The Spirit Takes Root : Hard Work Helps Overcome Nightmare Under Train Wheels

Margarito Sanchez planted more than 1,000 tomato plants last year, in between fixing fences, growing cacti, feeding donkeys and repairing the roof of his stepdaughter’s three-bedroom home in Jamul.

For any other hard-working tomato farmer, it might have been just an average year. But, for Sanchez, 39, who lost a leg and severely injured the other in a train accident two years ago near Tijuana, it was an exceptional year.

Despite having to rely at times on a wheelchair and on a heavy, home-made, wooden leg, Sanchez manages to climb trees to cut away overgrown branches, repair water lines for neighbors and clamber up ladders to paint houses. In December, Sanchez, a Mexican national, was granted temporary amnesty.

But he knows that to stay among his beloved tomato plants he will have to convince immigration authorities that he can support himself.

Fixes Everything

“Now, working is the principal thing, my No. 1,” said Sanchez, whose temporary amnesty expires at the end of the year. He lives with his stepdaughter, a legal resident, and her husband, a U.S. citizen, and hopes to be granted permanent amnesty.

His stepdaughter, Leticia Sullivan, said Sanchez, who grew up in Mexicali, fixes everything around the house. “Electricity, water, he never complains . . . . He can’t stay lying around the house. He’s so hyper.

“He’s not afraid to go fishing. He goes out in a boat by himself. He built his own room in the garage, because he wanted to live there. . . . He does everything. He even washes his own clothes and he makes good flour tortillas.”

Before the accident, Sanchez was a truck driver, fisherman, mechanic and odd-job man, but his life changed forever on a set of railway tracks in the Mexican town of La Mesa, near Tijuana, when a San Diego and Imperial Valley Railroad engineer spotted him too late to stop the train. The freight, which goes through Tijuana at least six times a week and makes a run to Tecate twice a week, originates in San Diego.

The train tore off his right leg and pinned his left leg against the track. Sanchez said that, if he had had a pistol, he would have shot himself, the pain was so bad. Sanchez conceded that he was drinking the night of the accident.

‘Screaming and Screaming’

“I was screaming and screaming until I couldn’t scream anymore,” Sanchez said through an interpreter. It took authorities more than an hour to free him. He was taken to a public hospital in Tijuana where he said “they treated me really bad, gave me a bed and that was it.”

Both his stepdaughter’s husband, Gene Sullivan--a Los Angeles County probation officer who lives in Jamul three days a week--and a Spring Valley chiropractor who later treated Sanchez speculate that he drank until he passed out on the tracks. Leticia Sullivan thinks someone slipped something in one of her stepfather’s drinks.

Sanchez, who says he no longer drinks, believes the train was heading to Tecate, but records show it was going the other way. Either way, follow-up care was poor and Leticia Sullivan is bitter that doctors did not work harder to save her stepfather’s left leg.

From the room in Tijuana where he spent time recovering, Sanchez used a pair of binoculars to watch illegal aliens crossing the border. A few months later, after family friend and chiropractor James A. Wilson wrote immigration officials saying he would treat Sanchez’s injuries without charge, authorities allowed him to enter the United States for medical care.

“One of the first things he did when he got here was ask me for a block of wood so he could start carving a leg. . . . He calls it a bionic leg,” Gene Sullivan said.

The second thing he asked for, Sullivan recalled, was a packet of tomato seeds. Sanchez had crossed into the United States illegally several times before to work in the fields.

Since his injury, he has worked hard to make the Sullivan’s two-acre plot on Lyons Valley Road home, raising tomatoes, cacti and geraniums, and fixing anything that needs repair.

Soon, Sanchez will have to tie each tomato plant so that it grows straight. There are 900 plants now, but more will be planted. Before the harvest, when some of the plants are 6 feet tall, Sanchez will have had to tie each plant three times. He hand-fertilizes each plant with horse manure and, if necessary, a handful of commercial fertilizer. Using his arms to drag himself from plant to plant, he also picks off any bugs he sees.

Sadness Is Gone

Asked if he harbors resentment about the accident, Sanchez said, “I don’t feel anything. The sadness is gone. The only thing I know is I cannot walk.”

Smoking a cigarette during a break from installing a new irrigation system, Sanchez told a visitor that he draws his strength from watching his plants grow and bear fruit.

“My strength comes from my mind; the body is not as important,” he said. “In the beginning I felt bad. But working, you don’t think about it. Keep busy. It’s the best thing you can do. If I’m just lying there, I’m going to think (about) depression.”

Wilson, the Spring Valley chiropractor who offered Sanchez his services, said: “He’s got a fighting spirit. . . . He wouldn’t be here without it. He would have been dead a long time ago. A lot of people lay down and expect society to wait on them. He’s not one of those people. He’s no burden to anybody.”

Sporting a sea-green work shirt, faded jeans and a pair of denim cutoff shorts--so as not to wear out the seat of his pants--Sanchez grinned as he remembered making a bus trip to Sacramento alone.

He earned enough money from the $1,200 the Sullivans took in last year--after selling more than 4,000 pounds of tomatoes--to visit his sister and brother-in-law for several months. While he was there, he took up temporary employment in a print shop. Back in Jamul afterward, Sanchez repaired cars, fixed washing machines, built geranium planters, erected greenhouses and pulled down fences. From his wheelchair he even shot rabbits that dared eat his tomato plants.

In his spare time, which is rare, he likes to eat a steak-and-tomato dish called bistec ranchero, watch Western movies, read mysteries and collect hats. He makes it to a pancake restaurant in El Cajon about once a week. He thinks about planting watermelon, and he hopes to win the California Lottery.

“It’s OK to lose a leg, two legs. But not your eyes,” he said. “Then you cannot see the beauty of the world.”