As I was trying to find my way back to the house, a jeep roared towards me and pulled to a halt. Behind it was another. Get in, and Mukhtar—Zhaksilik’s middle son, who was driving—put his foot down. The land, the former seabed, between the lagoon and the fishing site at Shagalaly was sandy thicket, which gave way to a broad strip of powdery sediment the colour of pigskin, and it was across this, ten kilometres, that the jeeps raced, three members of the brigade in each, the other one driven by Mukhtar’s older brother Maksat, following the hundreds of twined tracks made by their previous comings and goings. Where Serik was I didn’t know. At eighty kilometres per hour, ninety, we thundered over this open land towards the sun, the other vehicle jostling and rattling alongside five metres away. A shunt would have been disastrous, would have meant death and maiming; but we were going to the sea, and in my drunkenness the feeling was not peril; the boys in both jeeps were howling—with the familiar excitement, and pride, and love for their home and one another. The racetrack gave way to a maze of reeds three metres tall, which went on and on, flocks of birds rising, until the vista opened out, and the sky expanded, and everything was bright-lit and shimmering as happens near great expanses of water.
Amidst the reeds close to Shagalaly was a cloister formed by three shipping containers in which the boys slept when the boats were late back. Clothes hung on a line strung between containers; a black dog trotted out of the shadows to watch us pass. The sea when we reached its edge was still and hyper-reflective. It was the sea depicted in the rowboat-painting at the museum in Aralsk, tranquil and alive. From the beach, a narrow wooden jetty extended into the water. No far shore was visible, just water and sky.
It was as if this had always been the shore; nothing indicated that the place where we stood was new; that until thirty years ago it had been fathoms underwater. The boats were home and had been pulled onto the sand. Folded on the deck of one of them was a pink floral duvet for when it got cold. Serik, it turned out, was somehow here already. Looking out at the waveless water, we stood in a circle while the boys unknotted nets and spiralled them into rubber buckets. First the blunt heaving of the fisherman’s day, then once the catch was landed and before you went home, these hours of unpicking with numbed fingers. One of the men put a cigarette lighter to an empty Coke bottle to breach the plastic then carefully tore the base off to make a drinking vessel. (Vodka is never to be drunk straight from the bottle.) I’d drunk enough, God, but I downed what I was served. And okay the next. The aim was not to get drunk, or even to drink, but to get the foreigner drunk.
Two brown horses, farmed for meat, appeared on the track behind us, and stood side by side between an upturned boat and one of the Russian personnel carriers. They dropped their muzzles to a puddle and began to drink, raising their heads every few seconds to monitor us. Others stepped out of the reeds, two or three at a time; finally the mothers with their young, until a party of twenty or so was milling about the puddles, sipping, watchful. Glossy and gorgeous, and baulky. Sixteen hands; taller, some of them. Two approached, keeping close to the edge of the reedbed, wavering when they sensed our eyes on them. Others joined the line, treading behind the leaders. Mukhtar dropped the net he was working at and picked up an empty vodka bottle from the sand and with a roar pitched it at the lead animal, striking its flank. It turned and galloped back to the rest of the herd still waiting by the GAZ. Scanning the sand, he picked up another bottle and threw it at the second horse, missing, before turning back to his work untangling the nets. The herd found its confidence. The line broke up and began to gallop towards us. At the last moment they charged away and splashed along the shore to some hidden bay where they would spend the night.
5
BETWEEN GREAT FIRES
The Sonoran Desert, USA
I moved to Tucson, Arizona, in the summer. The afternoon heat in this city enclosed by mountains was too much even for the hummingbirds. The feeder I put out for them dripped agave untouched on to the dry concrete. The world can be cavalier with its metaphors. In London I had checked each room of the flat before locking up and posting the key through the letterbox. When you have exhausted the resources of a place you move on or perish. There was a desert lesson.
