The Desert Weeps for No One
All day I’ve faced a barren waste
Without the taste of water,
Cool water
Old Dan and I with throats burned dry,
And souls that cry for water
Cool, clean water
--Marty Robbins, Cool Water
The crags and spires of the Baboquivari mountains loom above the bajada where we stand, looking out on a dry desert expanse without end. Wind, rain, and time have sculpted an alien landscape that is rugged and rocky beyond belief. It’s still early morning in southern Arizona, but even now a white-hot sky spreads out above us portending another blistering, sunny day. Volunteers with Humane Borders, we have driven a rough, rock-filled four-wheel drive road for about three miles to get to this high point where our water station is located. It is our first stop on our weekly water run to maintain permanent water stations in the desert.
As we stand beside our white Humane Borders truck looking for signs of life, it is deathly quiet except for a lone curved bill thrasher that whistles at us from a spindly ocotillo nearby. Despite our grand vista, there is no water in sight save for the 350-gallon tank on our flatbed pickup and the rescue water barrel we have come to check. At least we hope the barrel still has water in it. We know that our water station may be the only reliable water for miles. We hope migrants can find it in time. Unlike our national policy of “prevention by deterrence,” our mission is to prevent death by dehydration.
Here in the Sonoran desert fifty miles southwest of Tucson, creosote, mesquite, palo verde, brittlebush, and other desert plants have adapted ways to thrive and survive in this sere landscape. People—not so much. It is so dry there is no smell. The parched desert around us crackles with the brittleness of pretzels left too long in the sun. Leaves shatter, twigs snap, crinkle and pop, the gravel beneath our boots sounds like we’re walking on breadcrumbs. Lips crack, sweat never appears but salt lines form, and eyes don’t water. Water is out there, but it is hard to find, skulking beneath the surface. As Craig Childs observed, “the secret knowledge of water is nothing but desire. It saturates everything in the desert.”[1] In these times of climate change, “lust” might be a more appropriate word.
If you want to know about water--to really understand it--you should come to the desert. In deserts, water is primordial, immutable, sacrosanct. Desert water is an existential elixir so precious it will burn a hole in your conscious and soul. Little wonder that so many desert travelers fantasize about “agua dulce” and stagger toward illusory mirages of lakes while on the verge of death. Lust drives them toward a fantasy built on deceptions.
The Sonoran desert will school you in the secret knowledge of water. After all, Arizona is where rivers go to die. Just ask them: the Colorado, the Gila, the Santa Cruz, the San Pedro, the Hassayampa, the Salt. These major rivers are mere trickles of their former selves. Even the mighty Colorado River, which carved the Grand Canyon, barely provides a salty trickle to the Gulf of California. Most Arizona rivers are dry except during the monsoon season when extreme rain events create flash floods—what Childs calls “a furious and elegant beast.” Most of the time, though, the few rivers left with any water are on life support, ironically themselves in danger of expiring and dehydration from lack of water.
Spend any amount of time in deserts, and you also quickly learn that deserts are lands of extremes: you can just as easily die of thirst or drown. Stop drinking water and see how hard it is to sustain a coherent thought and then, days later, how hard it is just to stay alive. To slake your lust for water, your search can drive you insane. At first, the need for water is a psychological pain, but shortly a physical torment ensues. It can drive you so crazy that you die of something other than dehydration—hallucinations, walking in circles, striping off all your clothes, falling down, crawling, eating sand in a delusion that this will quench your thirst. Dehydration makes you irrational. Some migrants hang themselves rather than die the painful death of dehydration. Not surprisingly, Arizona has become a land of open graves—of rivers, springs, and of people who try to cross the desert in search of a better life.
“Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.” Perhaps nowhere else than in Arizona’s deserts is this more true. Hiding beneath desert mountain ranges, alluvial basins from Nevada to Mexico hold more than 4 trillion cubic feet of water. As Charles Bowden documented, the desert is a land of hidden waters. So, in our mission to ensure that no one dies of thirst in the desert, we maintain a network of more than fifty water stations.
No one deserves to die in the desert from the simple lack of water. For the past 9 years, I have been a Humane Borders volunteer, delivering water to save lives. Perhaps displaced people, refugees and asylum seekers should find another way to enter the country, but they don’t or can’t, and their decision to flee violence and extortion should not be a death sentence. Blood may be thicker than water, but when caught alone out in the desert, familial connections are meaningless and the search for water is all consuming. Water becomes your new best friend, a favorite uncle, a loving grandmother. Water is your long lost stepchild that you long to embrace and smother with kisses. If you find it, you’d cry tears of joy, but your body lacks sufficient liquid to weep.
