Into Thick Air

by Jim Malusa

  —Bill Beer,

  “We Swam the Grand Canyon”

  CHAPTER 11

  Tucson

  That Sounds Just Awful

  IT WAS BEDTIME in Tucson. The blinds were drawn against the January cold, but they did little to muffle the sporadic yowl of sirens from the fire station. My three-year-old didn’t mind. He liked disasters, and he had a very important question.

  “Did the captain of the Titanic get in trouble for not bringing enough lifeboats?”

  He was staring at a fantastically detailed illustration of the great ship in deep trouble. The bow was under and the stern lifted high above the black sea. The ship was nearly vertical, and the ranks of still-glowing portholes made the Titanic look like a sinking skyscraper.

  I said, No, Rudy—it wasn’t his fault. And now it’s time for lights out. I’ve got to get up early to go work in the desert. I’m still making my plant map.

  “How long will you go?”

  Only four nights.

  He considered this. “Are you going to Africa again?”

  No—I promise.

  Three weeks earlier, I’d returned from Africa with a mind to paint my file cabinet the colors of the Djiboutian flag, start a khat plantation, and finally watch Titanic. Not a one happened. I’d begun planning the final trip.

  Driving west into the desert the next morning, I imagined myself pedaling my bike along the same road, sailing along on a smiling tailwind, bound for Death Valley, California. Fifty miles out of town, I passed a two-track off the highway that wound into the foothills of the Quinlan Mountains. At 60 mph the hills looked like nothing more than a rock pile and a bunch of well-fed saguaros, but I guessed the dirt road would lead to the perfect first camp.

  With Death Valley I would end my quest for the pits in the same way I’d begun bicycle touring some twenty years earlier: alone, riding out of the only city I really knew. There would be no farewell at the airport weapons scanner, no malaria pills, and no passport. I considered myself a whiz at English. If I encountered a tribe of Harley-Davidson enthusiasts, with a glance I would know if they were lawyers in leather or true psychopaths.

  All that remained was choosing the route. My thirty years of rambling around Tucson did not make this task easier, just as living in the same city as my entire extended family did not make kin relationships simpler. Familiar territory still holds wrong turns and dead ends, and among my maps I happily wallowed in the work of getting it right. While the bees were cavorting in the citrus blooms I was lingering over 1:100,000 scale topographic sheets of the Colorado River valley. By the time the summer storms rolled into town my itinerary was firmed up, and I pedaled over to the university to excuse myself from work.

  I found the business manager at her desk, mousing around a spreadsheet on her monitor. Cecily was proof that you needn’t be a department head to run the joint; without her, nothing happened. My request was simple: could you please hold my paychecks for three weeks?

  She spun her swivel chair to ask, “Taking a trip?” She wore all-terrain office shoes, with thick soles equally capable of trotting to the printer or squashing a scorpion. “Where are you going?”

  Death Valley, I said.

  “For three weeks?”

  No, I admitted, not three weeks in Death Valley—three weeks to get there. I’m riding my bike from Tucson.

  “All the way?”

  Sells, Ajo, Gila Bend, Parker, Lake Havasu City, Vegas—all the way.

  She connected the dots and confessed, “I’m really sorry, but that sounds just awful.”

  I said, Cecily, I love an honest response.

  Riding home, I kept an eye to the mountains ringing Tucson. Over Cathedral Rock was a whopper of a thunderhead, some 30,000 feet of vapor stacked into confections, and I thought: the desert doesn’t look so awful to me. It was easy to picture myself at my first camp, alone and happy with a view of clouds glowing in the evening pink.

  Of course I’d hoped for the same in Australia, and ended up pursued by imaginary crocodiles, but this time would be different. This was my desert. There would be no Saharan sandstorms or Patagonian pummeling. No Russian swamp, either. The list of no’s grew until I reached no prostitutes and remembered that I’d be passing through Las Vegas. Once I’d driven close enough to the city to make out what resembled an art fair acrylic painting of a space colony on Venus, fed by high-voltage lines under a yellow sky. It was probably just a bad air day, but I’d turned away, thinking, Maybe another time.

