On July 9, 1945, there was a total eclipse of the sun. We five kids had paper bags put on our heads with slits for our eyes. We stood in the courtyard in the noonday sun like baby ghosts gazing at the sky along with the architects and our Scottie dog, who was racing around in frantic circles as the dark enveloped us. The heat of the day gave way to a subtle breeze as the sun turned black and a shiny ring of gold encircled it. I thought the sun blew the wind to us at that moment as it extinguished its own light—my first memory of mystery. It was enchanting living at the Olmsted estate.
My first encounter with water was also memorable. Mom took us to Walden Pond on a steamy summer day. With water wings affixed to our arms we splashed in the cool sanctuary and she taught us how to dog paddle. The pond in 1943 still had reeds and lots of frogs as Thoreau described it ninety years before from his cabin on the opposite shore. Today it is a busy recreational beach with attendant algae problems, but for us it was clear and clean with little fish swimming between our legs.
So my provenance of conservation was visited on me from an early age by masters. I was lucky. Yet beauty is found in nooks and crannies everywhere: in a shaft of light across pavement in the big city, in the eyes of a child, in the spill of water over rocks, or in the cut of mountains on the horizon. It is there for us, even in the ugliness we’ve inflicted.
The theologian Sallie McFague, in her eloquent book The Body of God, writes that every finite particle of our planet is the body of God and that until we love our own bodies and all the bodies we share the planet with we cannot begin to love and care for the body of the earth.
The body of the earth is scarred. The body of the earth is sacred.
Rearrange a few things and the relationship to earth changes. If our world seems beyond repair, leading to the irrevocable loss of many species, possibly our own, rearranging priorities can put us on a path to a holistic, even holy, path of healing our planet and our own despair.
There are thousands of stories of people around the globe taking matters into their own hands. There are organizations amassing millions of people online to put pressure on legislators to halt drilling in the Arctic, the spraying of pesticides, or the killing of wolves, for example. I have listed many of the most important organizations and their missions in the appendix at the end of this book.
Because national governments lag behind the environmental needs of local people, communities from Fiji to Laos to New York’s Hudson River are adopting best practices for fishing, clean air, and water. Women in Africa are planting thousands of trees, while children in South America champion the lives of endangered animals in the places where they live. Place is a space with memory. Everyone is imprinted with memories of places they lived, places we long to return to and keep as they were. Nothing stays the same, but it is possible to halt the wanton desecration of land, water, and air. It is not rocket science. It is commitment.
This blue marbled beauty the Earth is like no other, as photos of Mars, and now of Pluto, more than three billion miles away, attest. If we can send photos back from Pluto, we can do anything.
Human beings have indomitable spirit, and so do animals. The will to thrive is inborn. We adapt, we evolve, and we survive best in harmony. These last chapters are about extreme conditions, best practices, deadly ones, peaceable kingdoms, and the miracles of life on earth.
18
Desert
My fingers wound around three reins in each hand as six horses thundered across the Arizona desert, me sitting high above them on a rickety old stage coach. The sky was blue as blue can be, the space was wide open, and the thrill of controlling the power of six horses was incomparable. I was playing Calamity Jane in a CBS TV movie of that name, and although an accomplished wrangler hidden inside the seat box was actually holding the lead rein it did not diminish my excitement. The camera rolled, the Indians began galloping after me, and I felt free as the wind. I only hoped my hat would not fly off. “Cut!” yelled the director through an old-fashioned bullhorn and we turned the six-horse stage around and did it again. After the second or third take there was a close shot of me standing on my head on the running stage screaming like a crazy banshee, which frightened the Indians away. I really did stand on my head, but the stage coach was not moving. The long shot was done by a stunt double. Still, my commitment to shooting, trick riding, driving the six-horse stage, and crashing through windows with a tuck and roll earned me the trust of the stunt people, who were my idols. They gave me a big bronze belt buckle with “Stuntmen’s Association” engraved on it at the end of the shoot, and an honorary membership. It was like winning an Oscar.
