The Immeasurable World

by William Atkins

  One evening, sitting on the edge of a motel pool in Carmel, she told me a story, or a parable. “An anthropologist once asked a Hopi Indian why so many of his people’s songs were about water,” she said. In one hand, as she spoke, she was holding a lemon I’d picked, all rind, big as a grapefruit and hard as a nut. She continued: “ ‘Simple,’ says the Indian, ‘because water is so scarce…And why,’ he asks the anthropologist, ‘are so many of yours about love?’ ”

  A parable it was. I slipped into the water, where we seemed to live, and though I did not say it, I felt that my happiest memories were associated with water.

  Within a few days of moving back to Arizona, back to the arid zone, my hands dried out again, like the spent seedcases of some desert plant; they were coarse enough to snag on cotton.

  In my casita, the shadows of hummingbirds flitted across the blinds.

  The cicadas clicked in the old mesquite tree.

  Yellow tomatoes were rotting on the vine.

  I kept finding small black lizards in the shower.

  On the blank pages at the end of books I scratched away with my pencil. Scratch scratch scratch.

  Out in the desert people were still dying.

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  GOAT-ISH, QUIXOTE-ISH Jim Corbett believed that the principles of justice, community and sanctuary he espoused in his work with refugees ought to be extended to the nonhuman. The obligation to provide sanctuary, he believed, “extends far beyond Central America and specific human refugees to the need for harmonious community among all that lives.” It was a philosophy inspired in part by Aldo Leopold, who in his essay “The Land Ethic” (1949) observed that “there is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to the land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it…the land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it.” In Corbett’s words, it was about “learning to live by fitting into an ecological niche rather than by fitting into a dominance–submission hierarchy.” In 1988 he founded the Saguaro–Juniper Corporation. At the heart of the Saguaro–Juniper philosophy was a “covenant” to hallow the earth, a bill of rights for the environment:

  The land has a right to be free of human activity that accelerates erosion.

  Native plants and animals on the land have a right to life with a minimum of human disturbance.

  The land has a right to evolve its own character from its own elements without scarring from construction or the importation of foreign objects dominating the scene.

  The land has a pre-eminent right to the preservation of its unique and rare constituents and features.

  The land, its water, rocks and minerals, its plants and animals, and their fruits and harvest have a right never to be rented, sold, extracted, or exported as mere commodities.

  In 1995, it seemed likely that an area close to Corbett’s home in Cascabel, sixty kilometres east of Tucson, would be bought by a right-wing militia for automatic-weapons training. Nothing could be more offensive to Corbett. He and others in the community collectively bought up the 180 hectares of rocky desert around Hot Springs Canyon, and founded the Cascabel Hermitage Association.

  The strawbale cabin where I went to live after returning to Arizona was built by the association at a location selected by Corbett. There is something about the scenario that reminds me of that other desert pioneer, Brigham Young of the Mormons, arriving in Utah; the prophet striking his staff on the anointed ground: This is the place! But Corbett the Quaker was no guru. He had not exactly led, though he had been followed. “To learn why you feel compelled to remake and consume the world,” he wrote, “live alone in the wilderness for at least a week. Take no books or other distractions. Take simple, adequate food that requires little or no preparation. Don’t plan things to do when the week is over. Don’t do yoga or meditation that you think will result in self-improvement. Simply do nothing.”