  This would be that time. It was now September, the last gasp of summer. The cicadas quit their screaming, and trusted in the next generation. Likewise, I hovered, quietly satisfied, over my sleeping children. The closer I got the better they looked, with polished skin and translucent eyelids.

  One morning they woke to find my wife and me watching TV at 7:30 AM. This was extraordinary, but there was something extraordinary to see. The World Trade Center was falling. As if Channel 4 understood that I could not fathom the destruction, it played the scene again and again.

  Rudy understood that something terrible had happened. He also saw a titanic slow-motion collapse that looked awfully familiar, ranks of windows vanishing into a sea of lesser buildings. He tried to cheer me by explaining the singular advantage of this disaster. “All the old disasters happened before I was born, so I didn’t get a chance to see them.”

  At least I wouldn’t have to worry over the psychological trauma to my son. I could fret full-time over the mood of America. Shortly after the suicide bombers were identified as Muslims, there was a revenge shooting in nearby Phoenix. The victim was a Sikh, not a Muslim, but an immigrant with a turban was close enough for the junior marksman.

  I didn’t relish the thought of pedaling across a United States that despised the people who had treated me so well. But every country I’d visited over the past five years had been maligned as either a disaster or a danger—the Russian Mafia, the Afar nut-whackers, the Aussie vipers. Then I’d gone and found out that, for a cyclist, all that was only muttering rumors and old fears. I figured it would be no different for this country, and there was only one way to know for sure.

  Only then could I tell the story that began the last day of September, when I kissed my sleeping wife and children in the placid predawn, grabbed a banana and my maps, and headed out to the bike. The way to Death Valley was down my gravel drive, and west on Waverly Street. It was the same route I took daily, except this time I would keep moving.

  CHAPTER 12

  Tucson to Death Valley

  Way Down in That Hole

  Where There Ain’t No Noise

  VERY EARLY on Sunday morning, old Tucson is possessed not by cars but by dog-walkers and doves. It’s quiet but not silent, and only a half mile from home I run into a real commotion, a trio of children in the street, waving feathers and yelling, “Uncle Jimmy! These are for you, so you fly like an eagle.”

  My sister whispers, “They’re turkey feathers.”

  Still, I fly. The bike carries a mere fifteen pounds of gear, including a stove, pot, tent, sleeping bag, and a copy of Mary Austin’s Land of Little Rain. Five minutes brings me to the university mall, past the fat palms and under the gothic olives; another five and I’m turning onto Fourth Avenue, where the sidewalk coffee sippers gasp whenever a cyclist wipes out on the trolley tracks.

  I don’t crash. Coasting down a subtle grade, I pass my unwitting sponsor, Value Village: outfitters of antiexpeditions. Their “pretested” cotton button-up shirt features a breast pocket that’s handy for a spiral memo pad, pen, and aspirin in a Tic-Tac container. At speed on the bike, the shirt inflates nicely, lifting the fabric off my back.

  A breezy shirt is a bonus in the heat, but today heavy clouds are spilling in from the south. Hurricane Juliette is spinning over the Gulf of California, 220 miles southwest. Luckily, the pinwheel of a hurricane rotates counterclockwise in the northern hemisphere. Relative to the eye of Juliette, I’m at two o’clock and Death Valley is noon, so
counterclockwise winds should speed me on my way. There are two flaws with this scenario—Juliette will surely move, and will likely make rain—but I’d rather deal with a potential hurricane on a Sunday than certain traffic on a Monday.

  Nothing’s moving downtown except me and a man in a cowboy hat, rolling a smoke outside the Greyhound station. When touring in Djibouti, I was charmed to see a local in a traditional hat. In Tucson, I brand the man as a fake: he wouldn’t know a steer from a heifer.

  It’s impossible to be a tourist at home. The Wig-o-Rama store on Congress Street, a showcase of cratered foam heads, looks doomed or perhaps already closed—but no, Wig-o-Rama is the rock of ages and has outlasted most every other downtown business. A mile farther west, A-Mountain rises four hundred feet above the sucked-dry sands of the Santa Cruz River. With a road nearly to the whitewashed “A” at its summit, it’s a joyride for day cyclists, a nocturnal hotspot for eager young couples, a graffiti battleground, a dazzle of shattered Bud Light bottles, and the place I smoked my pipe with Jim Boyer two days before his climbing gear failed.

