DEATH AT SEVEN DEGREES

[Prologue: Last week I reported the following:

"This afternoon I gazed out the 'dining room' window to the west and noticed what appeared to be a number of cars stopped along the main highway a couple of miles distant. (We keep a pair of binoculars handy for looking at the road so we can tell when the snow has melted and it's safe to drive to town.) I quickly focused and confirmed the presence of a dozen or more vehicles, including police cars and either an ambulance or paddy wagon."

I speculated breezily about roadblocks for illegals or drugs, even joked about a wreck and donut-eating cops. To date I've been spared death by lightning or public beatings, perhaps to share this with you. In any event, a few days ago I learned the real reason for their presence and have not stopped thinking about it since. . .-- JHF]

So you think you know everything, do you?

Someone I never knew died a week ago last Saturday, literally within sight of my house. 21 year-old Christina Sanchez is with the angels now. How she got there is ostensibly explainable in physical terms, but the rest of the story still gives me goosebumps -- and a greater respect for the human spirit and the unknowable realms in which it moves. Here in northern New Mexico, events take place against a razor-sharp horizon of Creation that most people never experience, and the veil is often thin-to-nonexistent. In the early morning hours of November 18, the Great Mystery was a living presence in this mountain valley. I don't think it's really gone away, either.

Christina R. Sanchez lived a few miles north of here in the village of Questa. She had a 4-year-old daughter named Audrey. Three years ago the girl's father (Christina's boyfriend Manuel Romero, Jr.) was killed in an accident about a mile and a half south from where our long dirt road joins the main highway. His carefully maintained descanso [below] is a prominent landmark along the road to Taos. I have never driven by, day or night, without noticing it, and for the past three years, neither has Christina.

For the past year she worked at a local bank, my bank, and may have cashed a check or two for me. She was there for Friday's all-day grand opening celebration at the just-remodeled northside branch and after work attended several private parties with colleagues from the bank. Around 1:00 a.m. that night, she left for home in her white 1999 Chevy pickup. Questa is only 20 miles away, but somewhere in between, she disappeared.

In this part of the world, daughters don't stay out all night without their families becoming alarmed. According to the local paper, friends and relatives were out before dawn on Saturday morning, combing the roadsides between Questa and Taos on foot with flashlights. By 8:00 a.m. an official search was underway, conducted by two volunteer fire departments, the Questa police, officers of the state police, and three local businessmen flying their private planes to search from the air. At 2:00 p.m. Christina's family made a formal missing persons report to the New Mexico State Police. The search continued throughout the night and into Sunday. At approximately 1:00 p.m. a group of volunteers walking the highway near San Cristobal found a wheel, which they promptly carried back to the Questa firehouse for Christina's father to identify. It was hers, all right: a front wheel from a Chevy pickup with a tire he could recognize, as daddies do. With all their efforts now concentrated on the spot where the wheel was found, the searchers soon located the truck, upside-down and 700 feet down the hill!

Christina was not inside.

For unknown reasons, it appears she'd swerved abruptly to the left going down the road [above] into the valley. The truck had struck a steep, boulder-strewn embankment with sufficient force to tear off one of the front wheels and become airborne, either rolling or pitching end-over-end several times, crashing through the piñon and juniper for quite some distance before coming to rest on its roof. All this Christina miraculously survived at first, apparently having been ejected from the vehicle at some point, suffering only (?) what the paper calls with merciful vagueness "head trauma." Alone and injured on that rocky hillside, she must have seen the lights of a nearby house and struggled to make her way in that direction. Losing consciousness, her strength fading, she stumbled into a barbed-wire fence and became entangled. The temperature was 7 degrees. . .

And now the questions: I have been to the scene and tried to understand how such a thing could happen. The embankment is relatively abrupt and steeper than it looks in the above image. To clear it, Christina's pickup must have been been traveling quite fast. The absence of obvious ruts or tire tracks at the top of this rise suggests the truck rolled or pitched on impact, then tumbled up over and on down the hill. From the lay of the land, it seems that had she struck five feet either side of where she left the road, the truck could have bounced off the guardrail or the embankment itself and ended up on or beside the pavement. She would have been found sooner, perhaps.

No one knows yet whether alcohol was involved, though that will come out. For my part, I fail to see how the truck could have followed the trajectory it did without a hard left turn of the steering wheel, an inadvertent or willful manual input. (She could have swerved to avoid an animal and over-corrected, losing control, as some have suggested.) Ironically, the roadway has just been resurfaced and improved: the guardrail itself is only two weeks old, and skid marks, if present, can't readily be seen on the fresh black asphalt.

You have to pay attention in these parts. For the last six months or so this section of the highway has been a deathtrap: no guardrails, no pavement markings, no reflectors, an absolute black hole when driving at night. But now it's fixed: white lines, yellow lines, reflective markers, the works. This incongruity doesn't give me the shivers, though. This isn't mysterious. Why do some people die so young, and in this manner? -- that's the real shocker. Let me put it to you this way: remember Manuel, Audrey's father, who died in a crash three years before on the same road?

His descanso is less than half a mile from where Christina left the road!

[Epilogue: It is only with the utmost respect for the memory of this young woman and her grieving friends & family that I tell her story and publish this picture scanned from the local newspaper (the Taos News). I also want to publicize the fact that the Centinel Bank in Taos, NM has established a memorial fund to help with funeral expenses and to provide for Sanchez's 4-year-old daughter. Local residents can go to any bank branch and make deposits directly into the fund account. Anyone else reading this who wishs to contribute should probably telephone Centinel Bank at 505-758-6700 and ask how to do so. The bank has a Web site, but the only email address listed is centinel@centinelbank.com. Vaya con Dios, Ms. Sanchez.]

[NOTE: the work of Eric J. Hedlund in his reporting for the TAOS NEWS of the events cited in this column is hereby gratefully acknowledged]

John H. Farr also edits the news for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives will take you to the past three years of columns. John also writes a monthly op-ed page column called "El Emigrante" for Horse Fly in Taos, NM and has an ongoing project called Zoozone News that he really wants you to visit (over 70 New Mexico pictures can be seen at the Photorama).

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