Imperial (30 page)

—G. Polya, How to Solve It (1957)

I
opened the newspaper and read:
The deaths are full of suffering. People have been suffocated in airless trucks . . .
Dateline: EL CENTRO, Calif. Operation Gatekeeper’s harvest might well take the gold medal at the next county fair
in the more unguarded and desolate deserts of Arizona and eastern California,
a zone which naturally includes Imperial, because
June was the deadliest month ever there, with 67 migrants dying.
Fortunately, the majority of these perishings took place in Sector Tucson, which Officer Dan Murray had told me was “a hot spot for narcotics and immigration” and which lies outside this book’s sphere of concern; let’s say they never happened. In Sector El Centro,
which includes the vast Imperial Desert,
only fifty-two dead
pollos
had been found in the last ten months.
The sheriff’s department believes the deaths could outpace last year’s record of 95.

Three ninety-nine, one seventy-seven, said the radio. Ninety-nine, you anywhere near the Highway 111 check?

Ninety-nine, that’s me in the white Explorer.

We achieved two hundred and forty-eight thousand apprehensions last year, a Border Patrolman told me.

I congratulated him, and he proudly said to me: We’re highly visible. We’re on the border. We’re in the hills, day in and day out, to try and deter them.

The dying season began early this year, with four bloated bodies found floating in the All-American Canal on March 14.
Well, it wasn’t the worst news on the front page: more air raids and suicide bombings in the Middle East, an attempt (fortunately foiled) to murder a hundred schoolchildren in a Christian school in Pakistan, and my government had snubbed Iraqi overtures; we were getting ready to bomb them again. I had been to Iraq; I had seen the sick and dying children in a medicine-embargoed hospital; so I had my mental picture; it’s better not to have mental pictures. But why confess such a flinch? I’d rather clothe myself in principle: Communication for its own sake is not an interesting goal. (Does that sound plausible?) Unlimited access to information remains worthless without something to do with that information, or some way to verify its quality. What can I “do with” my image of that young mother whose hijab made a white crescent across her black hair as she held her baby’s round head tight against her throat so that it was just their two heads filling my vision in that ward of Saddam Hussein Pediatric Hospital whose pharmacy was empty, while the baby, not knowing that anything was wrong with it, gazed sleepily upon the world and the mother stared into space, never at me, the corners of her mouth parenthesized by bitterness? I asked her if there was anything I could “do”—I’d already given the duffel bag of medicine to one of the doctors, and she probably wouldn’t get any of it—and she replied, grinning with hate: End the sanctions.—Thank God her misery didn’t take place in Sector El Centro! I won’t need to write about her in this book.

