The Devils Highway: A True Story (13 page)

He veered.

Into the Growler Mountains, a savage little maze. His men followed. They tried to climb over the peaks and fell back. Then tried again and fell back again. Ajo’s lights were blotted out by the Growlers. They walked by stumbling in the pitch black. Spines. Chollas hooked into their flesh. Whip-slash branches cut their faces, stung their eyes.

Fifteen miles northwest.

If Mendez was worried, he didn’t admit it. He told them they had “just a few” miles left to walk. He let them stop. They fell to the ground, squatted, guzzled their water. It was Sunday morning. They had walked about forty miles, most of it in the dark.

Dawn was coming, and with it, a heat wave.

9

Killed by the Light

SUNDAY, MAY 20—6:00
A.M.

D
awn came gradually to the Sonoran Desert. With the light, the heat started to fill the land. The promise of fire awakened alien noises all around them. Cicadas went off like sirens. Quail in the arroyos made their ghostly whoops. Desert grasshoppers burst into the air with ratcheting machinery roars.

We’re lost.

No, we’re not.

Mendez says we’re not lost.

We are not lost. I know exactly where we are. Where are we?

We’re in the first desert.

The first desert?

There are three deserts. We’re in the first.

How far do we have to go?

Not far. It’s in the third desert. Just over those hills.

Those hills were the Growlers, where they had already been wandering. Now, Mendez judged that they had to climb over.

It was hardly cool. Temperatures had hovered in the low eighties all night. And the deep rock cuts where they had wandered had held the day’s heat and radiated all night. By 3:00
A.M.
or so—the bug-sign hours—the heat had moved into space and the cool of the stones could set in. The rocks went from oven-hot to feeling about as warm as a human body. This would be the coolest moment for the walkers, though at the time it felt far from chilly. The next few nights would stall at ninety-four or ninety-five, and the days would explode into triple digits.

In the spring, on that Sunday morning, still between Easter and the start of summer, the sunrise was deceptively gentle in its first manifestations. Many mornings in the western desert start like this. An immense stillness, vast as the horizon, yet somehow flat, echoless, leaning against the ear like deafness. It was not as if the sounds of the world had been swallowed by the desert—it was as if the sounds of the world had somehow failed to enter the land.

Dawns offered an astonishment of birds. In the scrub and mesquite hollows, there were more songbirds than could be heard in the Rocky Mountains. Crows, sparrows, mockingbirds. The cactus wren would have been making his small noises as he went about his business. A scintillation of singing and squabbling cut into the silence. Feral parrots might have fluttered greenly across the sky, arguing their way toward Tucson. A hawk riding a thermal sounding his “scree.”

The almost cool air hugging the hardpan, not yet ignited by the white flames of the sun, felt blue. It moved slowly with the last stalling breezes of night. Where the predators had made their kills, white down and scattered gray pinfeathers waved like seaweed in a tide. Crickets, wasps, bees. A rusty understory of insectile melody.

Before the heat dropped on their heads, the lost men were drowned in music.

The coming sun was white. The Growler Mountains collected the light and poured it on them like lava.

That heat sizzled at the edges of things, then slammed into them, instant and profound. It opened certain blossoms and closed others. The desert was full of color, though they couldn’t see it from the valley where they awoke. The mesquites had small flowers, the prickly pears showed colors in their buds. The last bats sipped their last saguaro nectar. The first hummingbirds swarmed up from Mexico and took their place. The beavertail cacti had half-moon voids chopped into them by the impervious jaws of javelinas, those stink-pigs already nestling in brush and paloverde shadow for their morning snooze.

Rattlesnakes eased from dens and unfurled in the light, soaking up the day’s warmth. Tarantulas backed timidly into their burrows. Scorpions wedged themselves in dark crevices.

For some reason, Mendez decided to break with the pattern. Perhaps he really thought they were only a few miles away from their target. If Maradona had been with them, he’d have known the trails better. But Mendez made his third major error that morning. First, he’d gotten started too early, and they’d been precooked by extra hours in the sun. Then, he’d taken the wrong turn at Bluebird. And now, he started walking in the light. As the men followed him again into the Growlers, they had already begun to die.

As Melchior Díaz once demonstrated, not only Mexicans die in this desert.

