Tomás’s brother, Francisco “Pancho” Murillo, arrived at noon. Pancho drove an old white pickup truck with two large mules and an even larger burro squeezed in the back. The saddles, harnesses, and his gear were tied to the top of the cab. I was packed and ready to go, with forty liters of water and two dozen bean burritos purchased from Ana Ilicia.
Pancho saddled up the light brown macho mule for me, and he rode the dark mula beauty. I asked Pancho what my mule’s name was, and he shook his head. “I don’t know.” He had rented the animals.
I stroked the mule’s creamy light brown, sun-weathered hide, glistening with sweat and immediately thought of hot chocolate. “His name is Coco,” I declared.
We rode silently past the mission cemetery; nothing remained there but three unmarked stone crosses atop weathered piles of mortared rock. When I’d asked Nonnih who was buried in the graves, she shrugged. “Nobody knows.”
Coco was a bit slow and sluggish and just the perfect temperament for me. But the saddle was painful, and the uneven and crude stirrups held my feet in contorted and painful positions; I dismounted and walked at every opportunity.
I never knew what gear I was getting. The vaqueros had a hard enough time rounding up mules. I paid the same price for a mule regardless of saddle, so the vaqueros didn’t pay much attention to the saddle that came with the mule.
North of the mission there is scant vegetation, but what little there is grows in bizarre shapes and sizes—cholla ten feet high, grotesquely twisting cirio, naked cardon, and deformed torote trees.
My skeleton body felt right at home here.
We set up camp in sand and rock near a dirt road. There was no water for the mules, and wouldn’t be for days. Pancho lit a roaring fire, something Tomás never did, and I sat close beside it as if with a dear old friend. That night, Pancho took out his pocketknife and adjusted the saddle and stirrups, trying to get them to fit comfortably.
Pancho Murillo was the best of the best, a vaquero par excellence. A north wind blew strong against us for five days, but somehow Pancho always managed to coax a roaring campfire out of dry mesquite, even in a gale-force wind. He respected the animals and stopped often to reposition saddles and blankets. He could find water in the middle of the barren desert and food for the animals. And he would eat anything.
Even after Pancho’s attempts to fix them, the stirrups were too mismatched, and I found them excruciatingly painful. I rode for an hour and then walked until the terrain gave me no option. I always walked unless there was simply no choice: barbed-wire cactus, razor-sharp stone, or knee-deep sand. Even in the roughest parts, my feet hurt less on the ground than in the stirrups.
The desert was miles of sameness, miles of nothingness, and looked like a moonscape of white sand. The only thing that changed was the names of the arroyos—Verde, Palo Chino, Huguay—as we moved north through the barren plains of San Julian. It was a sullen, desolate place. There was some green, but mostly gray and brown and white. Even the cow dung was parched white and looked petrified. Much of the cactus was dead, the trees were leafless and barren, and there weren’t any sounds. I noticed at night there were no night sounds, no crickets, and in the morning there were no birds.
But there was evil.
The old El Camino Real mission trail follows arroyos, and arroyos have always been hiding places for outlaws. The United States State Department advises against travel to Baja because of the violence of the drug cartels. The Mexican drug cartels transport cocaine north through the Central Desert to Mexicali and the California border.
Pancho pointed to tire tracks veering in and out of the arroyo; the tracks were deep with no blown sand in the tread marks. They looked fresh from the night before or early that morning.
“Narcos.” The word was enough to seize hearts with terror. Drug smugglers.
Further down, there were strange tracks in the sand, like a pushcart, that led to the arroyo. “Espera aquí,” Pancho advised—wait here—and I took the burro. Pancho called her burra, but suggested I call her Paloma, since she was dove-colored, and the name fit nicely, so I did.
Pancho charged down the rocky embankment and quickly came back up. “Dos grandes contenedores en el arroyo,” he said. There are two large containers in the arroyo. I didn’t know the significance of that.
“Muchos problemas aquí, muchos narcos,” Pancho said in a low voice, looking nervously toward the arroyo. “Muchas personas en la noche.” Many people at night.
Innocent vaqueros and mission walkers can stumble upon a narcofosa—a narco cemetery—out in the middle of nowhere, strewn with carnage: encobijados, or headless bodies wrapped in a tarpaulin and taped, and encintados, mutilated bodies bound and blindfolded with tape.
“No vemos nada y no decimos nada.” Pancho advised, his voice barely a whisper. We see nothing, and we say nothing.
Yes, I said to myself, and pray that we aren’t in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We came to a paved highway, the first cars and paved road I’d seen in five weeks. Coco stood firm and erect. His stance reminded me of Queso at the top of El Paraíso. Coco’s ears pointed slightly forward in a warrior pose, sensing danger. I shuddered to think what would happen if a truck were to round the curve and come upon me and a frightened Coco in the center of the road.
