Southwestern Homelands Read online

  We woke to the melting snow of another nighttime storm, and laziness. It was a day to lay up and forego agendas. A book to travel with is Czeslaw Milosz: “The smell of winter apples, of hoarfrost, and of linen. There are nothing but gifts on this poor, poor earth.”

  In El Paso, Jim Crumley hustled us across the bridge into the chaos of downtown Juárez, where we stood up at the bar in the famous Kentucky Club (colonized by United States military men from Kentucky during World War I). A white ceramic tile-work urinal ran the foot of the bar, and Annick was delighted to witness an old man calmly pissing into it. This, again, was it. Any sweet striking thing could happen.

  What did happen was unshucked oysters. Crumley persuaded a friend to bring a barley sack filled with hundreds of oysters back from a trip to Corpus Christi, and threw what seemed to be a forever-and-ever party for a crowd of his assorted writer and biker cronies. I still bear a scar on my left thumb from a moment of awkwardness while trying to shuck one of those oysters. We never did eat them all. But it was a failure we loved, born of plenitude and generosity.

  Driving along the El Paso side of the Rio Grande we could see over into the profound back-street poverties of Juárez—mile after mile of adobe houses with tacked-on rooms of scrap lumber and cardboard, roofed with tar paper and patched with flattened tin cans. No tree or greenery in sight along unpaved, dusty streets. Isolated men and women walked slowly toward no goal we could make out. “What do those people do?” Annick asked. “All day job just surviving,” Crumley said.

  It’s semi-impossible for people like me, from the privileged end of things, to grasp what’s going on in a town like Juárez. What I realize is the degree that I’m insulated from the feelings of people who labor so mightily just to sustain hope. I’m incapable, because of my background, of even seeing much of what’s there, or who’s there, what they’re doing. I don’t know how to see it, or them. Even so, those injustices I have trouble seeing are to a great degree my responsibility.

  Two problems are waiting to explode in the Southwest. The first centers on injustices along the border, the other is aridity, ecological fragility. Cities like Phoenix and Tucson and Albuquerque are booming—too many people, a huge number of them poor, and there is not enough water. So, thirst, both actual and metaphoric.

  Crumley took me on an all-day road trip along the Mexico/New Mexico border, to visit a fellow he knew in the tiny community of Columbus, New Mexico, where Pancho Villa invaded the United States only to be defeated by forces under the command of Gen. Black Jack Pershing, later an American leader during World War I in France.

  Our first move was into a tavern, this one in the town of Palomas on the Mexican side of the border where I paid for a round of tequila with a twenty-dollar bill and was startled when a man came from a back room, snatched it up, and vanished out the door. We were into a second go-round on the tequila before he returned in triumph, clutching a handful of greenbacks. He’d been up and down both sides of the street finding change for my twenty.

  Money wasn’t a problem on the United States side of the border. Crumley’s friend lived in one of a long string of well-kept houses along the highway north into New Mexico, where he was storing the remnants of a defunct Pancho Villa museum. This subdivision was only one-house deep, backed up to an airstrip. Most householders had an airplane.

  Escape and freedom were strong considerations in this community of the like-minded. The people who lived there were concerned that the poor and people of color, led by communists, might rise up and begin taking over the civilized world. There in the shimmering isolation of Columbus, New Mexico, they were hidden. Their larders were stocked, their aircraft fueled. They were ready to fly out.

  Where they planned to go I have no idea. Maybe to the mythic distances of backland Paraguay. Maybe they owned ranches down there. Maybe airstrips and servants were waiting patiently in Paraguay. But probably not. These were not the very rich but rather the huddled, dithering well-to-do, people who had learned to tell themselves a story about flying away in order to survive the end of industrial civilization and white-man privilege as it presently exists.

  It would be too easy to write off that cluster hiding out in Columbus, New Mexico, as lunatics. They were only trying to care for themselves. Dislocation and dangers we think we see lurking in the world drive lots of people, including me, some of the time, quite frantic.

