The Environmental Protection Agency ordered Phelps Dodge to install emissions controls at a cost of half a billion dollars. The company shut down the smelter instead. In mid-January 1987, four workers poured the last batch of copper. Clouds of exhaust stopped billowing from the towering smokestacks. A haze hanging over the valley dissipated. No one missed the thick air, but there were other losses: 347 jobs with $10 million in payroll, an estimated quarter of the local economy. That rankled the citizens of Douglas, even those who still had work. “I wish they’d ship all those S.O.B.s that had anything to do with closing the smelter to Russia and Canada,” one Coors beer distributor employee told The Boston Globe. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s communist-inspired.”
Douglas’s prospects are still in freefall. The town’s only hospital shut down in the summer of 2015, taking another seventy jobs. The metro area encompassing Douglas and Sierra Vista, another former smelter town, was recently named the fourth-fastest-shrinking city in America. Between 2010 and 2015, Douglas saw steeper drops in population than two rust belt capitals: Flint, Michigan, and the Youngstown, Ohio, metro area.
As I walked down G Avenue, the gulf between Douglas’s heyday and modern era was visible all around. Across from the Gadsden Hotel stood the century-old Brophy Building, a former commercial hub whose neoclassical good looks with ornamental shields, egg-and-dart molding, and a dentil cornice now lent a strange solemnity to boarded-up storefronts. One block north, a marquee at the long-empty Grand Theatre said “NOW SHO ING.” Around the Grand’s opening in 1919, boosters called the 1,600-seat movie palace the “finest theatre building between San Antonio and Los Angeles,” touting such amenities as a pipe organ to accompany silent films, a tearoom, and a candy shop. Apart from showing films, the Grand hosted entertainers from Ginger Rogers to John Philip Sousa. But the rise of television in the mid-twentieth century marked the end of opulent movie houses, and the Grand closed in 1958. The roof later collapsed. Trees sprouted in the ruins. In the early 1980s, preservationists purchased it for $1, but restoration would require some $9.5 million, so it’s still dormant. In the 2000s the derelict theater found at least one role: Halloween haunted house. To raise funds for the building, volunteers made an annual tradition of creating scary scenes inside, including an embalming lab built by a real-life funeral home and a Pet Sematary horror scene acted by high school students.
Though Linda was intrigued by Douglas’s storied past, the town’s decline was no tragedy to her. For an experimental homesteader on a budget, it kept things affordable. The cheap real estate was already attracting a trickle of entrepreneurs and artists, from Robert Uribe, a Manhattan transplant who opened a coffee shop in Douglas and was elected mayor four years later, to Harrod Blank, a Berkeley filmmaker who was building Art Car World, a museum of creatively modified vehicles. The fleet included Carthedral, a hearse with stained glass windows and gothic spires, and the Coltmobile, bedecked with 1,045 plastic horses. The latter was created by an alcoholic Vietnam vet who, during his recovery, glued a horse to the car each time he wanted a drink.
But the town posed challenges, too. While researching her new home, Linda had encountered something ominous. “There’s been quite a drug smuggling problem because Douglas is right on the Mexican border,” she had told me, not long after making the down payment. That information had come from books about Douglas, Linda added, but she didn’t know how long ago they were written. So maybe things had gotten better since then?
While reading about the trafficking problem, Linda had learned about the town’s most famous drug bust. It dated back to 1990, when agents found a 300-foot-long tunnel running below the border. Used by the Sinaloa cartel to smuggle cocaine, the concrete-reinforced passageway lay three stories underground and started at a house in Agua Prieta, where the entrance was cleverly hidden. Turning on a water spigot activated a hydraulic lift, which raised a pool table—and the slab it sat upon—to reveal a ladder leading down. Inside, the tunnel was five feet tall and air conditioned, lit with electric lights and protected from flooding by a sump pump. A trolley ran end to end on a pair of metal tracks, terminating in Douglas below a 2,000-square-foot warehouse disguised as a truck-washing station. There a hoist-and-pulley system hauled bundles of cocaine up to the surface, where workers loaded them onto waiting tractor-trailers. Agents marveled that the tunnel, nicknamed “cocaine alley,” was like “something out of a James Bond movie.” Sinaloa kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was even more effusive, boasting his operatives had “made a fucking cool tunnel.”