It rarely rained in Arizona but when it rained it rained explosively and with atrocious, ecstatic ferocity—less like a tap turned on than a bucket flipped. More than once the street adjacent to my hundred-dollars-a-week casita would be ankle-deep in rushing water while the rain had not even dotted the dust of my yard. The Sonoran Desert, in which Tucson is situated, occupies much of southern Arizona and eastern California and extends over the border into Sonora, the Mexican state it takes its name from. With up to thirty-eight centimetres of rain per year, it is the wettest and greenest of the United States’ four desert regions (the others being the Mojave in California, the Chihuahuan in New Mexico and the Great Basin in Nevada). Like many deserts, the Sonoran is largely enwalled by mountains: to the north and east, the edge of the Colorado Plateau, the Rockies and the Sierra Madre; to the west, the Sierra Nevada. It is the last that is responsible for much of south-west America’s aridity, removing the moisture from the Pacific’s clouds as they are drawn up its western flank. Annual precipitation on the western slope might be seventy centimetres, while a kilometre away on the eastern slope it won’t exceed twenty. They call it a rain shadow but the effect is not so much a shadowing as a milking. It is from the low-lying south—the jungle south of Central America—that the monsoon comes, and the result is a desert in which dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people die each year, but which often feels fecund.
One morning I cycled on the rutted suburban streets to the path that follows the Santa Cruz River through the city. The banks were three metres high and vertical, so it was not possible to get close to the riverbed. To look was enough. It was dry grit save for a seam of silver threading down its centre like a zip. When I returned the following day the water had gone. Later someone told me it was likely effluent. The Santa Cruz was not always like this. Without a perennial river, as it once was, the Native Americans would not have settled on the plain they called “S-cuk Son” (“at the base of the black mountain”); without it the Spanish mission at San Xavier del Bac, south of today’s Tucson, would not have been established nor the presidio that replaced it. The Native Americans dug many kilometres of drainage ditches to irrigate their beans, squash and maize, but for white farmers and miners the fitful Santa Cruz, with its meagre 0.7 cubic metres of water per second, was not enough, and the valley is too broad to dam. It became clear that the visible water was a fraction of the actual river. When, in the 1890s, steam pumps began to “mine” the aquifers beneath the basin’s alluvium, the water table sank, and by 1940 the volume being removed from the aquifer exceeded the rate of recharge from precipitation. As early as 1910 an Arizona hydrologist described the Santa Cruz as “ever a dwindling stream.” Wells that in 1902 needed to be no deeper than six metres, by 1920 had to be sunk to thirty metres. By the 1950s the river no longer flowed except in times of flood or where treated sewage was discharged into it. When the Santa Cruz ceased to be perennial, the habitats it supported dwindled: first the cattails, then the cottonwoods, then the mesquite; until finally the onetime river was flanked by nothing but desert scrub. The existence of Tucson is vouchsafed by nothing but the vanishing mass of water banked in the ground. Today the open-pit mines south of modern Tucson extract some 30,000 acre feet of water annually—37 million cubic metres (an acre foot being the amount of water it takes to cover an acre of land to a depth of one foot); the pecan groves near Sahuarita are similarly exacting. As the ancient reserves were pumped, the land shrivelled and slumped and buildings collapsed. Interstate 10, the road from Tucson to Phoenix, became rucked and cracked. Completed in 1993, the Central Arizona Project canal was dug to supplement Tucson’s and Phoenix’s groundwater, running 540 kilometres across the desert from a dam on the Colorado River. Look at it on maps and the canal’s straight
lines, especially where it runs near-parallel with the channel of the Santa Cruz, are reminiscent of the cannulas and catheters attending a body in intensive care.
In 1878, John Wesley Powell, a one-armed Civil War veteran and confidant of Ulysses S. Grant, published his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. It caused outrage, and remains among the most influential treatises on the American deserts. “The Arid Region begins about midway in the Great Plains,” he wrote, “and extends across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean.” It was an area so dry, he warned, that “many droughts will occur; many seasons in a long series will be fruitless, and it may be doubted whether, on the whole, agriculture will prove remunerative.” Nor was the question merely of dispersing what water the region possessed: “When all the waters running in the streams found in this region are conducted on the land, there will be but a small portion of the land redeemed.”
