It is widely rumored, and also true, that I wrote my first novel in a closet. Before I get all rapturous and carried away here, I had better admit to that. The house was tiny, I was up late at night typing while another person slept, and there just wasn't any other place for me to go but that closet. The circumstances were extreme. And if I have to--if the Furies should take my freedom or my sight--I'll go back to writing in the dark. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, writers will go to stupefying lengths to get the infernal roar of words out of their skulls and onto paper. Probably I've already tempted fate by announcing that I need to look upon wilderness in order to write. (I can hear those Furies sharpening their knives now, clucking, Which shall it be, dearie? Penury or cataracts?) Let me back up and say that I am breathless with gratitude for the collisions of choice and luck that have resulted in my being able to work under the full-on gaze of mountains and animate beauty. It's a privilege to live any part of one's life in proximity to nature. It is a privilege, apparently, even to know that nature is out there at all. In the summer of 1996 human habitation on earth made a subtle, uncelebrated passage from being mostly rural to being mostly urban. More than half of all humans now live in cities. The natural habitat of our species, then, officially, is steel, pavement, streetlights, architecture, and enterprise--the hominid agenda.
With all due respect for the wondrous ways people have invented to amuse themselves and one another on paved surfaces, I find that this exodus from the land makes me unspeakably sad. I think of the children who will never know, intuitively, that a flower is a plant's way of making love, or what silence sounds like, or that trees breathe out what we breathe in. I think of the astonished neighbor children who huddled around my husband in his tiny backyard garden, in the city where he lived years ago, clapping their hands to their mouths in pure dismay at seeing him pull carrots from the ground. (Ever the thoughtful teacher, he explained about fruits and roots and asked, "What other foods do you think might grow in the ground?" They knit their brows, conferred, and offered brightly, "Spaghetti?") I wonder what it will mean for people to forget that food, like rain, is not a product but a process. I wonder how they will imagine the infinite when they have never seen how the stars fill a dark night sky. I wonder how I can explain why a wood-thrush song makes my chest hurt to a populace for whom wood is a construction material and thrush is a tongue disease.
What we lose in our great human exodus from the land is a rooted sense, as deep and intangible as religious faith, of why we need to hold on to the wild and beautiful places that once surrounded us. We seem to succumb so easily to the prevailing human tendency to pave such places over, build subdivisions upon them, and name them The Willows, or Peregrine's Roost, or Elk Meadows, after whatever it was that got killed there. Apparently it's hard for us humans to doubt, even for a minute, that this program of plunking down our edifices at regular intervals over the entire landmass of planet earth is overall a good idea. To attempt to slow or change the program is a tall order.
Barry Lopez writes that if we hope to succeed in the endeavor of protecting natures other than our own, "it will require that we reimagine our lives.... It will require of many of us a humanity we've not yet mustered, and a grace we were not aware we desired until we had tasted it."
And yet no endeavor could be more crucial at this moment. Protecting the land that once provided us with our genesis may turn out to be the only real story there is for us. The land still provides our genesis, however we might like to forget that our food comes from dank, muddy earth, that the oxygen in our lungs was recently inside a leaf, and that every newspaper or book we may pick up (including this one, ultimately, though recycled) is made from the hearts of trees that died for the sake of our imagined lives. What you hold in your hands right now, beneath these words, is consecrated air and time and sunlight and, first of all, a place. Whether we are leaving it or coming into it, it's here that matters, it is place. Whether we understand where we are or don't, that is the story: To be here or not to be. Storytelling is as old as our need to remember where the water is, where the best food grows, where we find our courage for the hunt. It's as persistent as our desire to teach our children how to live in this place that we have known longer than they have. Our greatest and smallest explanations for ourselves grow from place, as surely as carrots grow in the dirt. I'm presuming to tell you something that I could not prove rationally but instead feel as a religious faith. I can't believe otherwise.
A world is looking over my shoulder as I write these words; my censors are bobcats and mountains. I have a place from which to tell my stories. So do you, I expect. We sing the song of our home because we are animals, and an animal is no better or wiser or safer than its habitat and its food chain. Among the greatest of all gifts is to know our place.
Oh, how can I say this: People need wild places. Whether or not we think we do, we do. We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers. To be surrounded by a singing, mating, howling commotion of other species, all of which love their lives as much as we do ours, and none of which could possibly care less about our economic status or our running day calendar. Wildness puts us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many future generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own.