Linda was intrigued by this, but none of it discouraged her from homesteading in the area. “An ex-border patrolman wrote about people getting killed who have been giving information to the police. Informants,” she had explained, matter-of-factly. “Yeah, the drug cartel slaughters informants. And I’m like, ‘Well, I’m not associating with any of those people.’” After we hung up, I wondered if Linda was trying to reassure herself. Or me. Or both. In any case, she hadn’t been exaggerating when she said Douglas was right on the border. Twelve blocks south of the Grand Theatre, the town—and the nation—comes to a halt against two parallel fences, which flank a cement-lined channel that looks like a dry moat. (Its official name, used by federal contractors, is “Douglas International Ditch.”) The first fence, on the U.S. side of the moat, is made of heavy wire mesh painted a self-effacing desert beige. The second fence, which faces Mexico and is the official border barrier, looks like something out of a prison film. A bollard-style structure made of heavy steel, it looms eighteen feet overhead, continuing its work out of sight and underground, where it descends another six to eight feet to deter diggers. Its bars are black and dappled with rust, separated by four-inch gaps that frame glimpses of Mexican sister city Agua Prieta, a sprawling industrial metropolis nearly five times the size of Douglas. Many of its citizens work in the maquiladoras—foreign-owned factories that assemble products for export—making everything from car parts to medical supplies, window blinds, electronics, and clothing.
Linda’s books were correct about the smuggling, too. Drug couriers can make more in a single night than maquiladora workers earn in a month. So it’s little surprise that Border Patrol agents at the Douglas port of entry often find bundles of marijuana stashed in the quarter panels and spare tires of inbound cars. (On rarer occasions, it’s meth, heroin, or cocaine.) In a recent bust, they caught a sixteen-year-old Mexican boy using a seat belt to rappel down from the top of the fence into Douglas. His mission: collecting burlap sacks stuffed with ninety pounds of pot, which had already been tossed over the barrier from Agua Prieta, and hauling them to a nearby getaway car. For his work, he’d been promised $400. Back home, he made vehicle timing belts in a maquiladora for $42 a week, money he used to help feed his mother and nine siblings.
Border agents have reported stranger exploits, including traffickers who built a homemade zip line to shuttle drug bundles high overhead like tiny cable cars. Another creative smuggler tried wading into Douglas through the sewers carrying fifty-five pounds of marijuana. Agents popped a manhole and discovered him equipped with a scuba tank and mask, wearing a black and purple wetsuit. He dropped the dive gear and the weed and hurried back toward Agua Prieta. From elsewhere along the border come tales of pot flying over the fence on remote-control ultralight aircraft. (One of these drones accidentally dropped a twenty-three-pound bale on a carport in Nogales, Arizona.)
IT WAS ALREADY past noon when I set out to see Linda’s land, driving up into the Sulphur Springs Valley. Bordering the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, this arid expanse runs nearly a hundred miles through southeastern Arizona and into northern Mexico. The lower half is cradled by a half-dozen mountain ranges: the Dragoons and Mules to the west, and the Chiricahuas, Swisshelms, Pedregosas, and Porillas to the east. Linda’s homesteading site was at the foot of the Porillas. She’d told me there were camp hosting jobs to be had north of her place in the Chiricahuas, which were part of Coronado National Forest.
; I traversed what felt like endless scrubland, much of it uninhabited. Ahead the asphalt looked like a shimmering puddle—a heat mirage that vanished when I got close. A rotting billboard on the roadside said “FREE TRADE POLICY: DRUGS IN $$$ BILLIONS OUT.” Occasionally low-slung ranch houses rose from the chaparral. Some appeared to have been abandoned for a long time—open sockets gaped where doors and windows had been, and skeletal rafters peeked through gaps in the warping roof boards. On the left side of the road appeared a small white shrine full of silk flowers and then, farther along, a solitary late-model RV, way out in the lonesome distance like an establishing shot from Breaking Bad.
After a few wrong turns, I found a rough road heading east that was mentioned in the Craigslist ad for Linda’s land. It was already one o’clock, so I texted her to say I was running ten minutes behind. The reply came immediately: “I’m ready.”