For Powell understood that lack of water was not the only problem: there was also the frost, the alkaline soils, the poor drainage. You could not live here as you lived in the east. Above all space was needed. The Homestead Act of 1862 granted 162 acres to each homesteader, but that was a dispensation calculated by men in cloudy Washington. In the desert it would suffice for about two self-possessed cows. Powell suggested an allocation of at least 2,560 acres per ranch. He advocated unfenced common pasturage, co-operative labour and federal grants. The implication, some felt, was this: the West was inimical to capitalism. For the report’s readers in Congress it was, at best, a council of capitulation. (Nobody used the word socialism.)
For “boosters” of the American West such as an influential land speculator named Charles Dana Wilber, Powell’s desert was simply a myth: “The Creator never imposed a perpetual desert upon the earth,” he wrote in 1881, “but on the contrary, has so endowed it that men by the plow, can transform it, in any country, into farm areas.” No preponderance of scientific opinion sufficed to sway those gripped by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Wilber was also an evangelist of the notion that agricultural activity itself would alter the immediate climate, an idea first articulated by Josiah Gregg in 1844; “The extreme cultivation of the earth might contribute to the multiplication of showers,” he wrote. The mechanism of this process remained unclear—some speculated it was connected to the increased absorbency of ploughed soil—but there developed a conviction among settlers and boosters that the desert, such as it was, might be routed to the very foothills of the Rocky Mountains. One booster claimed that upon every yard of rail put down across the desert an extra gallon of rain would fall each year. But we know it was not the desert that was routed. “Rain follows the plow” was to prove a catastrophic motto for homesteaders who established landholdings on the desert’s eastern edge, only to see drought follow drought as the century drew to a close. Those leaving the dustblown plains painted on their wagons “In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.”
In 1890, one Robert Dyrenforth was charged by a worried Department of Agriculture to conduct a series of “experiments in the production of rainfall.” This involved the firing of explosives into the desert skies from cannons, balloons and kites. In the view of the Chicago Times, the twenty thousand dollars would have been “less ridiculously employed if it were devoted to the manufacture of whistles out of pigs’ tails.” Dyrenforth was duly dubbed “Dryhenceforth.”
In May 1957, eighty years after Powell’s report, an essay appeared in Harper’s Magazine by Walter Prescott Webb entitled “The American West, Perpetual Mirage.” It was the cover story: “The West’s leading historian uncovers the one overwhelming fact which seventeen states have been trying to hide for the last century.” His subject is the persistent failure of America, even into the twentieth century, to concede the extent and severity of its desert. The West, Webb argues, setting out his stall, extends from a “line drawn from the southern tip of Texas to the further boundary of central North Dakota”—significantly further east than the threshold of Powell’s Arid Region of 1878. He slices this vast strip into three north–south segments: the Pacific coast, the mountains, and the Great Plains. The “overriding influence,” the “dominating force,” is the desert, and in his description it is a kind of ruthless god: “It shortened the grass on its borders before destroying it in the interior. It never permitted trees on the plains it built; and where it found them it beat them down to sage and brush, reducing the leaves to thorns and the sap to grease and oil.” He pictures the desert as an inferno. “In the centre will be an area where all life has been destroyed, a charred mass such as may be seen in parts of Utah, Idaho and Nevada. Beyond that will be a series of concentric circles where the destruction decreases as the distance grows.” When he studies a selection of school textbooks on American history, he finds that the Great American Desert is invariably given no more than a few pages. This is partly because “the West is in comparison to the east a land of deficiencies.”
