Southwestern Homelands Read online

  If you go there—no gathering jar,

  no ether, no pins, no net—spend money wildly,

  placing your wealth in the hands

  of the ejiditarios, which means

  you place it in the wings of the monarchs,

  in the family album of earth’s history

  that their brief lives exalt.

  Deming is acknowledging another threat to the monarchs—poverty. Forests where the monarchs overwinter are threatened by logging on the part of local peasants. What to do? What good are our powers if we can’t find the wit or will to support those poor people while preserving a species so redo-lent with life?

  The solution: In December 2001, President Vincente Fox announced that a 6.1-million-dollar monarch trust formed by the Mexican government and a group of private foundations will pay locals to stop cutting trees and to reforest. So economic support to the poor and preservation of an environmental treasure. Let’s hope the Mexican government sees it through.

  About three years back, Gary Nabhan took Annick and me on a trip to the Mexican village of Cucurpe, to visit families he got to know while doing graduate work there in 1976. Nabhan hired a couple of the farmers, and they came to Tucson, to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum where he was then director of Science, and put on an exhibition of pit-roasting sword-leafed agave (Agave lechuguilla). But the part of the trip I like to think about involves the mescal, the legendary booze with a worm floating at the bottom, that those farmers sold us in Cucurpe, all that we could legally get over the border. Nabhan was driving, so I got to sipping and drifted into a dream of finding I was at that moment home, coming home and going home.

  Vast creosote flatlands, saguaro on bajadas, timbered snow-topped mountains, Navajo hogans among the red-rock mesas, glittering cities, barrios, nuclear workshops, smugglers along the borderlands, unemployed cowhands—where have we been, where is the Southwest going? That will of course depend on the will of citizens there. It’s a matter of vision. What do they want, what do they imagine as a future worth working for? Who’s doing the inventing, the dreaming up?

  People don’t want to be called intellectuals, it sounds elitist. But some of them are, for instance Ed Abbey and Bill Eastlake and Doug Peacock and Gary Paul Nabhan. Others I’ve admired are Leslie Marmon Silko and William deBuys, Sharman Apt Russell and Richard Shelton and Simon Ortiz, Luci Tapahonso and Ron Carlson and Alison Deming, Carla Elling and Alberto Ríos, Keith Wilson and Scott Momaday and Jimmy Santiago Baca and Joy Harjo, Charles Bowden and Fred Turner, Ann Zwinger, Dave Foreman and Barbara Kingsolver. Pray for me, whom have I forgotten? Thousands. May they forgive me. But anyway, that’s a list of Southwesterners from my profession who’ve acted as if they think the well-being of the Southwest is a personal project. Others include pinstripe lawyers and lonesome cowgirls, beatniks and grocery-store clerks who’ve enriched their homeland by insisting on spreading equality around and taking care of ecologies, human and otherwise. Maybe there’s a billionaire. Homelands are mostly made, I think, of reverence and intentions.

  Saints and fools have always been out to undercut hierarchies and break open ripe melons for all to enjoy. But as we know, in the long run everybody has to see this deal through for themselves.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  William Kittredge has published fiction and essays in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Rolling Stone, Outside, TriQuarterly, North American Review, and Iowa Review. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a professor of creative writing at the University of Montana, Kittredge’s works include Hole in the Sky: A Memoir, Owning It All: Essays, and the story collections The Van Gogh Fields and Other Stories and We Are Not in This Together.

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