter Martinsen, operate the cross-country ski hut at Mogen, which they've opened early, in March, just for us. My brother Steve and I have come to Norway to retrace the Amundsen brothers' journey across the Hardangervidda, partly as a tribute to our heritage (our mother's side of the family is Norwegian) and partly to better understand the courage and drive that made Amundsen unquestionably the greatest polar explorer of all time. Mogen is halfway along our ski route. For four days straight, we've been grinding into 60-mile-per-hour headwinds.

“Amundsen gave the farmer a compass for saving their lives,” says Wøllo, a classic Norwegian beauty in her thirties, whose hair is pulled back in a thick ponytail. “His great-grandson still has it.”

The attempt was Amundsen's second at crossing the largest mountain plateau in northern Europe; the first, in 1893, ended after a 40-below open bivouac in which he nearly froze to death. The Hardangervidda had turned out to be almost unconquerably cold and storm-whipped: the perfect polar prep school. Amundsen would later wryly recall that his ski traverse “was as strenuous and dangerous as any of my following trips . . . [T]he training proved severer than the experience for which it was preparation, and it well-nigh ended the career before it began.”

It is often the close calls of a man's youth that set the course for his life. Ill-equipped and ignorant, flush with youthful hubris, Amundsen would never again make such mistakes.

“Adventure is just bad planning,” he would famously say. And yet it was by getting slammed in his own back yard that Amundsen found the direction of his life.

 

One hundred years ago, in the fall of 1911, a team of five Norwegians led by the thirty-nine-year-old Amundsen began skiing south across Antarctica, the harshest continent on earth. They looked like Inuits, clothed entirely in furs, mushing fifty-two Greenland dogs pulling four sleds. Some 500 miles west, a team of fifteen, led by forty-three-year-old Robert Falcon Scott, a British naval captain, began setting out for precisely the same absurd location: the South Pole.

Scott's team consisted of four men driving two motorized sledges, ten plodding behind sled-pulling ponies, and two on skis. As British author Roland Huntford recounted in his extraordinary 1979 double biography,
Scott and Amundsen,
this was the start of one of history's last great adventure epics: a contest not simply between two men or two nations but between two philosophies.

Huntford was scathing in his critique of Scott, describing him variously as contradictory, confused, deluded, dramatic, irritable, and morose. Amundsen, on the other hand, drew his highest praise. “In the way an artist may be obsessed with his art,” Huntford concluded, “Amundsen was obsessed with exploration to the exclusion of all else.”

We all know how the contest ended. Amundsen got to the pole first and made it back safely with all his men. Scott also got to the pole—thirty-four days after Amundsen—but didn't make it back alive, dying of starvation with two other men in a forlorn tent 130 miles from base camp.