The Patience of a Saint
Written with Steven Hopp
When I was nine years old I jumped across the Mississippi. My family had sought out its headwaters in Itasca State Park, Minnesota, where a special trail showed the way for adventurers with this feat in mind. I took my leap reverently. My parents made sure I understood that this modest stream I'd taken in stride was actually one of the earth's great corridors, the dominion of paddle-boats and Huck Finn, a prime mover of flood, fertility, and commerce across our land.
However much we may long to re-create the landmark events of our own childhoods for our children, water passes on. One can't--as Heraclitus put it--step into the same river twice. Nowadays when my family sets out for a lesson in river, we often drive southeast from Tucson to a narrow, meandering cottonwood forest where the kids may attempt to vault the San Pedro. They've done it often and sometimes don't even get very wet. Where its headwaters cross from Mexico into Arizona, this river is barely three feet across. As it runs north across a hundred miles of desert with a scant but persistent flow, it rarely gets much wider. In the scheme of human commerce it's an unimpressive trickle. Mostly it's a sparkling anomaly, a novelty for us here--a thread of blue-green relief for sunstruck eyes.
In the heat of late April the modest saint invites us down from the blazing desert into a willowy tunnel of cool shade, birdsong, and the velvet-brown scent of riverbank. We take unhurried hikes there whenever we can, reading the dappled script of animal tracks and the driftwood history of flood and drought embedded in the steep banks. The sight of a vermilion flycatcher leaves us breathless every time--he's not just a bird, he's a punctuation mark on the air, printed in red ink, read out loud as a gasp.
The kids dance barefoot between sandbars, believing they have found the Secret Garden. For the space of an afternoon we're sheltered from the prickly reality of the desert in which we live. Most human visitors to the San Pedro appreciate it for about the same reasons people value gold: It sparkles, and it's rare.
From a resident's point of view, though, the price of gold couldn't touch this family home. For the water umbel spreading delicate roots in a lucid pool, the leopard frog peering out through a veil of duckweed, the brush-prowling ocelot, and the bright-feathered birds that must cross this hostile expanse of land or find a living on it, the San Pedro is a corridor of unparalleled importance. Nearly half the river's hundred miles, and fifty-eight th
ousand acres of the surrounding corridor, have been protected since 1988 as the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation area. The Nature Conservancy has named it one of the nation's "Last Great Places."
To jump across this river with the right measure of reverence requires an animal frame of mind. Eighty-two species of mammals--a community unmatched anywhere north of the tropics--inhabit this valley. Hiding out here as well are 43 kinds of reptiles and amphibians, including the endangered Huachuca leopard frog, a bizarre critter that calls (as if he knew it was a big, harsh desert out there) from underwater. The San Pedro also harbors the richest, densest, and most diverse inland bird population in the United States--385 species. It's one of the last nesting sites for willow flycatchers and western yellow-billed cuckoos; green kingfishers breed nowhere else in the country. For millions of migratory birds traveling from winter food in Central America to their breeding grounds in the northern U.S. and Canada, there is one reliable passage, on which their lives depend. Just this one.
I lead my children down its banks in the hope that they'll come to recognize in the San Pedro the might and consequence of that splendid word river. Never mind that Huck Finn wouldn't have troubled himself to spit across it. As our girls stoop at the edge of a riffle, peering into the clear, fast water, my husband and I talk to them about heroic navigational feats undertaken not by paddle and steam but by feathered wing.
Our Tucson-born children are more accustomed to ephemeral desert streams that roar briefly after a storm, leaving behind bleached, stony channels that stay dry for weeks or months until the next good rain. "This one never, ever dries up. Wow," the elder observes. "There could be fish living in there." Her little sister, meanwhile, hurls herself toward the sandy shallows, crying, "Clothes off!"
This may or may not be reverence, but most children are good at the animal frame of mind.
This place is one of the blessings I count when I brace myself to consider a dearly beloved and threatened world, and stake my heart onto pieces of what's left of it. The pulse of a whole continent beats in this thinly drawn vein, and I'm called to put my hand in it and listen. Within the leafy protectorate of the conservation area, most of the river is flanked by a trail, and much of it we've walked, in sections as long as a Saturday and a small child's legs. We hike northward with the flow, guessing the river's intentions as it braids into sandbars and shallows. Sometimes it nearly disappears, but stands of young cottonwoods testify to a permanent flow just under the surface. It's more troubling to find a grove of old trees with no young ones at their feet; this means the water table, depleted by nearby wells, has dropped too far for saplings to take hold. If it continues to drop, eventually even the grandfather cottonwoods that constitute the backbone of this ecosystem won't be able to find sufficient moisture to sustain themselves.