The most provocative element of the essay is the map outlining Webb’s incendiary geography. “Let us be realistic and divide the West into the two categories, Desert States and Desert Rim States.” Labelled “DESERT STATES, THE HEART OF THE WEST” are not only Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Colorado, but northerly Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. The “desert rim states” meanwhile comprise all or part of California, Oregon and Washington to the west, and, flanking the desert’s eastern edge, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas. Webb’s line marking the “approximate limit of desert influence” therefore impounds well over half the nation’s landmass. The desert, he writes, “emerges in its true character as a great interior force—repelling to people and repulsive to wealth in nearly all forms.”
* * *
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IN LONDON the mouths of pundits and politicians had been full of the “migrant crisis” and here in Arizona was another of its grim centres, the U.S.–Mexico borderlands. I began attending weekly meetings in a church hall not far from my casita, organised by an activist group called No More Deaths, which provided food, water and medical care to undocumented migrants trying to cross the desert between the Mexico border and Tucson eighty kilometres to the north. Once a week, James, a senior member of the group, would pick me up at 5:30 a.m. He was a former high-school principal with a buzzcut and an army bearing that belied a great sweetness of temperament and the kind of regretful quality found in those who struggle to reconcile a belief in their own basic cheerfulness with a suspicion that hope is implausible. It is a common enough tension. Lois, another elder of Tucson’s migrant-aid community, joined us one morning. She had the stature and alertness of a teenage girl; a girl’s interrogative glare too. She’d just turned eighty and was glowing bones and sinew, healthier than someone—me—half her age. Even a child-size T-shirt was baggy on her. It bore the No More Deaths logo, a single plastic water canister marked with a green cross and the word “AGUA.” She sat in the back of the car dispensing homemade muffins and barbed commentary. As the morning went on, as we moved into the desert, her frown softened. She carried in her backpack food parcels and fresh socks in ziplock bags; she could no longer carry water in the quantities she once had. This she admitted with some embarrassment, this woman of eighty, who marched into the desert at a pace that left me constantly a hundred metres behind. On either side of Lois as we drove south from Tucson along Route 19 were Ryan, a new volunteer in his early twenties, who was studying astronomy at U of A in Tucson; and John—John with his long white hair and his desert bonnet and neckerchief, all ironic eastside softness and transatlantic teasing. John, a birder, loved the desert at this time of day, he said; loved it for its birdsong that would die off as the sun rose, and loved especially its TVs—turkey vultures—even if their collective circling did indicate something dead.
Dropping south on the Nogales road, past the Santa Rita Mountains and their alluvial fans, through Sahuarita and the retirement enclave of Green Valley, we took a right at Arivaca Junction, pa
st the Border Patrol checkpoint on the other side of the road, and the small settlement of Arivaca where No More Deaths has a first-aid outpost. The drop site in the San Luis Valley lay within the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Reserve. There was a period of preparation: the rolling-down of sleeves, the slow winding of scarves, the fitting of sunhats and sunglasses. Sunblock slathered on, two-handed, like a potter. Travelling in the Sonoran Desert in 1909, the Norwegian explorer Carl Lumholtz wrote that “the sensation was that of walking between great fires.”
Our backpacks were loaded up with four-litre plastic flagons of water from the trunk. We’d barely set off into the dry creekbed before John and Lois had vanished into the dense ironwood forest ahead. The ground was dominated by prickly pear cactus, and ironwood and mesquite trees. The creekbeds were dry, but thick with wildflowers, and as we moved, a shoal of grasshoppers moved ahead of us from tree to tree, with a dreadful massed shrieking. We stopped at one of the many dumps of discarded possessions. It hadn’t been there more than a few days. It included a “fruity shine” lip balm and a pair of chrome-plated nail-clippers. As if their owners believed they were going somewhere else entirely, a visit to aunty. When, after an hour, we reached the place where the supplies were to be left, John and Lois were waiting, sitting a few metres apart on boulders that strewed the dry creekbed.
Lois looked up at us as we put down our water containers and unloaded our backpacks. “They’ve all gone.”
The Immeasurable World Page 22