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Another Desert Storm
by
Bruce F. Barber
It was the summer of '46. I was a member of a highway gang building a two-lane
road through Telegraph Pass, twenty miles east of Yuma. It wasn't my first
job, but it was, at the time, the most exciting.
I was a Powder Monkey's Helper until I joined Maintenance and began servicing
our road-building equipment. As a mechanic's helper, I drove everything
the company owned including Pickups, Tournapulls and DW-20s (earth moving
equipment), scrapers, bulldozers and the new Euclids, ten cubic yard dump
trucks. Not bad for a sixteen year old kid on summer vacation.
At 115°F. it was hot out there, but I was working in a man's world and
had to learn to take it. Because it didn't rain much, it was a blessing
when it did and I was one who wished for rain. When it came, however, it
was as though it had come out of nowhere. One minute I was soaked with perspiration,
the next I'd be standing in a cooling
downpour threatening to wash away the land.
From every hill and mountain around me, I could see cascades of white water
racing to the desert floor. It was amazing, I thought, to see an arroyo
change from a nondescript bone dry rut to a raging torrent of water, sand
and gravel and, thirty minutes later, be bone dry again, as if nothing had
happened.
I've carried that scene in my memory for many years for it was a fond memory
of a sweaty, miserable boy being refreshed by a startling act of nature.
Now, however, I'm on the opposite side of the coin where I've come to realize
the toll those unbelievably violent torrentS of water levy upon the land.
Because it is an annual toll, the following might have been taken from any
past year but I chose to take it from the storm encountered on August 4,
1992, when an otherwise happy, healthy woman drowned in a raging torrent
of chocolate-colored runoff. What's more, because many who will read this
article are within the physical boundaries of these annual desert cataclysms,
the possibility exists that the same horrible toll could be levied on one
or more of them.
Imagine a dip (vado, in Spanish), that sudden depression built into streets
and highways to allow the passage of water from one side of the road to
the other. The dips I'm referring to are those along Mexico's Federal Highway
Five, the Mexicali-San Felipe Highway. I could, just as easily, be referring
to the dips along the Ensenada Highway, California's Highway 78 between
Brawley and Blythe, or more than a hundred other routes in the land of the
American Monsoon.
Monsoon? In America? Yes! Emphatically so-every July and August for many
more years than I can attest to although the bed of the untamed Colorado
River seems to bear witness to tremendous volumes of prehistoric water.
Whereas up to ninety-five percent of the monsoon-inundated land may be described
as the Colorado River Watershed, the Colorado is only important in identifying
a generalized geographical area extending from San Felipe to Las Vegas;
from San Matias pass (fifty miles northwest of San Felipe) to Phoenix, Flagstaff
and beyond.
Vast amounts of heavy, moisture-laden air are meteorologically pumped from
their place of origin above the Pacific Ocean, across the Baja California
peninsula where they mix and match the moisture evaporated from the Sea
of Cortez. Turning north, the newly formed clouds dump their cubic miles
of water upon a land known to most as desert.
Thirty miles north of San Felipe is a place called El Chinero, the intersection
of Mexico's Federal Highways Five and Three. Twenty miles west of Chinero
is Borrego Pass, a natural phenomenon representing the dividing line between
the Santa Clara Valley and the six hundred square mile Borrego-Chinero Plain.
Every summer, as moisture-laden clouds wend their way from Baja to Alta
California and beyond, the American Monsoon drops a trifling of its horrendous
load on the Borrego-Chinero plain. The amount of falling water is so much
more than the desert can absorb, the excess races across the sun-parched
land to return to the sea: Trillions of water droplets unite to form rivulets;
a thousand tiny rivulets unite to form streams; a hundred streams are joined
to become rampaging rivers formed so rapidly they appear without warning
as torrents of raging water pour across a land most men and women think
of as barren and dry.
In recognition of a universal problem, highway departments created "dips"-those
dedicated highway crossings for storm water-an economical solution to a
problem created by nature. Remember Nature? The cause of the tempests in
our teapot; the maker of earthquakes and forest fires, tornadoes, waterspouts
and floods; chubascos, hurricanes and typhoons… and, just as regular
as clockwork, the American Monsoon.