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  THE SAN PEDRO VALLEY lies in what is known by biologists as the Arizona Upland subdivision, the coolest and wettest part of the Sonoran Desert, an ecosystem dominated by low, green-trunked paloverde trees and saguaro cactus. Saguaros, the pleated, multi-armed cacti of Westerns, grow only in Arizona. The oldest, which might have been growing for two centuries, reach heights of fifteen metres or more. The San Pedro is one of southern Arizona’s few “perpetual” rivers, alive where its twin, the Santa Cruz, is largely dead, and flowing for most of the year along its whole course. On the banks, when I passed through Cascabel, asters and sunflowers were blooming in the shade of Fremont cottonwoods. In a shady bosque beside the river I met Daniel, who looked after the hermitage and those who stayed there. He’d studied at a seminary in Chicago and run his own business before moving to Cascabel in 1994. Since then he had mostly lived in a tent on the few hectares he owned in Hot Springs Canyon. He was a model of sanguinity, with a white, untrimmed stubble. He possessed a sort of wayward quietness that was neither guarded nor shy nor remotely aloof. It seemed he was simply allowing me to tell him, by my actions and my words, what sort of person I was, and how he might help me, yet I didn’t feel it would be possible to disappoint him. It was the quietness of a person who has spent long periods alone in the wilderness (longer than I ever had); but he wasn’t a mystic manqué. He would have hated Burning Man, but he was not (I felt) fearful of the world; he didn’t dislike society or humankind, even if he enjoyed the desert more than the city. He was not your dried-out desert rat.

  The dry washes east of the river were margined with yellow ragweed. All along the ridges saguaros were lined, arms raised heavenward, watchful. Beside the track as we drove to the hermitage were coils of violet scat, showing that the coyotes’ diet extended to the fruit of the low-lying prickly-pear cactus, which was starting to ripen purpley along the ridges. Daniel halted to point out what he thought was a mountain lion’s print in the sand alongside the track, a different kind of “cutting sign.” When we reached the cabin after forty minutes of driving along dry washes and tracks all but demolished by recent floods, a roadrunner was perched on the roof’s ridge like an ornament. It fled as we neared, and I didn’t see it again. A few steps from the door was a four-armed saguaro six metres tall. Beside it grew a metre-high paloverde, the saguaro’s “nurse tree,” whose shade the juvenile cactus depended on. Fifty years later, the saguaro was the biggest living thing for miles. My instinct sometimes was to hug it, never mind the spines. The mesquite nearby attracted bees in such numbers in the late afternoon that at first I thought a swarm had gathered there. Behind the cabin was a mature ocotillo, like a quiver of javelins pointing skyward; sometimes a small dull shrike would sit for a few minutes on the tip of one of these spikes, and sing to me.

  Inside the cabin when I arrived, in a corner behind a rolled-up sleeping mat, a nest had been made of carpet fibres, and beside it were two adult mice and, clinging to its mother’s rump as she moved away, a baby. Once I’d waved Daniel off, I swept the nest into a dustpan and dumped it outside at the base of the paloverde, and then spent half an hour with the broom shepherding the mice, and two geckoes, out of the door. The baby hid under the cabinet, and I tried to coax it out with the handle of the broom. It was reluctant; I prodded it gently. It stopped moving. So much for the Saguaro–Juniper covenant. Extracting the small body, I realised I had not killed it, not quite: its eyes were open, and I could see its heart beating under its skin. I took it by the tail-tip and laid it outside in the shadow of a rock, either to revive or to be food for something. When I returned, it was still there, still breathing, its useless legs paddling. Still I couldn’t do what I ought to have done—crushed its head under my heel or under a rock. That evening it seemed like the mouse’s small heart was the engine of all the desert’s noise.

  Because the desert was not silent. The ridges were richly vegetated and as in every
desert, there was wind. In other words the noise was partly the wind acting on the plants, soughing the leaves of the paloverde; shivering the creosote bushes; flowing, hour after hour, over the concertina ribs of the saguaro. The roof of the cabin was sloping tin and resounded like a drum under the movement of the mice and lizards and whatever else was up there. This was the daytime noise; but it was at night, when the desert cooled, that the animal cacophony began. Aside from the mice and lizards tumbling about in the roof, the principal source was the cicada, the thrumming millions of them within hearing range, cranking up as the night deepened, as if compensating with noise for the absent light. Over the cicadas was the intermittent bickering of coyotes from their den in an arroyo a kilometre away; the occasional fox-yowl. And then there were the other sounds, sounds of the semiconscious hours whose provenance it was hard to guess, but which might be, on the one hand, something being eaten alive or, on the other, something relishing its kill. After the first few days I ceased to find anything threatening in these sounds.

