The Devil's Highway: A True Story

by Luis Alberto Urrea

Your scalp burns along the part in your hair, or where your hair is thin. Your cheeks, your neck burn. Your eyelids burn, too. And the tips of your ears. Your lips are not only burned by sun, but by wind; they become dehydrated, and they get rough and flaky, and you keep licking them to try to wet them, and they get sanded until they crack and bleed. Minor trouble. But you still have water, so you’re okay. If you brought beer, you’re an idiot, because alcohol makes you thirstier. The ground is burning your feet—it’s 120 degrees through the soles of your shoes.

And now your jug is getting hot—your drinking water is starting to get as hot as coffee. The desert’s air, like you, is thirsty. It’s sucking up your sweat as fast as you can pump it, so fast that you don’t even know you’re sweating. But you’ve been walking across rough terrain for a couple of miles now, and you are breathing hard. The air comes to your lips and pulls water from you. Every breath dries out your nose, your sinuses, your mouth, your throat. Your tongue: you drink more hot water; your tongue, you take just one more gulp of hot water; your tongue. Desolation drinks you first in small sips, then in deep gulps.

Your spit turns to paste. Your mouth tastes nasty, so you take another little drink. You tell yourself you’ll only sip a couple more times, but to hell with it—you take a big pull off the bottle. Your lungs, now, are leaking moisture to the vampire air. Your tears leak into the sky—eyes dry and scratchy. The fluid in your lungs helps transport oxygen through the tissues into the blood. Less fluid, less oxygen. You breathe harder, you get drier.

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That first urine is pretty good, as urine goes. It is still relatively clear, since it is the cycling-through of your gallon of drinking water. The first urine is yellow, and if you’re lucky, it’s pale yellow. The paler, the purer. Pale yellow is the Evian of urine. The next time through, that same urine has picked up more filtered impurities, and it is a little darker now. Saltier. By the third round, it is orange. It smells bad. Then dark orange. Then pale brown. Then a darker and more poisonous brown. It looks like foaming Guinness stout. By the time your effluent is black, you’re doomed—even if you wanted to, you probably couldn’t drink it. It stinks of fish. Your body would retch. There is almost more bio-garbage in it than water.

Your skin gets terribly sensitive. It hurts, it burns. Your nerves flame. Your blood heats under your skin. Clothing feels like sandpaper. Some walkers at this point strip nude. Originally, BORSTAR rescuers thought this stripping was a delirious panic, an attempt to cool off at the last minute. But often, the clothing was eerily neat, carefully folded and left in nice little piles beside the corpses. They realized that walkers couldn’t stand their nerve-endings being chafed by their clothes. The walkers stripped to get free of the irritation.