Pancho and Paloma crossed quickly. Coco refused to cross, and Pancho hurried back, grabbed the rope, and pulled us across. Mules don’t like strange things, and paved highways with cars and trucks are strange to these desert creatures.
By late afternoon, the mules were getting restless for water. Pancho said we were close to a rancho and water. And yet we were still riding when it became dark.
Finally, we approached what appeared to be the rancho.
We heard cows, but it was too dark to see them. Two vaqueros came out with flashlights and helped us lead the mules to water. It was a small rancho with only a few cows. There wasn’t enough well water to support more. We were slightly west of the famous missionary waterhole of Yubay, where Junípero Serra had spent the night. “No hay agua en Yubay,” the vaqueros told Pancho. There is no water at Yubay.
The vaquero hut had a small kerosene lamp and a propane burner. They boiled water, and I fixed a survival meal of spaghetti. The vaqueros warmed several tortillas on the open flame. Pancho and I poured spaghetti on tortillas and ate quietly and quickly in the dark.
The vaqueros and Pancho talked in low, guarded voices about drug smugglers.
“Están aquí en el desierto,” one warned. They are here in the desert.
Our route would pass near a desert landing strip that had been used by narcos to smuggle cocaine from Colombia. The vaquero pointed his finger to the sky, tapped his ear, and shook his head. If we heard anything, we shouldn’t go further.
The vaquero let me sleep on his bed. The two vaqueros and Pancho slept on the floor.
There was no pasture and no trees or brush to feed the mules. The vaqueros shared their hay. I tried to pay, but they would not accept the money.
Paloma, our poor burra, was in bad condition and hurting. She had bolted loose and had run wild into a large cholla cactus patch; her left eye was swollen and red, with a big blood blister in the center. All morning her eye bled, and blood dripped down her face onto the sand.
The sand deepened the further north we rode. It would trap my feet, like quicksand, and pour into my high-topped boots. When I sat down to empty sand out of my boots, I sank so low it would spill into my cargo pants. My belt was so loose the waist hung open.
Walking thirty minutes in knee-deep sand is like walking two or three hours on normal dirt. I walked an hour and then rode the mule for an hour. Later in the day, the sand became too bad, and I changed to walking thirty minutes and riding an hour.
Paloma was a wild, free spirit, and Poncho was too exhausted to control her, so he let her loose, without a lariat. She walked just far enough ahead of me to kick hot sand in my face; the sand swelled my dry lips and blurred my dry eyes. I was certain Paloma was born of Satan’s seed.
We didn’t see anyone for days.
And then one morning, suddenly, two dirt bikes came roaring across the desert. After the Darth Vader–looking motorcycle riders roared by, it took half an hour to calm and settle the mules. It took all day to unclog the dust in my suffocating lung.
In the desert, miles are not counted, only places where water is available for man, and brush is available for mules.
There was no food for the mules. Pancho hoped to find a bush or tree they could eat, but there was nothing. There was not a single stick of firewood for a campfire, and we, too, went to bed hungry.
My air mattress had a puncture—probably from a cactus thorn from my pants. Each morning, the air mattress was flat. My air pillow no longer stayed inflated. There was no comfort to be had for my tired bones at night.
Pancho, a man of the desert sierra, didn’t have a problem with cactus or wind. He made himself a rather clever tent with the tarpaulin cover he used for the pack burro; the smelly mule blankets provided soft ground cover, and his saddle was his pillow.
In the stillness of the desert nights, I quieted my breath and strained my ears for any sounds of life. Other sojourners had listened, too, and heard nothing. A desperate soul wrote: “One might well think there was a curse resting upon this region, this perfection of eternal desolation. In the whole expanse not a living thing save the never failing cactus, which itself is a curse in many forms.”1
The desert climate is characterized by extremes, hot days and freezing nights, and I almost froze at night. My dry, taut skin barely covered my bones, and there was no body warmth. During the night, the ferocious winds blew moist air from the ocean. We woke up freezing wet—in the middle of one of the driest deserts on earth. My tent was sopping wet, both the outside and inside layers. I had to pack it wet.
The sun came up, a hot ball of fire. In less than an hour, the desert turns from freezing cold to sweltering heat, and from wet dew to parched air.
Several days before, coming down a steep arroyo embankment, a mesquite branch had torn the sunglasses off my face. The mules slid in the loose sand and covered them; Pancho and I were unable to find them. Now wind blew the brim of my hat straight up, exposing my eyes—just more misery that must be endured. Ash-gray mountains appeared in the distance, and Pancho pointed to the right. “Calamajué,” he said with a sweeping gesture toward the mountains. “Sierra de Calamajué.”