The road was narrow and uneven but the reddish dirt was packed solid. That was lucky, considering the midsummer rains. I was nervous and excited, probably driving a little too fast. What if I found something bad out here? What if Linda didn’t like what she saw? The car juddered along, flushing birds from bushes that crowded in on both sides. A black-tailed jackrabbit with cartoonishly large ears shot across the road. Soon an intersection appeared, marked with a pair of official street signs. They were the first ones I’d seen out here, oddly formal in an unpaved wilderness. I turned onto another dirt track and drove half a mile. To the left appeared the ghost of a road, overgrown with mesquite. A strip of sun-bleached pink flagging tape dangled from a bush.
I checked my smartphone map. The blue GPS dot was right next to the constellation marking Linda’s land. The cell signal was strong, so I used the phone as a WiFi hotspot to go online with my laptop and then rang Linda for a teleconference. On the first try there was no answer, but when I called again, she picked up. She was smiling, eyes crinkling at the corners behind her rose-colored bifocals. I waited for the familiar, three-syllable salutation.
“Hell-ooo-ooo!” Linda exclaimed. The video feed stuttered through a series of frozen images, like pages in a flip book. “You’re cutting out,” she said. But the audio was clear and the connection didn’t drop, so we decided to give it a try. I pointed the laptop forward and headed west on the path. “I see clouds!” Linda exclaimed. I’d angled the camera too high and it was broadcasting a wheeling view of the sky overhead. Trying to tilt it down, I gave Linda a shot of my nostrils from below. Finally I got it right.
“Oh, look! That’s the road?” she said incredulously. Her five acres were supposed to be marked with stakes made of PVC pipe, she added. Did I see anything like that? Not yet, I replied. What I could see: dry, reddish earth, the silhouettes of the Mule Mountains on the far side of the valley. “The views sure are pretty, aren’t they?” Linda marveled. Then she hollered to an unseen figure. “Gary, come sit down and look!”
“I can’t sit down,” came a slightly muffled voice.
“Well lean up against a tree, then,” Linda replied.
An older man in black plastic-rimmed glasses appeared. His face hovered over Linda’s shoulder, brow furrowed as he peered at the screen. His gray hair was thinned out on top and he wore an expression of benevolent curiosity.
“Cloudy today,” he remarked. And then: “Look at all that grass!” When Linda laughed at the joke, Gary broke into a grin. “You might need a riding mower,” he deadpanned.
A white pole appeared in the distance, poking out of the ground like a splinter. “See the PVC?” I asked.
“No!” Linda replied. She leaned in and squinted. I kept walking. She reminded me to be careful. “Watch where you’re stepping,” she warned. “Make suuuuuure you don’t see any snakes.” Rattlers were common around the campground where Linda and Gary had worked in Sequoia National Forest and she knew they lived here, too.
Finally, we got close. The five-foot PVC pipe was planted beside a small rock pile and a rebar stake. “Oh! I see it,” Linda said excitedly. “How does that look on your GPS?” The blue dot—my location in the desert—sat right on top of the star marking the northeastern corner of Linda’s land. “It matches!” I said. Linda let out a whoop. “Where do you want to go?” I asked. “We can do whatever you want.”
Linda wanted to see the arroyo. A dry riverbed cut across the northwestern corner of her property. Other potential buyers had peered down into that cleft and walked away, the seller had told her. But Linda thought it could be an asset, a way to collect rain during desert storms. “You know, I’m thinking, ‘more water,’” she later explained.
We joked around as I hiked west, holding the laptop pointed ahead of me like a divining rod. “If you see any snakes before I do, say something!” I pleaded. Linda, who’d already pointed out the choppiness of the broadcast, was dismissive. “Oh yeah, with the delay and everything,” she said, trailing off. We talked about the weather where they were located, just west of Joplin, Missouri, still en route to Kentucky. It was 93 degrees—same as here, but sunny and humid. “Oh, I am soaking wet!” Linda said. Before our meeting, she’d raced to find a rest stop on Interstate 44 with lots of shade trees, one that would be comfortable in the sticky heat of a Midwest summer. (“Racing” meant driving about sixty-two miles an hour in the Squeeze Inn, she later explained. Anything faster made it shake too hard.)