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  I’D DISREGARDED Jim Corbett’s advice about bringing books to the desert. In the second-hand bookstore on Fourth Avenue in Tucson—a place where I spent a lot of time—I’d chanced upon a paperback of John C. Van Dyke’s 1901 The Desert, perhaps the most influential book ever written about arid America. Born to privilege among the lawns of New Brunswick, New Jersey, Van Dyke went on to become chief librarian at the seminary school there, as well as professor of art history at Rutgers College, and among the best-known American art historians of the era.

  The journey recorded in The Desert began at his brother’s ranch in the Mojave, where he had gone in the hope of recovering from a “respiratory disorder” in the dry air. A desire for solitude, for the exclusion of mankind from the desert, extended to his writing: “Heaven knows the literature of humanity is large enough without dragging it into such sublime isolations as the desert.” We meet scarcely a single breathing human in all his book’s pages: his was an imagined desert, a desert in its original sense: not merely unpeopled, but pre-human, post-human. Himself he presents as that rare species, the aesthete-frontiersman, as handy with the rifle as with the pen; notebook in one pocket, hunting knife in the other.

  It was not only the clarity of the desert air that made it remarkable. Van Dyke believed “the air itself is coloured,” and looking at the Rincon Mountains at dawn I could see what he meant. “It would seem as though the rising heat took up with it countless small dust-particles and that these were responsible for the rosy or golden quality of the air-colouring.” Here is what he says about the painter Turner in a letter to a friend: “He carried his nature in his imagination, and he painted his pictures out of his head…His landscapes have no existence in nature.” There was something of Turner in Van Dyke’s own approach: air and light themselves as subjects. The Desert’s highlights, small masterpieces of Romantic description, are consecutive chapters entitled “Light, Air and Color,” “Desert Sky and Clouds” and “Illusions.” For Van Dyke those ephemerals are the desert’s foremost attributes. The desert, he writes, is “the most decorative landscape in the world, a landscape all colour, a dream landscape.”

  I have seen at sunset, looking north from Sonora some twenty miles, the whole tower-like shaft of Baboquivari change from blue to topaz and from topaz to glowing red in the course of half an hour. I do not mean edgings or rims or spots of these colours upon the peak, but the whole upper half of the mountain completely changed by them. The red colour gave the peak the appearance of hot iron, and when it finally died out the dark hue that came after was like that of a clouded garnet.

  The desert failed to cure his respiratory condition. On his return to New Brunswick, furthermore, having been obliged to have his appendix removed, he came down with post-operative pneumonia. “I had always believed that ‘back to nature’ was a cure for all ills,” he wrote; “but, lo! it was not.”

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  FROM THE TOP of the adjoining mesa, a flat-topped hill rising thirty metres, you could gain a sense of the cabin’s isolation. It sat alone on a ridge between two washes, in the arena of the degraded alluvial fan formed from the rocks and grit washed down from the Galiuro Mountains thirty kilometres east. From here the cabin was the only human thing visible, like a flake of skin or a single stitch or the dot on an exclamation mark. Sometimes, when I was strolling on the mesa, I would look down to where I had come from and, knowing the building was there somewhere, spend a few pleasant minutes waiting for my eye to find it.

  The desert is “timeless”—a platitude worth repeating only because, here, it did not feel that way. I was conscious of its mobility. Which is to say I was conscious of time and geomorphology. This is partly because I was aware of water. The action of water in the desert is not a slow business. It might transform a vista in an hour or two. I’d seen its power in Tucson during the August cloudbursts, and while walking outside Nogales I’d watched a wave moving towards me up a dry wash, implacable, the storm that birthed it visible only as a dark cloud in the distant mountains. It has been said that more die by drowning in deserts than by dehydration. It isn’t true, but a true point is being made. I also became aware of slower forces, those we are told are imperceptible. It was partly due to being unaccustomedly still for long periods. I sat for hours, my head wrapped in a damp scarf. It was not, of course, that I sensed the millimetre-per-decade shifting of the mountains or whatever; just that I did not feel that the desert was entirely the moored place it was often thought to be. I was conscious of entropy.