We rode hours through a sandy, bleached-out arroyo that slowly transformed into a kaleidoscope of intense, vivid color—green palms and reeds, orange and gold shrubs, red clay earth, and burnt copper and cinnabar red mountains. The arroyo narrowed between two mountains, and there was water.
Calamajué’s beauty was spellbinding, and water was everywhere. But it was undrinkable.
When the missionaries arrived, the Cochimí had a yellow and sickly appearance.2 I knew what that meant. When cancer attacked my liver, my skin and eyes looked yellow, a condition called jaundice. Yellow is the color of liver failure and, eventually, death.
The wretched water flowed from a mountain of copper, iron, saltpeter, mercury, antimony, and other toxic minerals. It contained so much salt and soda that thirst-starved men had died drinking it. The salty water didn’t quench or satisfy thirst; it increased it, and in some places the water was poisonous.
It caused instant and explosive bowel eruptions.
Paloma and the two mules drank the disgusting water slowly and frequently. They were unbothered by foul taste and toxicity. The stomach of a mule could probably digest acid.
Rather than being sickened by the foul water, Paloma was invigorated. Coco continued to plod along, slower than a slug. I often wondered if he was sleepwalking.
Pancho stopped the mules in front of a small trickle of water dripping from the side of a steep cliff. This small mountain stream had been the only source of drinking water for the mission, more than a mile away.
Pancho dismounted and filled his canteen. “No más agua por dos días.” There would be no water for two days, and he advised me to fill my water bottles.
I cupped my hands to taste it. After sniffing, I tasted with the tip of my tongue and spit it out, almost gagging from the memory of chemotherapy and the disgusting taste of the curative water at San Borja. I knew my intestines could not handle another sip.
I would rather die of thirst than from angry bowels. I still had one dromedary bag with at least a gallon of water, and decided to ration water rather than drink from the sulfuric spring.
The bad water sealed Calamajué’s fate even before the missionaries’ hastily constructed palm and adobe church was finished. Calamajué was an impossible place to live, and in less than a year the mission was moved fifty miles northwest to the Cochimí village of Cabujakaamung, where there was sweet water and a grove of palms. The mission was renamed Mission Santa María and was seven months into construction when the Jesuit missionaries were expelled.
We stopped just long enough in Calamajué for Pancho to fill his canteen and for us to eat the last moldy bean burritos from San Borja.
Pancho delighted in finding things along the trail. He had the heart and curiosity of a tinkerer. He found an old bicycle pump that still worked and gleefully tied it to his bedroll. Heaven knows what he would do with a bicycle pump, but I was sure he would make use of it.
Hours later, we reached the mountains. Pancho wove along the base out of the wind. He had spent a lifetime riding these trails. There was one small cluster of palo verde on this naked sandy plain, and he took us right to it.
The mountain protected our campsite from wind, and the palo verde provided food for the mules and Paloma. Pancho made a roaring fire between my tent and the mountain slope. The fire felt like a warm furnace, and we huddled around it. I had only dried scrambled eggs and chili left. I saved the chili and fixed the detestable scrambled eggs. They were awful. But they were better than not eating.
Pancho was sitting on his saddle next to the fire in the dark, and I was brushing my teeth when he motioned for me to be still.
“Un truck en el desierto,” he whispered loudly, and pointed to headlights coming slowly toward us, about a mile away. The desert was pockmarked with old mining roads, and it was impossible to know where the truck was coming from or where it was going.
“No luz. Narcos!” He motioned for me to quickly turn off the light in my tent and stomped out the campfire. We were camped in a secluded dust hole far from a deserted mining road, but someone could easily see the campfire from miles away.
The truck passed, slowly and in low gear, about half a mile from us.
Strangers are not welcome at night in the desert, especially this desert of narcos and smugglers.
That night, I took out my bear spray and my Home Depot pocket hammer hatchet and laid them next to my deflated pillow. They were a bit of a joke, but reassuring nonetheless.
I began to have intestinal cramping and pain around my stomach and liver. Any time I have pain, the fear of cancer fills me with dread. Please, not yet, I prayed. I fell asleep, massaging my stomach and dreaming of the future. I longed to be with my family and see my friends. When I got to the California border, I couldn’t wait to take hot baths and sleep in warm beds. In the future, I want to live in a campervan in the wilderness and never see another tent in my life, I thought to myself as I fell asleep.
I was awakened in the night by howling wind, and what I thought was the low sound of a truck motor in the distance. I groped in the dark for my hammer hatchet and held it tightly against my chest until the morning.