  Nevertheless, they were armed, thus dangerous in my eyes. What I wanted most fervently was distance between me and what I saw as paranoid-unto-craziness loonies. Maybe I was as frightened as they were. In any event, soon we were gone, in El Paso by nightfall and back to playing bulletproof, shucking more oysters.

  What is it with desert rats, reprobates, anarchic adventurers, profoundly conservative runaways? Wandering the semi-postmodern wonderland of the “new Southwest,” I keep in mind the greathearted but profoundly ironic spirit of Ed Abbey.

  At the end of Desert Solitaire Abbey says, “I am a desert rat. But why? And why, in precisely what way, is the desert more alluring, more baffling, more fascinating than either the mountains or the sea?”

  Trying to answer himself, Abbey writes, “The desert says nothing. Completely passive, acted upon but never acting, the desert lies there like the bare skeleton of Being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation.

  “The desert waits outside, desolate and still and strange, unfamiliar and often grotesque in its forms and colors, inhabited by rare, furtive creatures of incredible hardiness and cunning, colonized by weird mutants from the plant kingdom, most of them spiny, thorny, stunted, and twisted as they are tenacious.”

  Then an operative line: “There is something about the desert that the human sensibility cannot assimilate.”

  And, “Behind the dust, meanwhile under the vulture-haunted sky, the desert waits, mesa, butte, canyon, reef, sink, escarpment, pinnacle, maze, dry lake, sand dune and barren mountain—untouched by the human mind.”

  So, untouchable. Going to the desert, Abbey seems to be telling us, is sort of like going to the stars, to a weave of energies that cannot be transmogrified. Sort of like dying, our fragile and frightened individualism subsumed into the labyrinth of everything.

  So what’s the attraction? Maybe clarity, clear air, seeing over distances. The desert doesn’t conceal or bother to lie. The stories we hide behind don’t play well against a long backdrop of timelessness. Maybe a chance at life seen clearly, joys and sorrows of birth, sex, and senescence, and that ultimate question “What then?” taken straight because there’s no other option.

  Speculation about the early Christian monks who retreated to the Egyptian desert—the Desert Fathers—tends to center on the notion of renunciation and consequent chances at spiritual clarity. Maybe that’s part of it, tipping your hat and saying a compromised good-bye to desire so as to get on with the real business of life. Which is what? Maybe Keats was right—he said soulmaking.

  Ultimately the Southwest is dry territory. Aridity places a nearly absolute limit on the possibilities of life there.

  Too many people, not enough water, one hundred or more days with temperatures over 100 degrees, too many automobiles and too much air-conditioning, too many human fantasies heedlessly acted out, endless misuse of the land and people. That’s the beginning of a common litany of complaints about the contemporary Southwest.

  The pristine clarity of dry air over the deserts has been taken to be a natural metaphor for clearly defined purposes, and it is increasingly murky. Haze from the power plant at Page hangs in the Grand Canyon. The skies over Phoenix are ordinarily obscured by a dull dun-colored smog. Treasures like the glory of Glen Canyon are drowned.

  As the wreckage is accepted as normal, chances of utter Mad Max–land ruin are incrementally closer. The ghost of Edward Abbey tells me to say things like that, to demand a responsible and itemized adding up of the actual human and biological costs of “progress,” to resist the downtown forces of commodification
while insisting on the absolute value of every enfranchised and disenfranchised being, from the tiny bats helping to pollinate cactus as they feed at blossoms in the night to the men raging away their lives in the reeking dungeons under cell blocks in Florence Prison. Every being.

  Like so many solitaries, Abbey was an outlander who learned to value silences. His ghost is with me as I write this book. I imagine Ed Abbey shaking his head at my pontificating, muttering, laughing, popping a top. The old black-and-silver magpie man.

  After our time in El Paso with Jim Crumley, Annick and I drove to Tucson, and Doug Peacock led us out back of his house near the junction between Silver Bell and Ina Road, and showed us flowering. The relationship between insects and cactus and bats, nighttime insemination and blossoming, was actually interesting not to speak of sacred.

  Deserts, to a fellow like me, who grew up in the highland sagebrush country of the Great Basin, meant arid, gray, a simple ecology which never blossomed (never mind that it’s not true in the Great Basin, that I stomped on desert wildflowers all the years of my upbringing without really seeing them because my society had taught me to believe flowers were of no consequence). Desert meant arid wasteland, no blossoming.

