The Devil's Highway

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2004

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1 – 3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-16

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Chapters 10-12 Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 10 Summary – The Long Walk

By mid-morning the walkers are more confused and exhausted than ever. They are starting to get angry with Mendez, their situation, and the government…anyone they can blame for the pain they feel. They are stuck in the Growler Mountains. Every time they reach the top of a peak, there is another one waiting. Most of them are almost out of water. At noon, Mendez insists that they wait until nightfall before continuing.

That night it is 94 degrees when they begin moving again. Mendez makes another wrong turn that takes them four miles in the wrong direction. He may have genuinely thought he was going in the right direction, or his faculties might have been deteriorating along with everyone else’s.

Those without water grow desperate. Those who still have some don’t have enough to share. Soon they are walking without thought, only seeking a chance to go downhill and spend less effort on movement. The group disintegrates and they fan out in a long straggling line. Those at the back realize how lost they all are and want to quit. Santos, one of the Coyotes, tells Mendez that he wants to go back. Mendez says they’ll die if they leave, but Santos is able to convince between three and five of the walkers to go with him. Mendez lets them go.

Around 9 PM they walk into another maze-like stretch: a mountain range called The Granites. They look at the peaks against the dark, wondering if they have been here already. They say their prayers or collapse into unconscious. The night is a mixture of rage, fatigue, and delirium. No one wants to think about how soon the heat of the morning will be upon them.

Chapter 11 Summary – Their Names

Chapter 11 focuses on the names and backgrounds of each walker. Up until this point they have largely been anonymous entities, serving as statistics rather than people. Now the author presents each walker’s name, their ideas about family duties, their reasons for the walk, and their dissolving hopes. These are no longer simply a group of faceless walkers: the reader now knows enough about each one to feel their deaths, and soon it will time to mourn.

Chapter 12 Summary – Broken Promise

On Monday, May 21, even Mendez thinks they are going to die. The only time he has a clear sense of direction is at sunrise and sunset, east and west. By the time the sun is overhead, he is as delirious as confused as anyone. He calls everyone together and says that their only chance is if he goes for help. At least, that’s one account. The survivors recall, variously, that they told him he had to go, he said he had to go, he extorted them for more money, they offered to pay him more money, and so on. There is no cohesive version of events. What is certain is that he left and claimed that he would return in five hours with water and directions.

Mendez fumes as he walks away. All night they had yelled at him, blaming him for their situation, accusing him of killing their futures and their families. The walkers watch him go and wait. Five hours pass and it’s obvious that Mendez will not return. After a brief debate, they rise to their feet and begin walking again. They are delirious, nearly all of them hallucinating about home or bringing Mendez to justice. Others have horrible visions of engines beneath the earth and voices laughing about their deaths.

Chapter 12 ends with a hypothetical conversation between Mendez and Lauro. They had water when they left the walkers, and the two of them keep a better pace than the group. They know that they are close to the freeway and as long as they keep heading north they have hope. But at some point they decide that there is no point in going back for the walkers. They will all be dead soon, so what would be the point?

Chapters 10-12 Analysis

Up until Chapter 11, the personalities and even the names of the walkers have been peripheral or irrelevant. This strategy is in keeping with the author’s depiction of the desert as an all-consuming furnace that destroys identities and makes everyone the same. But he inverts this strategy in chapters 10-12. In Chapter 10, the true misery of the walk is portrayed and the reader experiences the walkers’ suffering.

Chapter 11 makes Mendez’s and Lauro’s actions in Chapter 12 even more despicable. They are not just abandoning a group of statistics. They are abandoning people. There is a frustrating degree of variation between the accounts of what happened when Mendez left. Some say that he and Lauro took their money, promising to use it to buy water, but no one can agree on how much Mendez asked for. There are also different versions of when they left, whether it was dawn or sunset, and more. One of the great difficulties of the story is that its characters spent so little of it in a stable frame of mind. Their memories are questionable, and therefore definitive answers are impossible.