Campers dot the sand at Buttercup Valley in the Imperial Dunes of California. It’s just across the river from Yuma, yet part of Yuma sector’s patrol area, perhaps one hundred miles from the spot where the twenty-six walkers began their journey. Happy off-roaders sputter and zoom all through the back country. Dirt bikes, ATVs, and dune buggies swarm these dunes. The signcutters leave them in peace, sitting nearby and watching the sky for buzzards, a sure sign that illegals have perished. On that day in May, there were go-carts kicking up rooster tails and VW buggies cutting doughnuts in the sand. White folks in RVs cooked breakfast and watched the
Today
show on their little TV sets.

Jump-cut to late June 2002.

Lisa Scala and Martin Myer went camping at Buttercup. They took their dune buggy along for some backcountry fun. Lisa Scala was twenty-nine years old—a good-looking woman with blond bangs and a warm smile. Martin Myer, forty-two, was recently laid off from the Goodrich Corporation. They probably just wanted to forget their worries for a weekend.

They headed into the desert, no doubt sure that they’d be back in camp in time for a cold one and a grilled hot dog. They hit the dunes and bounced into the land on a beautiful hot day. Neither had taken the recommended two gallons each of drinking water. They didn’t need it—they could drive back to the camp in a few minutes. No doubt a cooler full of melting ice sat in the shade under the picnic table. Brewskis, diet sodas. Then a pin jostled loose from the steering arm, and the steering wheel broke off the column. They were suddenly stranded.

Lisa was found a few days later, still sitting in the dune buggy. She died waiting for somebody to come save her. She apparently never got out of her seat.

Martin had tried to walk out. No doubt he told Lisa to wait right there and he’d be back in a matter of hours. A kiss goodbye. A
Don’t worry
. Probably even a joke or two—they had been in the dunes a million times. It was their playground.

He made it about two hundred yards.

Later they found Martin lying in the sand. Even with the efforts of the Border Patrol’s cutters, and even though he was less than a mile from Lisa, it took them more than two days to locate him. The land tried to hide him and keep him for itself.

That same summer, on July 6, a similar tragedy took place near the eastern end of the Devil’s Highway. There, I-8 turns to I-10 and rushes across the south. Past the turn-off is the Rooster Cogburn Ostrich Ranch. (Signs read: “Feed The Ostrich!”) As desert distances go, it’s a short hop to the Wellton 26’s jumping-off point.

Rooster’s ostriches scamper around the base of a strange volcanic remnant known as Picacho Peak. Picacho has a kind of cocked-hat appearance, its top slanting at a jaunty angle. It feels like some kind of magic if you’re not paying attention, for it moves back and forth across the freeway as you approach it on I-10. First it’s on your right, then it’s on your left, then it’s not there, then it’s in front of you. Jet fighters do smoky loop-the-loops out on the vast plains to the starboard side of the freeway. Pale orange dust devils, some of them several stories tall, march through the desert and batter themselves on Picacho’s flanks, falling apart in a sprinkle of dirt. From the peak of Picacho, you can see the tips of the Growler and Granite Mountains. That Saturday, the Popielas went for a walk in the park.

In the newspaper pictures, they are extremely charming. Joseph, thirty, is tall, with long hair, glasses, and a beard. His smile is radiant. Laura, twenty-six, his bride, is short and blond, and her hair is curled, and she looks like she might break into laughter at any moment. Joseph was involved in live theater, and they were planning to leave Arizona for Indiana. Perhaps they went to magical Picacho to say farewell.

They didn’t carry enough water. Can there ever be enough water? Probably not. But the Popielas carried a couple of those little plastic twenty-ounce bottles with them, the kind you buy cold in the Coke cooler at the Circle K. They might have stopped in Marana, bought some Corn Nuts and a couple of waters and some gum. They listened to the radio on their way, joking and flirting, possibly planning to kiss each other once they walked the three miles to the peak. A six-mile round-trip, with the steady sound of freeway traffic never silent, whispering in the air like a rushing river.

A few hours later, Laura was found dead on the trail by a recreational walker.

Joseph was in sight of their car, parked in the lot. He could see Rooster’s rancho below, and a diner featuring soft-serve ice cream cones. He had headed off trail, apparently trying to blaze a shortcut down the hill. Trying to get help for his wife, the cutters assumed.