  Prepared to be bored, I followed Annick and Peacock off into semi-urban remnants of desert, into arroyos with houses on nearby ridges. I found that the Sonoran Desert ecology was as complex as that of a rain forest.

  There’s one workable way to know any environment and that’s get intimate, slow down and meander, touch, smell and see, respond. Spring on the Sonoran Desert played in us, after a few hours of goofing around in the arroyos, like Mozart.

  There are, their characteristics determined by elevation, a stack of “life zones,” biological systems, in the island mountain ranges of the Southwest. The commonly accepted idea of life zones was developed almost a century ago by Dr. C. Hart Merriam after a biological survey of the San Francisco Mountain peaks near Flagstaff. Ascending from the alluvial plains and creosote playas in extreme lowlands involves working through transitions, changes in adapted animal and plant species, to the Arctic–Alpine Zone above 11,500 feet, where pika and mountain sheep live amid mosses and rocks.

  At the top of the Santa Catalina Mountains behind Tucson there are yellow-pine forests like those in the northern Rockies. Lower down creeks fall through canyons which constitute flowering enclaves where hummingbirds and butterflies inhabit a springtime paradise. People ski above Tucson, only a few miles from others who are rubbing on sunblock before heading out to hike among the saguaro cactus, while others are testing their touch on greens that run to a speed of eleven on the Stimpmeter at 150-dollar-a-round golf resorts.

  Peacock simply led us out to wander behind his house. We were in the desert where people most like to live—the bajada—stony uplands rising from the flats, where the mix of plant and animal species is most various, where the trophy houses cluster.

  The truly posh neighborhoods are on the bajada. Annick and I recently lived a couple of weeks in a friend’s house just where the bajada lifts into the wilderness of the Santa Catalinas. We saw January snow on saguaro outside the back door. In Phoenix the wealthy cluster below Camelback Mountain and, to the north, in Carefree, and out around the Nicklaus complex of golf courses at Desert Mountain (more bajada).

  From the bajada, from a patio on a ridge top, you can gaze down on the lighted flatlands of Tucson at night. Our species once found safety from attack by hunting cats through living on ledges, backs to the wall, where they could see out over the hunting grounds. A preference for this kind of setting was built into our nervous systems as the generations evolved. So, the well-to-do enjoy looking down on the less fortunate. It helps them feel invulnerable. Which we all yearn to do.

  Doug ambled, naming and explaining. Flowering cactuses and wildflowers blossom spectacularly in the bajada—bloody red, golden, white, purple. Ocotillo flowers red, tiny flowers; it’s called coachman’s whip, and instantly sprouts new leaves after a rain. The creosote brush has varnish on its leaves to seal in moisture, and releases its perfume in late July when the monsoon rains fall on the desert at night. Doug showed us the nests built by cactus wrens in behind the spines of the cholla; their nests, called pouches, where their young stay cool and humidified, sealed inside the woven layers of dry grass and feathers. He told us to watch out for the jumping cholla. One spine in your forearm, give a twitch, and there it is, an entire little limb of the cholla hanging from your flesh.

  This kind of information came at us frenetically, Peacock babbling, a man eager to talk about photosynthesis in stems, naming the little cactuses, the barrel and the prickly pear, both of which flower bright yellow in April, and the foothill paloverde, which also flowers yellow in April.

  “Mexican poppies, you ought to see it.” So we did, one afternoon we drove north on the freeway toward Phoenix, and hiked through wildnesses thick with tangerine-orange flowers, a splendor defying all but the most intractable despair.

  It’s an Arizona custom to go seeking wildflowers in spring. The blossoming is most spectacular after a rainy winter. Devotees count more than forty species—up to eighty—in a single day: indigo, delphinium, desert and Coulter’s hibiscus, tackstem and penstemon, fairy duster, desert onion, and on and on, name your favorites.