We were four weeks in the desert south of Tucson. It was hot. There was a spate of days where the temperature stood at 114. Our vigilant wardrobe woman was busy plying us all with wet cloths around our necks and salt pills to keep us hydrated. She neglected to minister to herself and collapsed one afternoon of heatstroke. The hospital did its best to save her but, shockingly, she died within days.
The sun is our life and our death. It is the fire that makes all life possible, threatening us with annihilation at the same time. Icarus flew too high. The sun melted his wings of wax and he plummeted to earth.
In deserts I always feel some fear, as if waves of heat or fire were about to roll suddenly over the next dune or scrubby hill. I have been there when dust storms and sandstorms obliterated all sight, when my scarf covered all but the slit in my eyes through the sunglasses, and still we trudged on. I have been low on water and felt panic. Where is the water? How do animals survive?
The Sonoran Desert embraces Tucson and extends west to the Salton Sea and Palm Springs in California, and south all the way down the Baja Peninsula into Sonora, Mexico. It is the largest of our country’s deserts, and the hottest. And yet the Sonoran has abundant life, plants, and animals that have invented ways to store water or become torpid until water comes to them. They are little miracles.
My favorite is the Spadefoot Toad, which has a bloated little three-inch body of greeny-yellowish mottling, big inquisitive eyes, and an appendage on its hind legs for digging—hence its name. It digs a burrow in sand or hardpan soil and then waits until it rains. The vibrations from the drops or thunderclaps bring it to the surface at night, where it immediately begins to feed on insects and seeks to mate. Males bleat like little lost lambs in the pools made by the rains, and females find them. The females will then lay as many as three thousand eggs, which hatch within twenty-four hours, even if the desert pool is eighty-six degrees. The tadpoles become Spadefoots in nine to fourteen days, the shortest time period of almost all amphibians. But theirs is a race against time. The pools are evaporating, and in order to maximize their progeny they hurry things along. They can eat enough in one meal to hold them for an entire year underground. Still, of the thousands of eggs laid, few survive to adulthood; they become meals for small mammals and birds, and the victims of dried-up pools.
This is an amazing amphibian and, like most amphibians, is best seen on a spring or summer night or before dawn. Amphibians are declining the world over due to factors not fully understood including fungal disease, pollution, habitat destruction, climate change, and poaching for the pet trade. The Spadefoot is holding on and is listed currently of “Least Concern” on the IUCN’s Red List.
The Sonoran Desert is home to a hundred reptiles, including the most venomous and famous, the Gila Monster. This is another animal whose adaptation to desert life is remarkable. Like the Spadefoot, its chunky body efficiently stores food. The Gila’s tail is a kind of storage locker expanding with digested meals of baby rabbits and other little rodents that come with the summer monsoon season. Its bladder holds an enormous amount of water so that the lizard can retire underground for a week or more fat and happy. The poison in its saliva is thought to have a hormone regulating this activity, which may prove useful to humans in controlling type 2 diabetes.
As I watched a chunky pink and black Gila Monster hunker down beneath the sand under th
e shade of desert scrub, two Collared Lizards a foot high raced by in tandem on their hind legs like Victorian gentlemen late for a party. I saw nothing in pursuit. Certainly not the Desert Tortoise, which lumbers across the parched land munching on flowers and leaves and tolerating temperatures of 140 degrees. Like the lizards, it stores moisture from these plants in its bladder. This is a species the U.S. lists as endangered, declining because of off-road vehicles and poachers.
Reptiles do not usually rank high when people think of the illicit trade in wildlife, but there is a vast network of collectors who will pay thousands of dollars for rare species like the Desert Tortoise. The Gila Monster was the first to be protected, in 1952. Even though it breeds well in captivity, it is still poached.