  In the thirty minutes it takes to pedal another five miles, the clouds advance fifty. They soar over the pine-dark mountains, then clamp down on all horizons. Another five miles and the city ends where the road climbs over Robles Pass, a minor notch between knobby hills and a thousand or so saguaro cacti. It’s easy to see why this pleated vegetable is a celebrity—it’s the only plant that appears to be waving good-bye.

  The wind comes up and kicks me in the rear, down Robles Pass and across Avra Valley. It’s a flat and straight cruise past drought-crippled hunches of mesquite, trees that an optimist would call half-alive. There are cacti, too, the jointed spindles of chain-fruit cholla, man-high and savagely spined. But the saguaros are gone, victims of the chill that slips down to the valley bottom on winter nights and kills the seedlings with daggers of ice crystals.

  Avra Valley is the Dust Belt, the creeping edge of Tucson. The pioneers live in rectangular ranch houses prettied up with split-rail fences, or in double-wide Cavco trailers on lots scattered with sun-wasted tires and pocked with dust pits dug by overheated dogs. By the time I reach the western edge of the valley, flags of dust are rising from the flats. The wind makes short work of the thousand-foot climb between the Coyote and the Roskruge Mountains, and soon I’m beyond the reach of Tucson.

  Turkey vultures veer on the wind over a roadkill I easily identify as a hog-nosed skunk. The skunk’s unfortunate color scheme of a single white stripe down its black back may be a benefit in the desert, but served this one poorly on the highway it very much resembles. I ride on with an ear and eye for speeding cars, but few are out this Sunday. The spoor of my fellow Americans is mostly Pennzoil jugs and Budweiser cans, and if I keep my gaze up and forward I hardly notice.

  Instead I notice the mountains. This is basin and range country, all the way to Death Valley. The ranges run mostly north-south, with topographic consequences for the east-west traveler: the road and I must thread our way around the mountains. I’m moving slowly by vehicular standards, but quickly enough to entertain the illusion that it is the mountains that are moving. Mountains sink into the horizon, and mountains duck behind other mountains. What looked like a lone pyramid is actually a spine of rock twenty miles long, humped up in the center like a hissing cat. The ranges rise abruptly from the apron of eroded rubble that geologists call an alluvial fan. Locally, we’re more apt to use the Spanish term, bajada. It’s the kindest habitat for the saguaros and the foothill palo verdes, small stiff trees with a photosynthetic skin of smooth green bark.

  I’ve driven this road a hundred times, but things look different from the seat of a bike carrying a sleeping bag with a cold beer tucked inside. For the next three weeks I’ll be living mostly outside, and, as Joseph Wood Krutch wrote in The Desert Year: “There is all the difference in the world between looking at something and living with it. In nature, one never really sees a thing for the first time until one has seen it for the fiftieth.”

  So true—but not always true. It doesn’t take fifty times to appreciate a hurricane.

  I catch the first whiff of moisture as I near the summit of the pass. When I look back over my shoulder I see whirling snakes of dust on the leading edge of the storm, mixed with spouts of rain close behind. It’s not a squall line or a cloudburst but what looks like a vast and filthy waterfall pouring onto the horizon. The effect on my legs is immediate: faster. In the forty miles between Avra Valley and the next town is a single rest stop with a picnic bench and ramada sunshade. I reach it just as the sky lets loose.

  But the wind is cutting so hard that the ramada isn’t enough. The horizontal rain forces me to crawl under the concrete bench and build a little upwind barrier of my bike and cargo bags.

  And still it finds me. Mesquite leaves stripped from the trees snag in the bike spokes and tremble in the gale. So do I, despite my raincoat. My usual fondness for storms is missing in action. It’s not the silver whips of cold rain. It’s the sound of the aluminum roof groaning as it twists and warps.

  The rain quits after an hour, a long time to feel stupid and afraid. The wind still blows, flattening the tussocks of yellow grasses and taking me over the pass. I’ve got in mind a certain dirt track to a campsite I’d imagined many months ago.

