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Hydrate or Die

By Michael Wolcott

"If a person is seriously dehydrated," Tom Myers says, "he will drink just about anything: sea water, urine, even antifreeze - it doesn't matter. By the time you are dying of thirst, you have stopped thinking clearly."

Myers is something of an expert on what too much heat and too little water can do to the human mind and body. He is co-author of Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon, which chronicles plenty of thirst-related mortality. For ten years Myers was a full-time doctor at the South Rim clinic, where he treated hundreds of people who got into water trouble. Right now he is in Flagstaff to deliver a quick-n-dirty lecture on the topic.

His talk is part of a day-long training put on by No More Deaths (No Mas Muertes), a Tucson-based humanitarian group that puts jugs of water out in the Arizona desert, in hopes of keeping illegal immigrants from dying there. Each year, the Border Patrol documents hundreds of corpses. How many are not found is anybody's guess.

Myers runs through his set of slides, spelling out the grim details of advanced dehydration and heat stroke: the brain and internal organs, especially the kidneys, essentially cook in their own juices. It is a horrible way to die.

Around the room, 30 people nod and take notes. Some are wilderness professionals who already know this stuff. Others are retirees with little or no experience in the ways of the desert. And a few are students at Northern Arizona University, taking an entire Saturday away from their books to complete this training, which is mandatory for anyone hoping to volunteer in the camps operated along the Arizona-Mexico border by No More Deaths.

The group hosts an "Alternative Spring Break" program that will attract 150 students from around the country this month. While many of their peers will be swilling beers and logging beach time in Baja or Rocky Point, students at the NMD camps will get a first-hand look at what's happening along the newly-militarized border.

March is a wonderful time to be in the Sonoran Desert. For a few weeks the hillsides are clothed in vibrant, delicate green. California poppies, brittlebush and globemallow splash the rocky landscape with bright yellow and orange. The killing heat of summer has not yet arrived. The students will soak up this beauty and breathe clean desert air. They'll feel the magic of sleeping on the ground under a sky smeared with stars, and wake up in a landscape that is mostly unblemished by human commerce.

But they will also see and smell the rotten fruits of the global economy, getting close-up views of our country's massive - and hopeless - attempts to deny its realities. They'll walk the migrant trails, worn by flights from poverty so grinding that we nortenos can barely wrap our minds around it. They will visit once-pristine drainages now littered with cast-off backpacks and empty plastic water jugs by the thousands. They will inspect "The Wall," our government's 700-mile, half-billion-dollar effort to push back this tide.

"The border" has become an inadequate term for this Homeland Security hotspot. It is el mundo nuevo, the new world - a place where the might of the U.S. security state is rendered irrelevant by poor people in sneakers. We are not really talking about border policy here. This is about Planet Desert.

The politics of this new world are beyond me. I have no solution to offer for the global crisis. It is hard not to feel despair over the unfairness of it all. But I go to the desert once in awhile and put out water.

I do this because I am in love with the Sonoran landscape and because once or twice while walking there, I have become what could be called "seriously" thirsty. It was terrifying. So I have nothing but respect for the migrants who cross carrying little more than a plastic jug and a dream. They travel a different desert than the one my friends and I "recreate" in.

When Myers wraps up his talk, I look around the room and manage to feel something like hope, despite the enormity of the problems to the south. In a world where death by thirst is just business as usual, the presence of these 30 people - especially these students - is not just a hopeful sign. It is an oasis.