The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [55]
You don’t know much anymore. You are confused; your memories are conflated with your dreams. Walkers see demons, see God, see dead relatives and crystal cities. They vomit blood. The only clear thought in your mind now is: I’m thirsty, I’m thirsty …
It is maddening. You dream of pools, seas, you dream of a lake and you dream of drinking the whole thing dry as you soak. You’d pay all your money for cold water. You’d trade sex, anything, for water. Walkers who find abandoned vehicles break open the radiators and die from gulping the antifreeze.
Sooner or later, you understand that you have to drink your own urine.
You piss in your hands, or in whatever container you might have. You try not to dribble a single drop, and you lament all the priceless piss wasted on the desert floor. You hold your breath and forget the taboos and you gulp your own hot mess. And you piss into your hands again until it’s gone. You’re alive! You’ve beat death with your own water!
If you’re really lucky, someone might piss in your mouth.
Although nobody drinks it, healer women in Mexico regularly use a thimble full of warm pee in infected ears. Certain insect stings can be treated with fresh urine. Eye infections are sometimes urinated on. Making the leap to drinking your own might not be impossible.
You don’t know it, but some of your more enlightened North American brothers are voluntarily imbibing it.
A surprising number of urine home pages can be found on the Internet. Urine is a kind of new-age panacea, and apparently a small dose of the elixir can fight any number of maladies. Urine is a homeopathic wonder drug. A squirt of the fresh stuff contains, according to the Urine Therapy Web site, the following substances:
Alanine, allantoin, amino acids, arginine, ascorbic acid, bicarbonate, biotin, calcium, creatinine, cysteine, DHEA, dopamine, epinephrine, folic acid, glucose, glutamic acid, glycine, inositol, iron, lysine, magnesium, manganese, melatonin, methionine, nitrogen, ornithine, phosphorus, potassium, protein, riboflavin, tryptophan, tyrosine, urea, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, zinc.
People pay good money at their health food stores for DHEA, melatonin, tryptophan. Face creams are full of urea. Pergonal, the fertility drug, is made of human urine. And, as the pro-urine Web sites enthusiastically proclaim: “Take the ‘M’ out of Murine Eye Drops, and what do you have?”
The village healer, peeing in a campesino’s pink eye, is at the cutting edge of medicine.
The recipe for the proper use of urine is:
Collect a midstream sample of fresh (light) urine
Avoid all genital contact, particularly female genitals
1/8 oz. distilled water
Add 1 drop fresh urine
Shake 50 times
1 drop of this solution added to 1/6 oz of 80 proof vodka (as preservative)
3 drops of this mixture under the tongue
But of course, you’re lost in the desert. You have no distilled water, or you would have drunk it. No vodka. No eye droppers. You have to gulp full mouthfuls of the pure product.
That first urine is pretty good, as urine goes. It is still relatively clear, since it is the cycling-through of your gallon of drinking water. The first urine is yellow, and if you’re lucky, it’s pale yellow. The paler, the purer. Pale yellow is the Evian of urine.
The next time through, that same urine has picked up more filtered impurities, and it is a little darker now. Saltier. By the third round, it is orange. It smells bad. Then dark orange. Then pale brown. Then a darker and more poisonous brown. It looks like foaming Guinness stout. By the time your effluent is black, you’re doomed—even if you wanted to, you probably couldn’t drink it. It stinks of fish. Your body would retch. There is almost more bio-garbage in it than water.
The last stage of hyperthermia begins.
Heat Stroke.
Your blood is as low as it can get. Dehydration has reduced all your inner streams to sluggish mudholes. Your heart pumps harder and harder to get fluid and oxygen to your organs.