Bryan Christy in his book The Lizard King documents the mafia-like global trade in illegal reptiles, with a cast of characters out of a thriller. The majority of U.S. trade is legal and done through retail pet stores or the Internet. There are also three hundred reptile shows put on annually in cities across the United States. I love spending an afternoon wandering the booths and talking to the breeders even as I cringe at the tiny jars and boxes the herps—reptiles and amphibians—are confined in. While contraband is forbidden, I’ve witnessed under-the-table transactions of exotic frogs from South America and baby boas from Asia. Most of the sellers are legitimate, passionate about their herps, and adept at captive breeding, which has skyrocketed in the past twenty-five years. Stars like Bob Clark breed albino snakes with intricate patterns rivaling art deco.
When I was twenty-two I kept a Green Iguana in my New York apartment. Iggy, as I inventively named him, was a fine pet. He didn’t need to be walked, didn’t bark or bite, and was a cheery celery green with some stunning turquoise scales; his eyes tracked me across the room until he got his dinner of fruit and lettuce. I wouldn’t keep one today, but I understand the popularity of herps. In any case, being captive bred, they cannot be returned to the wild.
Reptiles are not the only denizens of the Sonoran to be smuggled. The saguaro cactus—home to the little Elf Owl, which holes up between the spines, and to the Cactus Wren, which weaves a nest on them—stands as a majestic column as high as sixty feet with as many as twenty-five arms. They can live for two hundred years, growing achingly slowly. A ten-year-old may be only an inch and a half high, and the first arm may not appear on a saguaro for seventy-five years. Even when their weight tops two thousand pounds, their roots reach only a few inches into the soil, braced by horizontal extensions as wide as the plant is tall. The Sonoran Desert is their only home. The cactus is protected, but Saguaro National Park has major highways going through it, a fast getaway for poachers, who can collect thousands of dollars on the black market. Many of the most desirable wild cacti have been implanted with radio frequency chips to tip off the thieves’ locations.
My friends Karen and Ken have a small adobe home within the park boundaries, living as if surrounded by elegant Roman statues, or caryatids of the Acropolis. The oranges and pinks of the Arizona sunset wash over the cacti columns in an expressionistic orgy when the desert begins to cool.
At 4 a.m. I wandered among them by starlight, the faintest line of light on the horizon, when a thousand quail suddenly babbled through the stillness with the force of a thousand alarm clocks announcing the new day.
There are few deserts on earth with the biodiversity of the Sonoran. The topography rises in hills and slices into small canyons and arroyos that rush full with monsoon rains; sometimes it hardly seems a desert at all. With more than a hundred reptiles and amphibians, sixty mammals, two thousand plants, and four hundred birds, it is one of the biodiversity hot spots of North America—an incubator of desert evolution.
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At the western end of the Sonoran is the Salton Sea, the largest body of water in California and a case history of the state’s problems. I went there for the birds. I can’t remember what my ultimate destination was; it could have been Arizona or New Mexico, as I’ve made movies in both. I shot the movie A Gunfight, with Johnny Cash and Kirk Douglas, in a New Mexican desert where the horse wranglers wrangled a dozen ferocious Diamondback Rattlesnakes out of old wooden buildings and into large cages. Their heads were as large as fists and they kept banging them aggressively against the wire top whenever anyone came near. But it was not the snakes I feared—it was that I couldn’t see water anywhere. On my days off I drove to the Rio Grande and sat with my feet dangling in the river.
Wherever I was headed that day from Los Angeles, I remember spontaneously taking a detour south to the Salton Sea because of the White Pelicans, fully 30 percent of the U.S. population, and 80 percent of the population of wintering Eared Grebes. Driving down the I-10 I passed Ferruginous Hawks low in agricultural fields seeking rodents, and the agile Prairie Falcon high on utility poles eyeing small birds. Wintering Sandhill Cranes paraded through harvested rows picking up old seed, while flocks of Blackbirds careened overhead.
The Salton Sea is on the Pacific flyway, the migratory highway for birds heading south for the winter or north for breeding, as far north as the tundra of Alaska and Canada. It is the last big body of water on the southern trip before the Sea of Cortez, sort of like a service center on the interstate; you miss it and you may go hungry for the rest of the journey, running out of gas before you reach your destination. Millions of birds make a stopover, 450 different kinds, some off course and extremely rare.
