Imperial (16 page)

Well, so what? As we shall see, a few of these names bear passing relevance in the history of the Mexicali Valley. But the concern of this paragraph (and what if I never write another one?) is the source of the Río Nuevo. Near the righthand edge of Mr. Holabird’s map, the Colorado River first flows south by southwest between the Southern Pacific Railroad’s levee and a United States government levee, then splits, one branch wriggling almost due south from First Mesa to Second Mesa, then continuing off the map, all the way to the Sea of Cortés I presume, for these were the good old days, when the Colorado wasn’t drained dry by farms and cities; while the other branch, the one of interest to us, flows through a rocky falls, passes the crevasse of September 1909, traces the falls of August 1909. Here the cartographer or his successor has pencilled in:
Present channel of the Colorado.
The river now goes west by southwest, nearly paralleling the Paredones River (dry as of 1911), until it fans out into a zone of pinkish watercolor wash labeled
Apex of Delta,
arrows like a school of minnows
(Swift Currents),
then almost touches the eastern extremity of this selfsame Laguna de los Volcanes upon whose dry bed this restricted geothermal station where the engineer looked up at me from the blueprints might even be standing. I imagine that back in the time of its freedom. the Colorado sometimes came here, sometimes didn’t. But thanks to the All-American Canal, the
Present channel of the Colorado
bore no interest to the engineer, whose face I can no longer remember.

On the last of his blueprints, the one I’d craved to see, the Río Nuevo evidently originated in a spiderweb of wriggling agricultural drains in Baja California’s hot olive-drab and yellow-drab flatscape, some of them being named Dren Colector del Norte, Dren Xochimilco and Dren Ferrocarril, the last so called because it partly followed the course of the railroad tracks. My driver and I went to Ejido Hidalgo to discover, insofar as we could, the source of Dren Ferrocarril, and encountered more restricted areas which were scenic with white, sulphurous steam erupting on the horizon between latticeworks of pipes, everything guarded by shrugging sentries who had no authorization even to call anybody and who had never heard of the Río Nuevo. And now for the nearest of the assistant engineer at Centro Cívico’s natural springs.—Oh, yes, here it was: a cement-walled canal in which liquid of an insanely phosphorescent bluish-white glowed in the sun.

MEDITATIONS OVER ANOTHER HOLE

In the United States, the New River is more or less denied and avoided; the Mexicans were doing what they could to achieve the same bliss; for now, though, the Río Nuevo remained a part of the human landscape. Begin, for instance, with the wildly spicy sour smell of a shop which sold dried chilis; then came a concrete ruin, scarcely even a foundation anymore, advertising itself for rent, after which, at the intersection of Calle Mariano Escobedo and Avenida Miguel Hidalgo, the street dipped down into a pale dry gulley of trees, houses, warehouses, taco stands, this view being centered by the following grime-stained red-on-yellow caption: 

Hacienda S. A.
FABRICA DE
TORTILLAS

and in this dip, which as I’ve said was made by the Colorado River during the floods of 1904-06, there ran two blue-grey dust-sugared ribbons of asphalt between which there seemed to be something resembling a segmented overturned bathtub of endless length; I could see darkness between the segments here and there; that was all. My legless acquaintance Señor Ramón Flores might have been watching me. (
Q.
Do you have any problems with the smell? Does it ever make you sick?
A.
We’re used to it.) My nose could not detect dried chilis anymore; you can guess what it discovered. When I think about that arroyo now, I remember another album from the Archivo Histórico del Municipio de Mexicali; specifically, I remember a photograph entitled Puente sobre el Río Nuevo, the date being around 1920, probably; and the photograph depicts the airy trapezoid of a girder-bridge across our river, which was wide in those days and which glistened with the reflections of bushes and trees; it looked so cool and shining beneath the age-yellowed sky (a result of air pollution or improper fixing of the print)—so beautiful, in short; and on the bridge, a car of old-fashioned make preened itself, showing off huge, heavy-spoked tires and a perfectly flat roof; one didn’t often come across such cars and rivers anymore. In 2001, pedestrians toiled across the dirt; garbage, especially plastic jugs, adorned it; and beside me, from a little trailer with a prison-barred window, a woman’s hand every now and then flung out new garbage: a plastic plate with red rice stuck on it, a plastic bag of something, and finally—success!—a used condom.

