The Survey in November 2006

In November 2006, I was looking for bits of rock, ceramics, and old tin cans down along the U.S./Mexico border. We're there to clear staging areas for the U.S. Army Corps or Engineers and the National Guard to store equipment and materials to build vehicle barriers and lighting units. This area is one of the most lonely, situated on the west end of Luna County, New Mexico. The area is under the watchful eye of the U.S. Government, however. Black helecopters fly overhead every few hours, the low mountain passes are home to high tech surveillance equipment operated by the U.S. Military. Border Patrol vehicles are common, as is the occaisional rancher.

There are few roads, and fewer people in these areas during the day. They are not the kind of places you would want to be at night, for during the night, the border crossers come. They walk single file, and they walk along the existing road, but not on it, so as to avoid the sensors placed there by the border patrol. Full bottles of water litter the desert border region. Only a simple barbed wire fence stands between the U.S. and Mexico.

Signs placed along the border stating "Peligro", with pictures of snakes and scorpions and cow skulls on them warn people of the hazards of the United States Chihuahuan desert. The signs are ironic, because the desert goes on for miles in both directions of the border, with nothing to break the terrain except for the occaisional low hill.

One small town, Las Chepas, rests on the eastern slopes of the Carrizalillo Hills on the Mexican side of the border. This town once served the farming valley on the U.S. side of the border. At one time, the people of Las Chepas would line up at a metal pipe gate fashioned on the northwest end of town, and a bus would escort the populace to the farm fields. After 9/11/01, the ad hoc border crossing was closed, and the town dwindled. The U.S. proposed to demolish the town because of its lack of funding to create a border crossing there, and the obvious problem it posed to national security. Naturally, the remaining townspeople objected, and agreed to hire security for the town to keep undesirables out. The place is now almost abandoned, with exception to a few people, some cattle, and a dog or two.

One of the staging areas is located on the far western end of Luna County, near Border Monument 40. To get to this area requires a four-wheel drive vehicle, and then a half hour walk, through an ambush like pass. I was with two other men, who I had enjoyed the week with. One was the client for who we are working to complete the job, the other a skinny cuss with an ability to adapt to any situation. The terrain is broken with small and deep arroyo cuts. To complete the survey, we walk back and forth across these small drainages looking for cultural remains.

On the second to last pass across the proposed staging area, I come to a three-foot wide, four foot deep rounded arroyo. I size the thing up and decide if I make a run at it, I can clear my 250 pound frame and equipment across the distance. I get up a head of steam and make the leap. It is only then that I hear the unmistakeable sound of a rattlesnake directly below my airborne feet. Given the general trusim that archaeologists and snakes don't get along, my adrenaline spikes. I reach the other side of the drainage with little to spare, erupting with a slough of curse words. My compatriots come running to see the reason the expletives are coming from my direction, and too hear the noise, which seems to be amplified by the bowl of the narrow arroyo.

Cameras are produced to document what turned out to be a five-foot diamondback rattler. Visions of Fonzi interrupt my train of thought, in that episode when he jumped over the shark, and I am thinking to myself, "I Jumped The Snake!" Then I start thinking of what had happened to me if I had missed the jump, and Fonzi too, seeing this leather coat mixed with shark blood, and him getting dragged under, with one last thumbs up and a Heeeyyy! That sucker would have probably bitten me a couple times before we parted ways.

Thinking on it, the journey back to the truck was a good half hour, then another hour down difficult dirt roads to the blacktop, then another 45 minutes to the first location a cell phone could be used, near Columbus, New Mexico. then another 50 minutes to an hour to Deming, where the precious antivenom could be obtained. Fortunately such a journey did not have to be undertaken.

As the sun was headed down, we left the snake in his habitat, and headed back to Columbus for some dinner.