  Others chase hummingbirds in their flittering, the red-throated and the calliope, and ruby-crowned kinglets. Or they pursue flocks of sandhill cranes moving north to the tundras, snowy egrets and blue-throated hummingbirds and turkey vultures arriving for the summer. Osprey and rufous hummingbirds are just passing through. Hummingbirds, I can’t stop listing them, move me to my fanciest fantasies. The white-eared and the magnificent, so many species in flowering havens all day long, so intricate in their speedy doings, so elegant in their comings and goings, such quick splendor.

  The emblematic life form of the bajada is the saguaro. It germinates from black seeds so infinitesimally tiny, they’re best seen under a magnifying glass; and so tough, they can lie dormant for fifteen years and still come awake.

  The saguaro grows very slowly at first, maybe seven inches in ten years, and only branches when it reaches a height of ten feet. Mature saguaro have been recorded at fifty feet in height, with over fifty arms. The skin is smooth, another cactus with a waxy coating to prevent water loss. Under the skin, over a cylinder of wooden rods which reinforces the external ribs, is a layer of pulpy tissue which expands when water is absorbed. The body of the cactus, where Gila woodpeckers and gilded flickers tunnel and build self-healing nests in the flesh, thus forms a water storage tower, which roots itself most securely in shallow rocky soil like that of the bajada.

  The saguaro blooms in spring, at night, a flowering which is white in color, with dense yellow stamens in a deep tube where sweet nector accumulates. Moths and other insects and two species of bats go from flower to flower, pollinating, and soon fruit begins to form, each with four thousand seeds and as large as a hen’s egg. When ripe, the fruit split, revealing the bright red insides which are often mistaken for a flower. Birds take this fruit, seeds are scattered. The old symbolic giant reproduces.

  Part of the pleasure in witnessing this resulted from coming to understand that processes of this kind are going on everywhere. It was for me, once a farmer who believed that ecologies could be manipulated in simple one-off ways, a door opening on the constantly evolving interwoven complexities of where we are. And, thus, what we are. But no info on why.

  Recently, in High Country News, Craig Childs wrote of hiking the beds of streams coming out of the Galiuro Mountains northeast of Phoenix, in high summer. The daytime temperatures were around 120 degrees. Too hot for the snakes. In summer, water in the streams percolates up from underground, but some dry up during the daytime as root systems of trees and brush along the stream bed suck up all the water. Then the night cools, the trees and brush don’t need to absorb so much water to survive, and streams flow again. The most amazing thing, to the non-biologist, are the tiny fis
h that have evolved to survive in those streams. They get through the hot summer by spending long hours of daylight torpor in sponges of soaked algae under leaf piles or in rotten wood. Then, when the water flows, they reemerge. Water beetles, which survive in the same way, also emerge, and fireflies. By late evening the stream is alive again. This sort of thing has been going on for thousands and thousands of years, adapting and evolving. The Galiuro Mountains, far off on an eastern horizon, looked to be a never-never land—no roads on the maps I had. We never went there. A good thing that was.

  Craig Childs also tells of tiny fish that live in a pool fed by springs high on a terrace above the Grand Canyon. Their ancestors inhabited that landlocked pool for the millions of years it took the Colorado Plateau to rise and for the river to cut the canyon down through it. Thank God he doesn’t give an exact location. Those natural systems are, in their delicate intricacy, invaluable, and don’t need the likes of me and you stomping around.

  Driving back to Peacock’s house, hungry and ready to sniff the gin bottle, we were startled when a herd of javelina, wild desert pigs, crossed the road. “They’re habituated,” Doug said. “Next thing, they’ll be turning over garbage cans in the night.”

  Annick flew back to Montana, and Peacock and Ed Abbey and I drove down to visit Bill Eastlake in Naco, which overlooks the Mexican border south of Bisbee, where Eastlake had settled to make his last stand. We played a hour or so of half-wit pool at a table Eastlake had in what seemed to be a “family room,” then went off for steaks and conviviality at the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee. Eastlake had aged seriously, and was no longer the fellow I’d last seen in Ken Kesey’s barn. There we are, in memory, posed as if for picture-taking out front of the old Copper Queen Hotel, pretending we’re barricaded against frailties, and now we’re otherwise.