We believe that water is a human right. Like the air that we take for granted, it is not missed until it’s gone. For some people—particularly the vigilantes and militia members who vandalize our water stations—water is a privilege, in their view, that should be denied to migrants. In their delusional QAnon conspiracy-filled world, self-appointed militia and vigilantes fantasize that our Humane Borders water barrels are not aid stations but rather camps for rounding up unaccompanied minor migrants so they can be sold into sex slavery. This “fantasy cascade,” in Kurt Anderson’s terms[2], of believe-whatever-you-want fiction provide vigilantes with a way of spinning such nonsense into an ever-widening net that entangles and devours everything logical in its path. Pizza-gate transmogrified into a delusional phantasmal Water-gate. We just want to prevent people from dying in the desert from thirst. It’s that simple and that important.
Since 2000, more than 4,000 people have perished in our deserts, and those are just the ones we know about. Many more have died from exposure and dehydration, but their remains are never found. Their deaths are horrific, but even more gruesome is their dismemberment. Quickly, the flies and maggots go to work. The soft tissues and eyes are the first to go. Then scavengers and vultures descend on the rest. In only 24 hours, eight vultures can completely skeletonize a human body. In a month, little remains except a few long bones. The wind scatters the rest. Southern Arizona is a necropolis to the missing.
Nolberto Torres-Zayas was thirty-six years old the day he died. He had survived riding the deadly train called “La Beastia,” unscrupulous coyotes, Federales, and the cartels, but he couldn’t survive the waterless Arizona desert. He died on August 8, 2009 within one hundred yards of our Humane Borders water station south of the Arivaca road. By the time he reached the barrel, Nolberto was physically exhausted and hyperthermic after walking the 12 miles from the border alone in a scorching, dry desert and withering heat. Undoubtedly, he had hope when he saw the blue flag. Nolberto certainly lusted after a drink of water, but our barrel had been vandalized and sat empty. He staggered on, just a few hundred feet and collapsed alone under an acacia tree, scant shade for an overheated body. How long he took to die is unknown. Fortunately for his relatives back home, he was carrying an ID card. Alone but not forgotten.
Who was Nolberto? Was Nolberto headed home to his job in Portland, Oregon where he worked in a five-star restaurant making incredible Mexican cuisine, or to his home in Indiana where his wife and 3 kids anxiously awaited his return from his mother’s funeral, or perhaps to his construction job building homes in Scottsdale for the super-rich? We will never know because he died alone and dehydrated, a mile from the highway. Like so many others who die out in our deserts, we’ll never really know their stories, hopes or aspirations.
As we make our water runs, checking our barrels at seven stations today, we are constantly on the lookout for migrants and vigilantes—the former to help, the latter to avoid. Our water stations are 55-gallon drums with a spigot. The upper opening is sealed with a plug and capped with a metal lock to prevent vigilantes from tampering with the water. Such precautions have become necessary to ensure high quality, clean drinking water for migrants, or anyone for that matter caught in the desert without enough water—hikers, equestrians, hunters, mountain bikers. Each barrel has stickers in English and Spanish (agua potable) indicating that this is water safe for drinking. Some migrants leave behind tokens of thanks—coins, a rosary, a hastily scribbled note held down by a rock on top of the barrel, card with a prayer. Tokens of gratitude from those with so little to give and so much to lose.
Unfortunately, the locks on the water barrels haven’t solved all our problems with vandalism. Vigilantes like those from Veterans on Patrol, Arizona Desert Guardians, or Arizona Border Recon shoot our barrels, kick off the spigots so the water drains out, punch holes with knives or screwdrivers, or just drain the barrels until nothing is left, and then walk away, smug in their arrogance that they are denying relief to the desperate. Vigilantes have also broken the flagpoles and destroyed the flags, making it even more difficult for migrants to find our water stations.
When you live in a desert, there is no sound sweeter than the gurgle of water—from a spring, in a river, from a pipe, from a bottle, or even a water barrel. It’s that deep-throated sound that announces the flow of excess water from one place to another. It is a crisp sound, a clear resonance that invites curiosity. When you hear water flowing, there’s something inside all of us that tells you that you must go investigate. It’s a primal response to the sound to a life-sustaining substance. Trickling, spurting, gushing, guggling, dripping, sloshing, splashing. It’s alluring and enticing. Stimulating a feeling that can only be described as joy.
Life without water—anhydrobiosis—is only possible for small, microscopic critters like fairy shrimp (remember “sea monkeys”?), or roundworms. Certainly not people. Water is essential. Water is a human right. The desert would weep for us all, but there’s no more water.
[1] Childs, Craig. The Secret Knowledge of Water. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000.
[2] Anderson, Kurt. Fantasyland” How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. New York: Random House, 2017.