Early one evening, the heat stinging my nose and forehead almost deliciously, I descended back into that gully, half-crossed the road which so many people hoped and believed would be the new straight shot to Calexico, found a square hole, and peered down into it, wondering whether I would stand a chance if anybody lowered me and a raft into it, and while I considered the matter, my latest taxi driver, who enjoyed flirting with my interpreter, stood on a mound of dirt and recited “El Ruego” by the Chilean poetess Gabriela Mistral. Thus Mexico, where the most obscene feculence cannot prevail over art.—The current appeared to be extremely strong, and there was no predicting where I would end up. At best I’d be washed out into the federal restricted area by the border, where I’d probably get arrested, since even after seeing my press credentials the Mexicans had denied me entry. Should there be any sort of underground barrier, my raft would smash against it. I’d probably capsize and eventually starve, choke or drown, for I didn’t think I could swim against that speeding current whose stench was now making me gag, and even if I could, I didn’t see how I could clamber up out of any hole. Just to be sure, I knocked on a few doors at Condominios Montealbán, whose grimy concrete apartments, home to poor people,
polleros,
prostitutes and car thieves, stood a few steps away. How bad did they think it would be if one had to take a swim?

Well, the kids have respiratory problems just from living here, said one lady who was standing in the broken courtyard. They have coughs, and on the skin some pimples and rashes. There used to be nothing but a fence here.
Pollos
would go in. We used to see them swimming. They used to die. Some of them made it to America, I don’t know how many. Now in the Río Nuevo we see only dead people. They throw people in it like trash. Sometimes it’s gays. Two months ago we found a body in there. He was naked. I saw the police and the ambulance, but I didn’t go there because I don’t wanna look at those things.

How about you? I asked a Chinese woman. Does the river ever make
you
sick?

A year ago, when they tubed this section, we stopped smelling it. I don’t know anybody who’s gotten sick.

(Some of the taxi drivers at that dispatch stand used to get sick from the Río Nuevo, they’d told me, but it was better now. None of them suffered from it anymore.)

I approached some knowing-looking, money-hungry, daredevil teenagers who sat in the shade of the old stone lion and asked whether any of them would be willing to ride underground in the Río Nuevo with me. They shook their heads sorrowfully and said: No oxygen.

That settled it. Since I couldn’t spend my own death benefits, I decided to begin my little cruise in America.

FIRST RIVER CRUISE

Mr. Jose Lopez, who clerked at the motel where I was staying in Calexico, was an ex-Marine with a cheerful, steady, slightly impersonal can-do attitude. When I told him that nobody seemed willing to take me down the New River or even rent me a rowboat, he proposed that I go to one of those warehouse-style chain stores which now infested the United States and buy myself an inflatable dinghy. I asked whether he would keep me company, and he scarcely hesitated.—Anyway, he said, it will be something to tell our grandchildren about.

The store sold two-person, three-person and four-person rafts. I got the four-person variety for maximum buoyancy (since, as I’ve said, the idea of capsizing in the New River scarcely appealed to me), selected two medium-priced wooden oars, paid seventy dollars and felt good about the bargain. That evening at dusk, driving past the inky silhouettes of hay bales, I revisited the spot where the New River came through the gap in the border wall and, gazing back into that federal restricted area in Mexico, I thought more on what I was about to do, wondering whether I could prepare any better than I had. It was a hundred and fifteen degrees then, and sweat pattered down from my forehead onto the film holders of my view camera. Nobody had any idea how many of the New River’s sixty American miles might be navigable; the Border Patrol (one of whose white vehicles now hunched just across the river, watching me) once again advised me not to attempt any such thing since it was “dangerous.”

I’d prevailed upon Jose to bring his father from Mexicali. The old man would drive Jose’s truck and wait for us at each crossing of the road that he could, proceeding always ahead rather than behind, so that if we had to walk in the heat, we could be sure in which direction to go. If we waved one arm at him, he’d know to drive to the next bridge. Two arms would mean that we were in trouble.