  Geologists believe that, prior to the stretching of the mantle that created Nevada, Arizona and the rest of the basin-and-range province, the Sonoran Desert was a tableland, rocky and forested—and largely flat. Since the calming of the basin-and-range disturbance, the chief geological process—I saw it in the Black Rock Desert—has been the erosion of the mountains, their turning into grit and dust, and the slow filling up of the basins with those sediments. And so it can be said, if you are in an idealistic frame of mind, that the state to which the landscape—perhaps all landscapes—aspires, the ultimate state, is precisely this flatness, this spatial purity: the mountains, aberrant, are turned to dust, and while they exist, the gaps between them are packed with this dust. And thus a landscape that was previously flat returns to flatness. Water refines the world.

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  THE DRY WASHES are highways for animals and humans alike: level and flat and largely unvegetated, on account of the floodwaters that periodically surge through them. The walk to Hot Springs Canyon, a walk I came to love, began at the far side of the wash that formed the eastern slope of the cabin’s ridge. Take the long-ago-dozered track to the top of the mesa and follow its brink south-west. In places the track had been water-eroded down to hard white calcium-carbonate. Watercourses become human pathways, human pathways watercourses. From the summit of the mesa I could look west and see the green rind of the San Pedro River running along the foot of the Little Rincon Mountains; I could look north-west and see the riddling washes and the pale speck that was the cabin enshadowed by its sentinel saguaro; I could look east and see the range of the Galiuros over which the sun had recently risen. Somewhere, bees were swarming audibly as the air warmed.

  Here on the raw heights, creosote bush was dominant. Knee-high, with small waxy green leaves, in the brief moistness of morning it emitted a pleasingly pungent odour. Creosote bush has two names in Spanish: hediondilla, or little stinker, on account of its creosote odour; and el gobernador, the governor, because of the toxins it emits to impede competition. It is a classic desert strategy, called for by the sparsity of resources: eke out your quadrant of governance and defend it even against your own kind. Here and there, even at this elevation, were the candelabra forms of saguaros, and blocking the path ahead a fallen one, its flesh gone, reduced to a three-metre faggot of woody white ribs. Decay i
n the desert can be a process as long as life.

  The trail-cum-stream ran down, after three kilometres, to a wash parallel (east–west) with the one below the cabin. I turned left, east; then, realising my mistake when the wash ended at a sandstone cliff after five minutes, I turned back, and after six minutes realised I’d missed the point where I left the trail. I backtracked, but after several more minutes still had not found the trail. My priority now was just to get back to the cabin. Not entirely lost, not hopelessly—there was a sense that I would look back upon this moment in safety, perhaps describe it—but bewilderment with its tang of adrenaline shot through me like a snakebite. The trailhead was there somewhere, it was only a question of finding it, and trusting memory, and not allowing panic to obliterate that memory. I was conscious of the worst of desert fates: to come endlessly back and back again upon your own footprints. For another ten minutes I walked up and down the wash, slowly, until I identified where the path adjoined it—such a vague incision from this approach, barely visible as a trail at all. I felt slightly nauseous. Before resuming, I found three black rocks and made a cairn of them in the middle of the wash, adjacent to the trailhead. In my notebook, I wrote down the time that elapsed between one point and another; I turned on my heel every few minutes to take a photograph—here, where five saguaros stand together above the wash, this is where you turn; or where a black cave is set high in the cliff-face. With me I had a straight cane of paloverde, around one end of which I had wound a length of surgical tape as a grip. From then on, whenever I took one route rather than another, I used the cane to draw a deep arrow in the grit.