Reading a newspaper, you see, is fundamentally a matter of delineation: Some people prefer the sports page; in the Sunday
Sacramento Bee,
I always go straight for the “Forum” section, which deals in opinions instead of information; in the
Sacramento News and Review
I seek out erotic classified ads. We irrigate our mental fields with the liquid of our choice. And the reclamation of “reality” is the largest irrigation enterprise in the nation!
The bountiful continent is ours, state on state, and territory on territory, to the waves of the Pacific sea.
Each morning a new continent awaits me on the glass table downstairs; because each newspaper’s potentialities, like those of all entities blank or folded, are as vast as the wide silver-tan-ness of the concrete bay between El Centro’s Greyhound station and its adjacent sheds and brickworks: “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” What rivers and mountains will get discovered next? I can remember the headline when that surgeon in South Africa performed the first human heart transplant; he did something. He died recently, making obituaries but not headlines. I can still see the heavy black headline about the Apollo lunar landing in 1969. When I grew up, I would be able to go to the moon. Pan American was selling tickets. Pan Am’s bankrupt now. We’d colonize Mars, whose red craterscapes may not be conceptually distant from the tan sands of Imperial,
⁴³
at least in the case of the County Refuse Disposal Area. Recently I reread Ray Bradbury’s
Martian Chronicles
and realized that the Martians, at least at the end of that novel, when they’re essentially ghosts (before that, when they’re telepathic, magical, dangerous, tricky and treacherous, they resemble Puritans’ nightmares about Indians), speak and behave in an eerily familiar ornate fashion—why, of course! They’re Mexicans! We conquered California from them, expelling their laws and ways; California, Imperial California, is our Mars, but
the Martians are coming back!
(Excuse me, but do you prefer more alien aliens? Note the three glowing eyes on a locomotive; I’ll bet you can’t find that face in your xenobiology guide! The steady mica-like gleam of some trailer, window or car across the Salton Sea could be the beacon of a rocket in distress. Do you want spacemen? The handsome Border Patrolman removes his sombrero, pinching the crown of it with the left three fingers of his right hand as he gazes down into the bamboo-shadows of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, his communicator comfortingly ready on his left shoulder; it looks a bit like the spare respirator which now comes standard in a scuba outfit. He’s Neil Armstrong
and
Buck Rogers; he’s looking for Martians. I want to find them, too, but where are they? I see old shell-fragments and mussels on the shore. I hear the bubbles from the brine shrimp sizzling like popcorn.) The Mars of Robert A. Heinlein’s novels I remember, or think I do, from my childhood. Desert, difficult temperatures, colonists holding town meetings, fighting the wildlife and improving the sands into a democratic Eden, why does this strike a chord?
I can’t help believing in people . . . I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life . . . Ranchers in heavy boots stomped into luncheon conferences demanding water.
All this comes into my mind now, when I recollect that headline about the moon landing. All this is probably why I recollect it. I was nine years old. Several solar revolutions later there came a day in the Klong Toey slum when some skinny Thais sniggered into the window:
Big fire in your country! Buildings fall!
A blaze in California or Oregon must have nibbled at houses, maybe even a town; I thought of my friends in Borrego Springs; I’d once telephoned Larry to see how he was doing after his colostomy and he was busy watering down the roof and deck because flames might be coming; he explained, professorial to the last, that high temperatures and dry desert brush made for superheated conditions if a spark got lucky. When Imperial’s heat comes, people’s minds shut down; we don’t want to think or try anything new; we don’t want to know. (Ecclesiastes 1.18:
He who increases knowledge increases sorrow.
) And so it was only by accident (I wish I could have gone a week without knowing) that on the next day I happened to stroll past a sidewalk stand which displayed the
Bangkok Post
with its headline. For another minute I still couldn’t believe it; my innermost Border Patrol was still fencing out feelings which once I felt them would be as sharp-edged as the shadows on a burning-hot sidewalk. That must have been on September 13 or 14, 2001.
The sheriff’s department believes the deaths could outpace last year’s record of 95.

The sheriff’s department believes the deaths could outpace last year’s record of 95.
Then came Palestine and Iraq on the same page. There was also a small boxed item which from my point of view was especially unfortunate:
Sign of Slow Growth Sends Stocks Lower.
We mostly think of ourselves first. The bald shoeshine man on his throne, his hands crossed, gazing down at the world, how much time did he spend thinking of me?
I have never been cheated out of a dollar in my life.
I worried about my little girl’s college fund. Since September 11 it had lost a third of its value. But I wouldn’t want to imply that Imperial wasn’t interesting, too. (A guidebook advises:
Mexicali’s sights are few and far between, and most visitors are in Mexicali for business. A tourist-oriented strip of curio shops and sleazy bars is located along Avenida Francisco Madero, one block south of the border.
Another guidebook:
Mexicali lies at sea level . . . Be warned that it is unbearably hot here in the summer.
) Power plants and sugar beets, here and there a brief flash of onions, that was Imperial for you. Imperial was sticky sweets stacked up against a bakery window, each one hand-shaped, variable. That bakery closed, I think in 1998. No matter; I’d already photographed it.
⁴⁴
Which sweet do you want? Give me Imperial; I’ll skip Palestine. (An Algerian woman I know reads the latter article—something about retaliation and malnutrition—then starts wiping her red-rimmed eyes.)
Big fire in your country!
Sign of Slow Growth Sends Stocks Lower.
Bodies are being found in ever more remote areas . . . Here in the El Centro sector, five suspected illegal immigrants died of heat exposure in mid-July in an area of the Imperial Desert that resembles a moonscape.

