The Last Empty Places (35 page)

Muir fought for the cause of wilderness to his very end, when he was too frail to experience it directly. He died of pneumonia on Christmas Eve, 1914, at age seventy-six, soon after a final climactic battle to save the Sierra’s Hetch Hetchy Valley from being dammed for San Francisco’s water supply. Although the battle was lost, it proved a galvanizing moment for the future of wilderness preservation. “[T]he conscience of the whole country has been aroused from sleep,” wrote Muir.

Clouds swirled off the rock-and-snow peak of Steens. A quick patch of sun was followed by a blast of cold wind and the hard splatter of graupel—hail-like pellets of snow.

I pulled on my hat and gloves. I zipped up my hood. The graupel pelted hard off the hood, like a rainstorm driving against a roof. It was still several miles’ hike to the summit up the broad, gentle ridge. I knew I wasn’t going to make it today.

F
lying into Phoenix at night felt like descending into a video game. Out the window to the west, a beaded, golden grid of lights extended as far as one could see, a great, flat circuit board of lights, millions of lights in long, bright perpendicular rows, and other smaller lights moving along the glowing grid as if carrying messages from one sector to another, telling the sprawling mechanism what to do, telling it how to suck in more electrons from far-off dammed desert rivers and giant furnaces of burning coal, telling it how to feed itself.

Out the airplane window to the east—nothing. Blackness—utter, total blackness.

We four—our little family: Amy, Molly, Skyler, myself—jammed our backpacks into the trunk of a rental car amid the pools of light and shadow in the Mesa airport parking lot where palm trees stood and the air felt balmy. Then we drove east, a lone light-bead arching across empty overpasses and circling along empty ramps and swinging through empty cloverleafs in the total blackness east of Phoenix and Mesa, where it was said a half million more houses were planned but didn’t yet exist.

“Where are we?” we said to one another. “This is very strange.”

An island of white light hove out of the darkness. It was a mall, standing alone, waiting for the houses that hadn’t yet come to nestle warmly around it…waiting for the houses that now might never come, lit bravely, hopefully, like a lone Christmas tree on a cold, rainy night. But this was desert and there was no rain and sadness to repel, only the infinite blackness.

We found a motel near the brave mall and rose early, driving east again, into the bright desert sun. Saguaro cacti reached their arms up from arid hills. Dry, rocky mesas glistened before us. Here and there sat a small patch of houses along the road, and then there were none. We drove a long loop southeast, on Interstate 10, to skirt southward around the millions and millions of acres of high, rugged, empty country that lies along the border between Arizona and New Mexico. On
the Earth-at-night satellite photo image, three southwestern cities form a triangle defined by three nodes of light: Albuquerque to the north, Phoenix to the west, and El Paso to the east. They lie about three hundred to four hundred miles apart. In the center of this triangle, however, is a vast, shapeless, inky sprawl—one of the largest and most distinct blank spots of the Lower 48 states.

“If you start walking east from Phoenix,” I’d heard from a forester I’d met a year or two earlier who was based in Arizona, “you can travel all the way to the middle of New Mexico and cross only three paved roads.”

I’d also sat beside a white-haired grandfather at our children’s school music recital in Montana, where his grandchildren also went to school. He told me he lived just east of Phoenix.

“Behind our house sits a single row of condos. After the row of condos the Superstition Mountains begin. After that there’s nothing—just nothing—for a long,
long
way. I can’t tell you how far because I’ve never been back there. I don’t know anyone who has.”

Amy drove, while Molly and Skyler, ages fourteen and ten, crammed between camping gear in the backseat of our rental car, read their books. I fell asleep. When I woke we’d swung so far south that we were only fifty miles from the Mexican border. We crossed from Arizona into New Mexico, and left the Interstate, swinging north on a smaller highway, New Mexico 90, toward the heart of that sprawling region—the center of the triangle that had shown so blank on the Earth-at-night photo.

The open desert rose in long rolls, waves of balding ridges topped by scrubby piñon pine and juniper forests. A sign on the crest of one rounded ridge marked the Continental Divide, the spine of North America, where rivers to the east flow to the Atlantic and those to the west to the Pacific. We coasted downward through the Little Burro Mountains, past a large open-pit mine and long heaps of tailings, a former Phelps Dodge mine now owned by Freeport McMoRan, a global giant producing gold and copper, operating huge mines on the island of New Guinea, in the Congo Basin, and in South America. Long before Freeport, or Phelps Dodge, or its predecessors, however, Indians mined copper at this same ore deposit and shaped the soft, golden metal into spear points and ornaments.