There was not the searing heat I expected in one of the lowest points in North America, just a few feet shy of Death Valley’s record 250 feet below sea level, but I was not there in midsummer, when the temperature of the water alone can hit ninety degrees. Hundreds of White Pelicans sat on old pilings and rocks or occasionally swam in lines in the water trolling their massive beaks like seining nets to collect fish, perhaps the introduced species Tilapia, capable of withstanding hot water.
The Salton Basin is an ancient inland sea that has expanded and contracted throughout history. The modern-day Salton Sea was born of an accident in 1905 when the Colorado River overran gates to the Alamo Canal as a cascade of heavy rains and melting snows dug into sands and spread for 370 square miles. On my visit in the 1970s the marina was still active and boats were buzzing about. By the late ’90s the boats sat high and dry, hundreds of feet from water, and the marina was dead. The coup de grace will come in 2018 when a deal among the U.S. Department of the Interior, the State of California, and numerous water agencies takes effect. Water to the Imperial Valley and Salton Sea will be reduced for seventy-five years, until 2093, to allow growing cities like San Diego to receive what they need.
Meanwhile the Salton Sea shrinks, salinity increases, and algae blooms suffocate the oxygen, causing untenable toxicity. Dust from the dry seabed area is so toxic that people’s health is compromised as far away as Los Angeles when the wind kicks up. There are die-offs of thousands of fish and the concomitant deaths of thousands of birds—twenty thousand Eared Grebes in 1994 alone. With no food and nowhere to go, they have come to the end.
Audubon chief scientist Gary Langham has mapped projections of habitat loss until 2080 due to climate change throughout North America. We may lose as many as 314 species because of extreme conditions such as those in the Salton Sea, and the inability of birds to adapt.
California has entered a period of drought not seen since the 1500s, says the paleoclimatologist Lynn Ingram of the University of California, Berkeley. Ancient stumps at the bottom of dry lakes tell the story of severe and vacillating drought across the Southwest from 800 to 1600 AD. Ancestral Puebloans abandoned the intricate cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde in Colorado and Canyon de Chelly in New Mexico around 1250 AD; the Mayan civilizations with advanced agricultural canals and dykes ended before 1000 AD. Now the West is entering another waterless era.
California is the most remarkable state in the Union. While every state is unique, California is a great civilization all on its own, geographically, culturally, technologically, and agriculturally. M
ore than thirty-eight million people call the state their home—more than the entire population of Canada. It grows half the fruits, vegetables, and nuts we eat, produces most of our movies and TV shows, and boasts nine of our fifty-nine national parks within its boundaries.
From the deserts of Sonora, Mojave, and Joshua Tree to the redwoods and ancient sequoias of the north; from the coasts of Laguna, Malibu, and Santa Barbara to Monterey Bay, Mendocino, and San Francisco, from the granite mountains of Yosemite to the snow-covered volcanoes Mammoth and Shasta, and from the fields of strawberries and almond trees to the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma, there is no place in America, if not the world, that is so diverse. And risky—one has to be a gambler to live where fire, drought, mudslides, and earthquakes occur with regularity.
In the 1970s San Francisco’s Hyatt Regency had a revolving restaurant at the top of the hotel with 360-degree views of the city and its sweeping bay. I had a day off from the TV movie Death Be Not Proud, John Gunther’s moving story of his son. My husband, my son Jace, and I were having lunch there. The tower restaurant revolved on a huge disc like a giant 331⁄3 LP record, giving us slow but continuous views to the horizon on this bright afternoon. We hadn’t touched our dessert when there was a rumble, a bit of a shake, and the grinding squeal of a hidden winch as it attempted to keep us turning. Californians take their earthquakes, the small ones anyway, in stride, so there wasn’t much of a fuss until the whole turntable began to wobble as it tried to right itself, the water in glasses sloshed over their lips, and the screeching of the wheel sounded like a DJ gone mad in a scratch studio. We were all evacuated safely. People weren’t so fortunate in 1906 when a massive earthquake leveled the city, killing three thousand.
Wild Things, Wild Places Page 20