The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [52]
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