The Age of Perpetual Drought - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 110

CHAPTER 12
The Age of Perpetual Drought
God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and
a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.
—John Muir
“GROUND ZERO FOR CLIMATE CHANGE”
At dawn on August 23, 1905, a naked man stumbled out of the Sonoran Desert, in Ari-
zona, and collapsed at the feet of a scientist who had ventured out to study biology and
meteorology. The Sonoran is an exceptionally hot, dry place, where temperatures can
spike to 121 degrees in midsummer, and where there is almost no humidity and little
shade. The scientist, W. J. McGee, had set up camp at Tinajas Altas, a collection of small
pools that provided the only drinking water for miles. The naked man looked familiar,
but his body was so withered and scratched that it was difficult for McGee to believe it
was the same boisterous forty-year-old he'd met only a few days earlier.
he man was Pablo Valencia , a sailor turned gold prospector. He and his partner,
Jesus Rios, had introduced themselves to McGee when they stopped to water their burros
at Tinajas Altas on the way to their gold claim, near the Mexican border. When they
reached the claim, the men discovered they were low on water, and Valencia sent Rios
back to McGee's camp, to resupply. But in the rush of departure they failed to set a meet-
ing place. When Rios returned to the claim, Valencia was nowhere to be seen. Rios again
returned to McGee's camp, and for five days the two scoured the desert for the missing
Valencia. Valencia, meanwhile, was wandering the desert in search of a way to quench
his thirst. He managed to stumble across nearly forty miles of scorched sand with noth-
ing to drink but his own urine, which he carefully hoarded in a canteen, plus a few drops
of liquid he squeezed from the body of a scorpion he'd caught.
At dawn on the seventh day, McGee heard a strange noise, “like a cow bellowing” in
the distance. He rushed out of his tent to find the wasted prospector weaving unsteadily
toward him. McGee and Rios took Valencia in and nursed him back to health. He “was
well and cheerful,” McGee wrote, “though his stiff and bristly hair, which had hardly a
streak of gray a fortnight before, had lost half its mass and turned iron gray.”