Chapter 9

WATER IS HERE (1849-2002)

Possibly there was more rainfall in those days than now . . .

—John C. Van Dyke, 1903

I
n about 1845 Captain James Hobbs set his face westwards and departed Fort Yuma, prudently keeping close to the New River, which at that particular moment
possessed water only at one place, and that a small pool hardly fit to drink. In passing through this desert we came upon the remains of an emigrant train, which a month previous had attempted to cross this desert in going from the United States to California.
From the United States to California! These words hint at how bleakly remote Imperial was in those days. A sandstorm had driven his predecessors off course, and Captain Hobbs spied their abandoned wagons almost in sight of that foul pool in the New River.
⁴⁵
We could see where they had lightened their loads by abandoning goods, but still their cattle had been obliged to yield to the terrible thirst. There were eight women and children, and nine men. The body of a child had been almost stripped of flesh by the buzzards and animals and its clothes were torn off; but most of the other bodies had their clothes on.
Different times, different mores; a Border Patrolman in Yuma once told me that
his
dead bodies were usually naked or nearly so, because in the final conscious stage of heat exhaustion one’s flesh begins to swell; clothing becomes excruciatingly tight. Standing beside me as we faced the river, tall and neighborly with my passport in his hand (he’d just wanted to see what I was up to), that Border Patrolman said that whenever he came upon a T-shirt or a pair of pants in the sand beside the wavering spoor, he knew that the prize was near: another trophy for OperationGatekeeper.
We could see where they had lightened their . . .
The sandy stretches around Yuma have always been particularly deadly for desert-crossers legal and illegal. Aside from that detail about indecent undress, and aside from the fact that they weren’t Mexican, it was the same story as the Border Patrolman’s, almost. What’s the “almost”? Must I really tell it? All right then; here’s a book for you; I found it in the same bookstore where I bought my pretty new
Salton Sea Atlas,
or maybe I wrote it; it’s a book called
Imperial:

CHAPTER I

In passing through this desert we came upon the remains of an emigrant train. There were eight women and children, and nine men.
But someday these tragedies would be history, by which we Northsiders mean “obsolete”; we can forget them because Mars was going to be terraformed by Alistair MacLean at Ice Station Zebra, great clouds of oxygen becoming rain, Mars growing green; those ancient canals which an Italian astronomer first spied centuries ago (xenobiologists remain divided as to whether their builders were Cahuilla or Yuma Indians) beginning to shimmer with pure polar water, melted for us by Mexican bipeds whose spacesuit rental fees had been deducted from their wages in an easy payment plan:
WATER IS HERE
.

CHAPTER II

THE DESERT DISAPPEARS
.
Call it Lake Imperial. The weather is not uncomfortable in the New River section.
Wilber Clark improves his ranch: Here comes water; jump out of the way, because his fruit trees are sprouting up! TWO YEARS AND FOUR MONTHS PRIOR TO THE TAKING OF THIS PHOTOGRAPH, NEITHER WATER, TREE, NOR MAN EXISTED IN THIS PLACE, IMPERIAL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA. Now for Boulder Dam and the All-American Canal! By 1945 Imperial County will possess 259,487 grapefruit trees and 627,467 orange trees, and I’ll bet you the Coachella Valley’s got a few, too.
We need have no fear that our lands will not become better and better as the years go by.
Imperial’s heaven; water’s in Brawley; we’re safe from thirst forever.

CHAPTER III

The sheriff’s department believes the deaths could outpace last year’s record of 95.

Chapter 10