W
AS IT RUMOR
—or knowledge—of this very metal deposit that prompted Cabeza de Vaca to give his stunning report in the summer of 1536 to Viceroy Mendoza of Mexico City? After wandering for years in the unknown lands north of Mexico—what’s now the southwestern United States—he had finally found his way back to Spanish civilization, or civilization in a manner of speaking. Only fifteen years earlier Mexico City had still been Tenochtitlán, capital of the Aztec empire, until conquered by Cortés. Other Spaniards had conquered lands toward the south of Mexico City, in Guatemala and Honduras and the Yucatán peninsula. But they had little idea what lay to the north. No European did—no explorer had yet penetrated to the interior of the North American continent. Cabeza de Vaca, quite unintentionally, was the first.

Yes, Cabeza de Vaca reported when he reached Mexico City, there could be valuable metals.
¹
Yes, perhaps copper…gold…silver…in the unknown lands to the north where he wandered. And, yes, he’d heard of cities there, too—cities built of stone, many stories high.

It was all the news of Mexico City in the summer of 1536, this arrival of Cabeza de Vaca’s, and the rumors he brought of gold and cities to the north. He had long ago been given up for dead. But in April of that year a column of mounted Spanish soldiers headed out from the northernmost villages of Mexico to capture Indians to work as slaves on the Spanish plantations. One day the slaving party—having taken few captives because the Indians had fled and hidden—came upon a stranger whose bizarre appearance and words left them literally speechless. He stood before them nearly naked and barefoot, dressed in a few tanned hides and holding a gourd rattle. He addressed them in formal Andalusian Spanish.

He’d been shipwrecked eight years ago, he told the soldiers in the slaving party. He and three others were the only survivors of the great Narváez expedition of three hundred men sent out nine years earlier from Spain by the king himself to claim mainland Florida for the crown. While anchored off the Florida coast, a hurricane had blown away their ships, leaving only bits of planking in the treetops. They didn’t give up. They carried on inland, on horses, following rumors of gold. It was said by the Indians to lie to the west—always to the west, they were told. So they kept west. They fought Indians, and they befriended Indians. They
ran out of food and stole from Indians. Many men died from illness. Still they kept west, following the curve of the unknown coast. They were stopped by a great swampy delta choked with fallen logs. Starving, they killed their horses, devoured the flesh, and fashioned boats from the stretched horsehides. Still westward they traveled, now by horsehide boat, along the curving coast. After many leagues’ sailing, strong currents and powerful storms caught them, sweeping Governor Narváez’s boat out to sea, never to be seen again. Another boat overturned. Many died in the water. Others crawled through the surf to shore, naked, in November. Friendly Indians found them, built fires to warm them, and fed them. Still, many died of sickness.

Finally only the four of them remained, three Spaniards and the black Moorish slave. They were separated but got back together, living with the Indians. The Indians asked the strangers to cure their sicknesses. They obliged, using their crosses and their breath, and the sacred Indian rattles and amulets. They became medicine men and traders. The slave, the Moor, Esteben, was a prized medicine man. He could communicate fluently with the Indians by signs, and in their many tongues. For these eight years they lived among the Indians. Gradually, they worked their way west, toward the great ocean that lay there, and toward Mexico—Nueva España—where they knew they’d find the Spanish and Mexico City itself.

So there he stood before the mounted Spaniards of the slaving party, dressed in his tanned skins, mostly naked in their eyes, without sword or armor or lance, nothing whatsoever to reveal his rank, other than the sacred medicine rattle, surrounded by ten Indian companions, and led by the Moorish slave, addressing them formally in Spanish—Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, born in Jeréz, Spain, and serving as treasurer of the great expedition that came to so much ruin.

The soldiers stared, dumbfounded.

Could he be taken to their chief? asked Cabeza de Vaca
²
of the soldiers.

They were led half a league to the camp of the captain, who was both desperate for food and desperate to capture some Indian slaves to show something for his mission. The Indian friends of Cabeza de Vaca, out of their own generosity, brought clay pots containing maize to the hungry Spaniards. But after receiving the gifts the Spanish captain wanted to take his friends as slaves. Cabeza de Vaca argued bitterly against it.