It couldn’t have seemed that hard—perhaps Laura fainted, and Joseph was hurrying down to the car, water, phones, rescue. But he fell on the slope. Hyperthermia will do that to you, make you clumsy. He hit dark rock and never got up.

They went together to the same cold room that had housed the Yuma 14.

In the desert, we are all illegal aliens.

Experts can’t give a definitive schedule of doom. Your own death is largely dictated by factors outside of your control, and beyond accurate prediction. Your own fitness is a factor, your genetics. Gender doesn’t seem to affect your chances much. Women are far from being the “weaker” sex. They survive as long as men, and often survive longer. Hydration before the event might buy you time, same with shade, a hat, rest. How much, however, remains unknown. All sources say you will die in a period of time that can vary from hours to days.

However long it takes you to die, you will pass through six known stages of heat death, or hyperthermia, and they are the same for everyone. It doesn’t matter what language you speak, or what color your skin. Whether you speed through these stages, or linger at each, hyperthermia will express itself in six ways.

The stages are: Heat Stress, Heat Fatigue, Heat Syncope, Heat Cramps, Heat Exhaustion, and Heat Stroke.

The people most at risk from hyperthermia are the elderly. That’s why Midwestern heat waves feature dead Chicago retirees by the score. But the wicked genius of Desolation is that it makes even the young old so that it can kill them more easily.

Heat Stress.

Everyone has been tired, or even dizzy, from walking in the heat. Everyone has been sunburned, sometimes quite badly. And many people have suffered the swollen fingers, feeling like sausages, and the funny stumbling at the tail end of a hot hike. This is where it begins. General discomfort, nothing heinous.

A little heat rash. Headache from the glare. Thirst.

The Wellton 26 felt this immediately upon climbing their first hill. They were already tired before they began, perhaps slightly dehydrated from all their journeying and restless sleep. Some of them may have had diarrhea from the bad food and water on their long bus trip. When one of the brothers from Hidalgo said, “This heat is killing me,” he was telling the truth.

The heat becomes personal.

Heat Fatigue.

As you walk, the relentless heat makes your warm spots wet—your armpits, your crotch. Your head sweats, your neck, your skin blows a fine mist like steam to regulate your heat. You’re a big swamp-cooler, with water passing through your membranes and keeping the meltdown at bay. Most of your heat comes out through your head—your head is a chimney. Most of you didn’t think to bring a hat. If you’re from Mexico, your hair is probably black. The sun encounters body heat on a dark field. Heat wrestles there, rising and descending and meeting itself.

Your scalp burns along the part in your hair, or where your hair is thin. Your cheeks, your neck burn. Your eyelids burn, too. And the tips of your ears. Your lips are not only burned by sun, but by wind; they become dehydrated, and they get rough and flaky, and you keep licking them to try to wet them, and they get sanded until they crack and bleed. Minor trouble.

But you still have water, so you’re okay. If you brought beer, you’re an idiot, because alcohol makes you thirstier. The ground is burning your feet—it’s 120 degrees through the soles of your shoes. If you wore sandals, and many do, you are getting sunburns on the tops of your feet. Hither thither is getting in your sandals and giving you minor burns. You might have blisters—water goes through your system to fill them. And now your jug is getting hot—your drinking water is starting to get as hot as coffee.

The desert’s air, like you, is thirsty. It’s sucking up your sweat as fast as you can pump it, so fast that you don’t even know you’re sweating. But you’ve been walking across rough terrain for a couple of miles now, and you are breathing hard. The air comes to your lips and pulls water from you. Every breath dries out your nose, your sinuses, your mouth, your throat. Your tongue: you drink more hot water; your tongue, you take just one more gulp of hot water; your tongue. Desolation drinks you first in small sips, then in deep gulps.

Your spit turns to paste. Your mouth tastes nasty, so you take another little drink. You tell yourself you’ll only sip a couple more times, but to hell with it—you take a big pull off the bottle. Your lungs, now, are leaking moisture to the vampire air. Your tears leak into the sky—eyes dry and scratchy.

The fluid in your lungs helps transport oxygen through the tissues into the blood. Less fluid, less oxygen. You breathe harder, you get drier.