The Devil's Highway

The walk begins with a climb up a steep hill and it is immediately apparent that the walk is going to be brutal, even though some of them are in good shape. They must stick to the high ground to avoid jeeps and ground patrols. After summiting the hill they walk northeast for ten miles. As they walk, their bodies begin to hurt. The walkers will be described in more detail later, but it is clear that they are of various ages and at various levels of physical fitness. Each walker loses himself in his thoughts until they reach Bluebird Pass. Most are hopeful, but many are unable to concentrate on more than the heat and the next step.

At 11:30 PM they see headlights that they aren’t expecting. The group is illuminated and they scatter, running headlong into the desert. Mendez will later insist that the lights chased them. Maybe they came from a Border Patrol, maybe from a trickster, but once they began to run, the lights stopped and the vehicle left. In any event, Mendez’s panic leads him far from the road and everyone follows him. Soon it begins to rain. Despite the mild excitement and mystery of the lights, they are beginning to think the walk will be easier than they ever imagined.

After midnight Mendez takes them northwest. He believes that he is able to navigate by the stars, but it is not clear that he knows what he is doing. The walkers, however, are unaware that they are in uncharted territories. Their guide moved as if he knew the way, and the walkers followed. It is also unclear whether Mendez knew he was lost yet. At this point he still seems to believe that he knows where they are going, but Maradona’s absence makes him question the new route.

The remainder of Chapter 8 describes what trackers learned when they retraced Mendez’s steps. Every time he came to an object or obstacle, he skirted it to the left. This caused him to veer further off course than he was aware of. By the time it was nearly morning, the group had walked nearly forty miles and Mendez had led them into the inhospitable Growler Mountains. As the sun begins to rise, Mendez knows that a heat wave is coming. 

The walkers believe that they are lost. Mendez does his best to reassure them, but it’s obvious. If Maradona had come, they would not be in this mess because he knows the trails better. But he’s not there, and Mendez decides that they have to climb over the Growler Mountains. Up to this point, he has made two major mistakes: he started walking earlier than he needed to the previous afternoon, and then he took the wrong turn at Bluebird when the lights ambushed them. Now he makes his biggest mistake: he says that they have to start walking in the light. The temperature at night is typically between 94 and 95 degrees. During the day it explodes into triple digits.

The author detours into the story of Lisa Scala and Martin Meyer. In June of 2002 they went for a dune buggy ride near Buttercup Valley, California, which is close enough to Yuma to be part of the Border Patrol’s territory. Their dune buggy malfunctioned and they were suddenly stranded. Martin went for help and died two hundred yards away. Lisa died in the dune buggy while waiting for him.

The same summer that Scala and Meyer, died a similar tragedy happened on the east end of the Devil’s Highway. A young married couple went for a hike around a peak; it was supposed to be a six miles round trip. They did not take enough water and died after he fell and could not find help quickly enough.

The author then presents the six stages of hyperthermia, or “heat death”: heat stress, heat fatigue, heat syncope, heat cramps, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke. The elderly are most susceptible to hyperthermia in normal life. On the Devil’s Highway, all are reduced to the physical capacity of the elderly in terms of their response to the heat. It is a perfect, equalizing, non-discriminatory trap.

Each of the six stages is explained in terms of the physical effects one would suffer as a result. The heat is presented as a malevolent force against which no one can stand for long. The walkers were already in the first stage of hyperthermia before they started walking up the first hill, before the sun rose in the Growler Mountains.