Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border by Ieva Jusionyte

Author:Ieva Jusionyte [Jusionyte, Ieva]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9780520969643
Google: FrdmDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07FZ2NBF4
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2018-11-09T00:53:51.618000+00:00

PART THREE

Wildland

Wildland, n.

Land that is uncultivated or unfit for cultivation: wasteland, desert.

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, unabridged

A dull, wide waste lies before you, interspersed with low sierras and mounds, covered with black igneous rocks. The soil is a mixture of sand and gravel; the reflection from its white surface adds still greater torment to the intense and scorching heat of the sun. Well do I recollect the ride from Sonoyta to Fort Yuma and back, in the middle of August, 1855. [. . .] Imagination cannot picture a more dreary, sterile country, and we named it the “Mal Pais.” The burnt lime-like appearance of the soil is ever before you; the very stones look like the scoriae of a furnace; there is no grass, and but a sickly vegetation, more unpleasant to the sight than the barren earth itself [. . .]; to add to all is the knowledge that there is not one drop of water to be depended upon from Sonoyta to the Colorado or Gila. All traces of the road are sometimes erased by the high winds sweeping the unstable soil before them, but death has strewn a continuous line of bleached bones and withered carcasses of horses and cattle, as monuments to mark the way.

LIEUTENANT MICHLER

Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey

Washington, July 29, 1856

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