We departed home at six intending to drive to El Centro. Dark grey clouds
hung across the desert in profusion as lightning flashed in the distance
to a fully orchestrated theme. My wife and I chatted as I drove across familiar
terrain. Entering the "Zona de Vados," the first was dry, the
second moist, the third had the beginnings of a puddle.
By the time we reached El Chinero, water surged across the road stopping
cars and trucks that rapidly began to accumulate. My mind created a vision
of the newly-formed river pouring out of Arroyo Grande eight miles across
the desert to the west. Descending nine hundred feet over those eight miles,
the river grew in size and speed until, in front of us, it was a raging
torrent.
These were challenging moments when many of the accumulating crowd pondered
their situation. Among them, men and women who felt they had to get across.
One was a stewardess due in San Diego by noon. One was a doctor's patient
carrying a biopsy to a medical lab. There were trucks and truckers, men
and women on vacation, college kids returning to campus, and a grandmother
returning a grandson to school.
After a while, a big rig attempted to cross but stopped in the middle, unable
to move forward or back. Then a car tried and it got stuck, too. When two
men walked into the swirling waters to push the little car, I decided it
was time to cross.
With my wife on pins and needles, I selected four wheel drive and, feeling
the bottom through my tires, inched our way along. Knowing the water was
swift, the question was, "Is it swift enough to carry us sidewise?"
But the truck hadn't moved and neither had the little car. 'We're safe,'
I said to myself, and coaxed our car ahead. Behind us was a friend I'd convinced
to make the crossing, too.
When our friend stalled, I backed into the muddy torrent while others prepared
a tow rope. First our friend's car and, over the following thirty minutes,
six others. Three miles ahead, however, a couple less patient than we, dared
to enter a faster-running river at another dip.
As we approached, a man appeared desperately seeking rope. A car had been
swept away, he explained, the moment it entered the water. Of its two occupants,
a woman had drowned but a man had escaped and clung for his life to a nearby
storm-threatened tree.
Looking in the direction he pointed, we saw an automobile, headlights still
on, resting against a downstream bank. A hundred yards beyond, concerned
citizens agonized over a man's life hanging in the balance.
We came upon another crossing, the worst of all we saw. Standing on a bank
above it, we saw a pickup truck approach at high speed. It was pure machismo,
the kind that can result in tragedy. Changing his mind at the last possible
second, the driver stopped an inch short of doom. The fact is, had he continued
four more feet, that aging truck and its two youthful passengers would have
been gone… into water more turbulent than the Colorado's most fearful
rapids.
Although this vehicle stopped, the other had not and one of its passengers
was dead. Who knows what that driver had in mind? …or what he understood
about the problem? We do know, however, that these tempests take their toll.
Our neighbors, who telephoned to ask why we'd returned so early, had no
idea such a thing could happen. The dips, they explained, were but a minor
inconvenience and a meaningless, sometimes sandy entity along an otherwise
boring stretch of road. That sand, I explained, was the only remaining evidence
of the passage of a million tons of water as turbulent as any to be seen.
Why had we returned? I stood there with the telephone in my hand. It wasn't
because of death, for death is but an inevitable part of life. No, it was
because a quarter mile beyond that place of lonely death the road was severed
by another rampaging torrent. In fact, over the following mile, it had been
cut five more times leaving, as it does each year, San Felipe temporarily
isolated from the world.
As I pondered my answer, a fond old memory surfaced and I saw myself as
a boy. I was standing in a cloudburst, soaked to my heat-ravaged skin. Cooled,
refreshed, happy as a junkyard dog, I stood on a lonely stretch of road
watching rain water stream down a nearby mountain…
Parked on the San Felipe Highway, I saw a dozen similar cascades streaming
down the face of the Sierra Pinta… and I thought of a women who could
have been my neighbor.
The woman is gone, in more ways than one, but the dips are still there.
The highway is just as heavily traveled, and it's summertime again.
The forming clouds suggest… Another Desert Storm!
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