Of Sand, Pliers, and Mexican Jumping Cactus

 I once read a piece by a British oilman in Saudi Arabia who said, “Never travel through the desert with fewer than four people, because that’s how many it takes to get a car unstuck from the sand.” Yeah, that’s a paraphrase. No, I don’t remember his name. Yes, I did once get myself in trouble for not listening to him.

I don’t remember with any certainty, but I think it was New Years Eve, either 2008 or 2009. See, my brothers and I have been going to the same place in the desert for years, camping in the exact same spot every time. We don’t even have to specify where to meet anymore; we simply mention the desert and a day of the week, and then we all show up, none of us ever having doubted the rendezvous location. There are many washes there—big, sandy dry canyons carved out by the desert storms—that run perpendicular to the highway, and if one turns off the asphalt into one of these, he could find dozens of hidden places to pitch camp in the soft sand at the bottom.

Our spot is outside of a small desert town. It’s a one bar, one church, and one gas station type of town that the interstate runs through near the Mexican border. Follow the highway north for a couple miles and you see mountainous badlands to your right, and vegetated, flat desert to your left. The desert isn’t actually flat, because the washes have carved it out in so many places, but you can’t see those from the highway. Our spot is out there.

I packed my truck in the morning, went to work for the day, then drove out to catch up with the others when I got off at 10:00pm.  I got out there near midnight. I hadn’t been out there in a while, and had never tried to find the place in the dark. Eventually, I discovered that many, many turnoffs looked like the one I remembered, and that the more of these that I saw, the fuzzier my recollection of the real one became. I doubled back and picked one, then drove into the sand to head up the canyon.

I imagined that our spot wasn’t more than a mile off the highway, so I watched my tripometer closely. After nearly a mile and a half, I decided I was up the wrong wash, and needed to turn around. But this wash was narrow and rocky, and there was no place. So I pressed on, hoping to find a turnaround place. Eventually, I encountered a Y in the road, and I determined that if I started up one way, I could then back up the other like a U-turn in reverse. I did not want to stop the truck because of the sand, but I had to choose between this or pressing on for a better spot. I chose the U-turn. I got stuck.

Driving on sand is not difficult, but you should never stop in deep sand because you may have a hard time getting going again. My wheels spun without moving the truck; they flung sand and quickly dug themselves deep into it. I stopped trying when I realized what was happening, but it was too late.

I put the truck in neutral and tried to push it. Nope. I put rocks under the tires to gain traction. Nope. I tried calling my brother with the little cell reception I had. He answered but we couldn’t hear each other. I dictated my predicament into the phone just in case he could pick up enough detail to help.

I climbed to the top of the ridge to see if I could see a campfire, smoke, truck lights, or hear voices. Everything was black and silent. I looked at my tripometer and saw that I was about four miles off the highway. Not that far, I thought, and decided to hike back to it. But what to bring with me? One has to think of worst case scenarios in the wilderness. A knife. Water. A flashlight. A jacket. A snack. Pliers.

Why pliers? Because there’s a species of cactus in this part of the world that we call Mexican Jumping Cactus (a quick google search tells me it’s actually called Cholla Cactus, or Jumping Cholla). It’s cactus, right? Pokey and shit? But this is no Saguarro that those pansies in Arizona brag about. The plant is sort of…modular. Meaning that the branches grow in such a way that if you unhappily get caught by the barbed spines, they don’t just poke you; the spines dig deep into your skin and the entire motherfucking branch breaks off from the plant and sticks to your hypodermis. Then every single spine on this branch (when I say “branch,” picture a spherical module of spiny plant, not a long woody stick with leaves), decides to also dig into your skin so that you have dozens of them stabbing your leg. If you try to remove it, this spiny sphere of plant simply rolls a little to a new location on your leg, leaving the old spines still attached where they penetrated you and a whole bunch of new wounds, too.  Oh, and it’s poisonous. Not “kill you” poisonous, rather “burning and stinging pain, with moderate swelling” poisonous. And if you can successfully free yourself from this little passenger, you are left with a million barbed spines deep in your leg…. so, pliers-- I brought them.

The moon was bright enough to see a bit, which was good because my flashlight didn’t work. I calculated that if I walked four miles per hour, I could reach the highway in one hour, then reassess my location and try to find our campsite. If I had no hope of finding the site, I could always hitchhike back to the town.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that it would be quicker to walk in a straight line back to the highway instead of following the curvy wash that ran at who-knows-what-angle to the road. I climbed up the canyon wall and carried on in the best direction I could decipher. I could see the orange glow of the western horizon behind me and knew that the highway ran north-south somewhere east of me. If I walked away from glowing western horizon, I couldn’t help but cross the road.

I found the walk invigorating. I was alone in a peaceful silence and darkness, and I was stimulated by nature. I could hear coyotes. I thought of mountain lions, of course, but didn’t let myself dwell on it. I couldn’t shake the thought of rattlesnakes from my head, and every stupid stick on the ground looked like one, of course. And somehow, even with my eyes carefully glued to the ground before my feet out of fear of snakes, I still stepped right into it, just like I knew I would: a goddamned Mexican jumping cactus.

I felt it before I saw it. Two pieces grabbed onto me, one outside my jeans and one on the side of my shoe; both were firmly latched through the clothing and deep in my skin. When I finally stopped howling and hopping around like I’d stepped on a Lego, I sat down to free myself. I’d been hit before, so I knew what to do. I used my knife to pry them away from me while using the pliers to pull them straight out. I then used the pliers to get all the little pieces out. It’s painful, and it bleeds a bit because the barbs cause more damage on the way out. I had to pull the big pieces off, then take off my shoe before I could get the little pieces. And with my poor eyesight in the dark, finding each of the little ones was time consuming, but if I didn’t get every one, then each step could be a twisting blade in my leg. It must’ve taken a half hour. Eventually, I got resituated and kept moving.

So now I’m limping a little. And bleeding. And less sure of my direction. Somewhere along the way, my cell phone rang but I lost the call immediately. I’ve only been in the wilderness an hour and I’m already thinking about mortality. I thought a lot about what an idiot I am.

 I did eventually reach the road. And it turned out that my brother had heard what I told him over the phone, and my friend Daniel was driving up and down the highway waiting for me to pop out of the desert. I flagged him down and he picked me up, then we started driving to camp. Within a minute of driving, we were suddenly surrounded and run off the road by Border Patrol cruisers. They didn’t even give us a chance to cooperate and literally came alongside to force us to swerve into a sandbank.

Apparently, there are tall towers with many cameras on them that the BP uses to watch the roads. They saw a car pull over and pick up someone on the side of the road, and that’s some kind of red flag. We explained, and they checked our ID’s. They were complete dicks to us the whole time, and when they were leaving, we asked if they would help us get the car free from the sand. They said, “No, you’re fine,” and left us to dig ourselves out. And when we finished digging that car out, we drove back into the desert to dig my truck out, too.