I worried about two possibilities. The first and more likely but less immediately detrimental one was that we might get poisoned by the New River. Should this happen, I supposed that our grace period would endure long enough for us to achieve our next rendezvous with Jose’s father before ill effects overwhelmed us. The second peril, which seriously concerned me, was dehydration. Should we be forced to abandon the boat in an unlucky spot between widely spaced bridges, the heat might get us. Tomorrow’s temperature was predicted not to significantly exceed a hundred and ten degrees, so that could have been worse. My daypack lay ready to hand, half filled with bottled water, juice and sugar-salted snacks. I’d told Jose to prepare his own supplies. He was behind his desk at the motel now, laboriously inflating the dinghy breath by breath whenever the customers gave him a chance, for he had no bicycle pump with him. This was the kind of fellow he was: determined, optimistic, ready to do his best with almost nothing.

His father had first come Northside as a teenaged
pollo
in the 1950s. A Japanese ranching family, recently unrelocated from some miserable American prison camp, proposed to pay him nothing except for food and clothing, but to teach him everything they knew. Just as Jose gladly accepted my offer to ride the New River with me in exchange for fifty dollars (I gave him a hundred plus the dinghy), so his father bore out Officer Murray’s axiom: They do work most Americans wouldn’t do.—Jose’s father labored for two harvesting seasons. On each occasion, he’d walk along the border all the way to the terrible reddish barrenness of El Centinela, known on the American side as Signal Mountain. This journey required about twelve hours. He crossed at a certain place he told me about where there were no Border Patrolmen (they are there now). Then came thirty-eight miles in the heat. Sometimes there were taxi drivers who would take the illegals (who were not yet called
pollos
or
bodies
) that distance for ten dollars, and I hope I can imagine how much that would have been for a Mexican laborer in the 1950s, especially given Jose’s father’s wages. (In 2001, Jose got a twenty-dollar speeding ticket in Mexicali, and this fee infected him with anguish.) The first year Jose’s father preferred to walk that thirty-eight miles. The second year he chose to spend the ten dollars, less to spare himself than to limit his risk of being arrested. As it happened, some other field workers were ahead of him. The taxi driver took their ten dollars, then turned them in to the Border Patrol. After this, Jose’s father never trusted American taxi drivers; he went by foot. Each year when the last crop was harvested, he gave himself up to Immigration so that he’d get a free ride back to the border. At the beginning of his third year, the Japanese brothers began paying him twenty-five cents an hour. He was ecstatic. His grandfather, who’d been boarding him in Mexicali during the off season, was finally able to go back home to southern Mexico; Jose’s father could fend for himself now . . .

Sheep-shaped clots of foam, white and wooly, floated down the New River. (That’s domestic sewage foam, explained a scientist from the Environmental Protection Agency. Near Brawley there’s lot of ag foam as well.) I stood on the trash-covered bank, inhaling the reek of excrement and of something bitter, too, which I guessed to be pesticides. Still and all, the water did not smell nearly as foul as in Mexicali. The cheesy stench had mellowed into something more tolerably sour and rancid, further diluted by sun and dust. The Border Patrolman on the other side of the river sat motionless in his wagon, watching me. After fifteen minutes my throat got sore and I went back to the motel. Another Border Patrol car followed me slowly through the white sand.

At seven-o’-clock the next morning, with Imperial already laying its hot hands on my thighs, my shoulders and the back of my neck, the three of us, Jose, his father and I, were in the parking lot across the river from the supermarket, squinting beneath our caps, squatting down to study Jose’s father’s stick-sketching in the dirt; he was mapping out the New River with the various road-crossings; and across the highway, on the dirt road where I’d stood the night before, another white Border Patrol vehicle idled. The first place that the old man would be able to wait for us was the bridge at Highway 98, about a mile due north, which equalled four miles’ worth of river, thanks to a west-northwest north. After that, there might be a safe stopping place for the truck at either Kubler or Lyons Road, or perhaps the north-south overpass of S-30; but this depended on traffic, so the next spot which Jose’s father could guarantee was Interstate 8, which looked to be a good ten miles from Highway 98 if one counted in river-bends and wriggles. Perhaps two miles after this began a longish stretch between crossings. If we got that far, I would be nervous then. But I hardly expected to; nobody knew if the river even remained navigable.