  I find it: freshly washed sands and palo verde. A slice of blue is wedging under the clouds from the south. I don’t trust it; I set up the tent as close as possible to the only windbreak, a scrap-heap ridge of busted granite. The wind rolls in like heavy surf with waves that pour over the ridge and bow in the side of the tent until the fabric is three inches from my nose. When the rain returns there’s really nothing to do but to stare at the ceiling and think: only 665 miles to Death Valley.

  JULIETTE HOLDS HER BREATH long enough for me to shake the wet from the tent in the morning and pack quickly, under an armada of low clouds shaped like dumbbells. Forces beyond my control are tearing the clouds in two. When the wind starts to sing through the needles of the rain-swollen saguaros, I lick a finger to test its direction, smile, and get on the bike.

  This is Indian land. It’s a big reservation—4,500 square miles—and it’s a dry reservation: no streams and no alcohol. The people call themselves the Tohono O’Odam, and their capital is the nearby town of Sells, set between stony hills the color of chocolate. The “Business District” loop runs down a street splattered with big slushy cow flops, past the razor-wire jail and a playground in primary colors. The “Planning Department” trailer is closed, the video rental trailer open. The sole human afoot is a lady with a plastic grocery sack that sags with a shape I guess to be tamales.

  Every town has its warts, but Sells is all warts—except for the eucalyptus-shaded Papago Café, a crooked bungalow with a red neon OPEN. I take a picture, walk in, and a customer in a handsome velveteen blouse asks, “Are you a photographer?”

  Sort of. I must explain, so naturally I end up having my eggs, refried beans, tortilla, and salsa with Rosita Ruiz. She sits with Enos Francisco and his two-year-old granddaughter, Josephine, a photogenic little flower. I ask permission to take her picture, and Enos says with a big horsey grin, “Sure, but not of us—we’re fugitives.”

  Hardly. Enos is the former chairman of the tribe, and Rosita was secretary. Politics has made them garrulous. Most O’Odam are as quiet as the music-free Papago Café and our silent waitress. After she refills the tall glasses of ice water, Enos whispers, “I used to think her name was Mercy, but she wouldn’t respond. I knew something was wrong. It’s Lucy.”

  Josephine sucks on ice cubes. Enos cleans his thick glasses with a paper napkin. Men in uniform swagger in, freighted with handguns, GPS locators, and walkie-talkies. “Here comes Leonard and the trackers,” says Enos.

  The reservation’s southern frontier is Mexico. The Mexicans frequently do not ask if they can visit the United States for a day or a lifetime. It’s an old problem, but only recently a Mexican problem. In the 1880s it was the Chinese
sneaking in to work on the railroads. In 1915, Congress created the “Mounted Guards,” but they were overwhelmed by the first real border rush in 1920, when Congress passed the National Prohibition Act. By making alcohol a crime, prohibition spawned an enormous smuggling racket, run by thugs with machine guns. Congress responded in 1924 with the first 450 official Border Patrol agents. It was nice work for the adventurous: you supplied the horse and the saddle, and the government supplied the oats, a revolver, and a badge.

  Nowadays the smugglers with machine guns carry marijuana and cocaine. Leonard and his all–Native American team of trackers find them, gauging the smuggler’s load by the depth of the footprint. Along this piece of the Arizona/Mexico border, the “Tucson Sector,” another 1,700 agents keep an eye out for the more numerous job-seekers. Last year they caught over 600,000 people heading north. This is too much action for the locals. Rosita says with a scowl, “We’ve got the Border Patrol tearing up the land down by our place in New Fields. They’re arrogant, insulting, intrusive—I can’t find enough adjectives to describe how poorly they treat us.”

  I tell them that I’ve been working on the border, with no problems from the patrol.

  “That’s because you’re not a minority. You’ve got brown skin and you’ve got problems,” says Rosita.

  Little brown Josephine warms to me and climbs onto my lap. I let her hunt through my handlebar bag and play with my flat tire kit. “Now,” says Enos, “you won’t be able to get rid of her.” He checks out my bike outside the window. “Looks to me like there’s room for Josephine.”

  There is, but I leave by myself. A mile west I stop at the Career Center to take a picture of its mural that faces the highway, a mural that marvelously incorporates everything from bulldozers to the holy mountain called Baboquivari. Then a door opens and a young woman asks, “Can I help you?”

  Just taking a photo of this very nice mural.