Stepping around a very active anthill, I pointed the laptop camera down to show Linda. “Ooooh, nice ants!” she remarked. That view got her and Gary asking about the consistency of the ground. Gary wanted to know if there were many rocks. “It’s not that rocky, but there are some,” I said. Linda wondered aloud if the dirt was sandy and granular or fine and powdery. She wanted to install earth cooling tubes—a natural climate control system that involves burying pipes between five and eight feet underground, where the temperature goes down to 55 degrees—and use them to circulate air through her home and also a greenhouse. Putting them in would take a lot of digging.
“It breaks pretty easy,” I said, grabbing a fistful of dry, coarse dirt to show them and then spreading my fingers and watching it sift to the ground. “See it streaming through my hand?”
“That may dig well,” Gary replied. “That’s a huge plus.” Linda agreed. “Digging down for cooling tubes looks like it could be very easy. Oh good. Oh wow.”
We continued toward the arroyo and Linda admired the vegetation. The summer rains had made the desert plants appear vivid, almost lush. Delicate yellow blossoms hung between the waxy leaves of the creosote. White-thorn acacias were festooned with tiny, pollen-flecked puffballs. The yuccas had just finished a bloom cycle. A withered stalk jutted from each mop of blade-shaped fronds, bearing a head of dried-out blossoms. We passed one mystery cactus with long, undulating arms that looked like spiky tentacles. It was covered in red, knob-shaped fruits that reminded me of prickly pear. Linda knew it was something else, though. “Prickly pear has flat leaves. That’s another kind of cactus,” she said, adding “Should be able to eat it, though.” (I later learned this was night-blooming cereus—also called Queen of the Night—whose nocturnal blossoms open just once a year.)
After correcting for a wrong turn, the dry riverbed appeared ahead. “Is it a true arroyo or just a ditch?” Linda asked. “How deep is it?” I set the computer up on the edge, with the camera pointing into the arroyo, and clambered into it so she could see. In some places the edge lined up with my hips; elsewhere it hit my shoulders. I guessed between three and four feet.
“Is it that deep all the way through the property?” she asked. No, I explained. It only sliced off a triangle of land in the northwest, and not a very big one. Like the other corners, this one was marked with a pipe and, after stepping out of the arroyo, I went to find it. This time Linda saw the marker right away. “Oh there it is, look!” she exclaimed. “Yeaaaahh!”
After that I hiked back toward the first marker. “So what do you think?” I asked Linda.
“It’s better than what I thought,” she said, prais
ing the land’s panoramic mountain views and the quality of its dirt. “I was thinking I could end up with all rocks like Ehrenberg, but I don’t have that,” she added, referring to the gravel terraces where she had camped after the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous. That place had looked like a moonscape, with very little plant life. Linda was also delighted that the land had been properly surveyed and marked. “That is a big deal out there!” she said. “Especially for the price, my goodness!”
For three and a half years—since I had first met Linda—she had been showing me pictures of her favorite Earthship, a model called the Nautilus, whose floor plan was based on a Fibonacci series. I imagined it rising from this piece of land, with sloped adobe walls that echoed the contours of the surrounding mountains. “I’m trying to picture the Earthship here,” I told her.
“Yes, it’s going to be so beautiful right there, isn’t it?” Linda replied happily. She planned to come and camp out when her Amazon job was done and the weather was cooler. Once she got to see the land in person, she figured, she could decide where to build. “I’m just gonna have to sit on it for a while and the spot will appear,” she said.
For the past half hour, I’d been walking and talking under overcast skies, which kept things comfortable despite temperatures in the nineties. Now the sun came out and made the desert a griddle. A temperature alert flashed on my laptop—it wouldn’t work in this heat. The video froze and then the connection cut out. The tour was over.
I’d spent a lot of time thinking about what this land meant to Linda. Here was tangible progress toward the dream of building something no one could take away, something she owned free and clear, something that could outlast her. But seeing her onscreen with Gary added a new dimension. For all her charisma, Linda had always struck me as a lone wolf. She had family and dear friends, of course, but she kept them close while remaining fiercely independent. Now I started wondering what her future would be like if new people entered the picture. Would Gary end up homesteading with Linda? Would LaVonne and other nomads visit her land in their portable homes? And who exactly were Linda’s neighbors? Was there anyone in the backcountry she could rely on?
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