Cross Purposes

Desarae was headed home from a party on New Year's Day when the pickup she was driving fish-tailed on the dirt road and rolled three times. Desarae was tossed out into a horse pasture.

As soon as she got the phone call, Jolene knew what she would do. She knew she would search the field where Desarae had landed. She knew she would find the puddle of blood where her sixteen-year-old daughter had hit her head. And she knew she would mark that spot.

Jolene chose a white cross, because she's a Christian. She selected a bouquet of roses, because Rose was Desarae's middle name. And she crafted a marker from concrete, because she wanted something lasting. "I was with my daughter when she came into this world," Jolene tells people, "but I could not be with her when she left it." And that is why, she says, the marker is shaped like a heart.

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Descansos have their detractors.

In Florida, which banned the markers in 1997 after a contentious move toward officially sanctioned lollypop-shaped memorials, Jim Philips of Orlando's WTKS radio gave a T-shirt to anyone who plucked a descanso from the road. The signs were visible blight, he declared, and apparently his listeners agreed. The station collected so many descansos that after fifty or so, Philips asked people to stop bringing them in and instead to simply throw them away. Which they did.

"It was getting ridiculous," Philips recalls. "Central Florida was getting to look like Mexico or Guatemala. Every time a drunk went off the road and hit a tree, someone would put up a cross. Some were eight feet tall, like the cross Jesus was crucified on. Some looked like tombstones. Some had electricity. You'd get people sitting out beside them in lawn chairs. They'd put up Christmas tree lights and fake ivy and silk flowers...I understand they mean a lot to people, but memorials are essentially for cemeteries, not for rights-of-way. Florida is ugly enough without that stuff on the road."

A veteran firefighter in Massachusetts argued that the memorials were hard on the paramedics, police and witnesses who'd been at the crash scenes. The shrines, he said, only served to remind people of the horror, pain and suffering they'd seen. "Let them take their memories and be private," David Yalenezian told a Boston newspaper. "Why do they have to show it in public, where it can hurt other people?"

In South New Jersey, the chairman of a transportation authority termed the descansos along the Atlantic City Expressway "morbid" and pushed through a new policy allowing the markers only if they are posted under a police escort. Even then, they had to come down after ten days. "Look at this ten years from now," Stanley Glassey told a reporter. "This could really get out of hand."

In Nevada, the family of a girl killed in a car wreck demanded that her friends remove a descanso dedicated to her. Because of the marker, they complained, their commute was "almost like going to the cemetery every day."

In California, road crews are ordered to remove the memorials on sight. Although state officials say they respect the intent of the markers, they argue that descansos distract drivers and hinder maintenance. So if they're in the way, they come out. No exceptions. When a California road worker died in the line of duty and his colleagues posted an orange construction cone with a poem, officials took it away. "We remove them as soon as possible," says Gene Berthelsen, spokesman for the California Transportation Department. "We consider them a traffic hazard. If someone has already had an accident there and someone else drives by and looks at the memorial instead of the road, they're liable to have another accident. We try to be sensitive. People want to grieve and remember their loved ones. But if they constitute a safety hazard, they come out."

At the other end of the spectrum is New Mexico, which treats descansos with respect. Road crews simply work around them unless the markers block traffic or obstruct views, in which case they will relocate them. As a result, some descansos have stood for decades. "As long as they're not endangering motorists, we don't have any problems with them," says Anthony Gonzales, a highway-department spokesman. "It's one of those things where we turn our heads if they're not causing a problem. Our guys have a lot of respect for them, especially up north, because they might know the person who died. They're close to our culture. People take pride in them. They signify a part of New Mexico."

Although few maintenance crews patrol their states' roads for illegal markers, most remove descansos if someone complains about them. A couple of states set time limits on the markers, and others encourage grieving families to participate in official memorial projects, such as adopt-a-highway campaigns.