When we stop to listen for the yellow-breasted chat in a thicket of Mexican elders, or scan the water ahead for the greenish glint of a kingfisher's wings, we have in the back of our minds, always, the health of this river. We visit the San Pedro as one visits a beloved, elderly relative: We don't talk about the inevitable, but we think about it a lot.
Rivers like this were once common in the Southwest, with permanent flow supporting long corridors of cottonwood-willow gallery forest that netted the body of the Sonoran Desert like veins. Now, in a land bled dry by agriculture and population growth, only 5 percent of the original forest remains. Riparian species have become concentrated in disparate fragments of creekside habitat. The species list is still impressive, but among many orders of animals and plants it's not as long as the roll call of those that have perished quietly. Of the fourteen species of fish that were once native here, twelve are now extinct. Beavers used to dam the rivers into strings of marshy pools, keeping the water table high, but they were hunted out long ago. It's no surprise to a desert hiker anymore to top a hill and look down on a ghost parade of giant, leafless cottonwoods snaking through the valley below, dying in place, marking a watercourse that has gone and won't ever come back.
Yet the San Pedro somehow perseveres. Scattered along its hundred miles are artifacts from countless human encroachments, beginning with that of the Clovis people; they settled this valley eleven thousand years ago, when woolly elephants roamed our continent and San Pedro with his Pearly Gates was far from anyone's mind. Hunting these marshlands with flint arrows, the Clovis settlers established the most prosperous North American population that archaeologists have found from that era. The Mogollon and Hohokam later built on their foundations, then themselves gave way to the Apaches, who controlled the corridor until the Spanish arrived. After Coronado's exploratory party beat down this path in 1540, the San Pedro became the point of entry for Spanish settlement of North America. Three centuries later pioneers from the East rushed to lay claim to every water source, especially this river, because claiming water was the only strategy that ensured survival here on an eastern bureaucrat's idea of a homestead allotment. Forty acres of desert will support a herd of pack rats but not a subsistence farm. However, with forty-acre plots strung like beads up the watercourse, and huge tracts of adjacent desert left largely unoccupied, each rancher with a water hole had an effective claim on many thousands of acres of rangeland.
Now the family cemeteries of homesteaders are tucked back among the trees, along with the crumbling adobe ghosts of boom-towns whose economies lived and died by mining. A roaring mill on the riverbank once pulverized copper ore hauled in by mule from nearby Tombstone. The river provided water for processing and a handy place to dump the toxic byproducts. Now we explore these ruins gingerly, cautioning the kids not to climb on fragile walls or impale themselves on scrap iron as they try to spy pottery shards and other interesting junk. It seems strange to say it, but I am comforted by all this faint and crumbling evidence of human civilizations that have risen and fallen before us. People come and go, as plans begun so modestly inevitably burgeon and bluster until the land beneath our feet finally fails to support our big ideas. It's not the end of the world, at least insofar as the frogs and fishes are concerned. Here among the green willows I am always tempted to see the remnants as reassurance: I want to believe that our own century's harsh claims on the river will someday ease away from it just as gracefully, so that our legacy will be absorbed with all the others' into San Pedro's patient embrace.
But since the day Coronado first guided his horses through tall sacaton grass in this valley, skirting a marshy river then hundreds of feet across, we've changed the face of the land almost unimaginably. Now the river is channelized between steep banks, and so reduced that at one point, near the farming town of Benson, the entire flow runs through an irrigation sluice. It's a dramatic lesson in ecology, a calculus effected largely by the subtraction of just one native from the river community and the addition of a single outsider: the beaver and the free-range cow.
Ranchers are testy about their claim here; it's a tough enough life they've inherited, without city-bred environmentalists challenging their rights to graze and irrigate. But now, as the Sunbelt booms, farmers and environmentalists find their voices equally drowned out by a new, louder demand from urban consumers. Historically, most of Arizona's water has gone to agriculture--80 percent at present, with the remainder divided between industrial and municipal use. The state's Department of Water Resources predicts, however, that municipal consumption will more than double over the next half century. Much of the population growth is expected in southeastern Arizona, where the San Pedro flows. The Fort Huachuca army base and the growing city of Sierra Vista flank the San Pedro, drinking up groundwater from an underground depression that diverts and depletes the same subterranean channel that supports the river and its many forms of life. As the trees die, fingers point in every direction, and well they might: On a map this corridor resembles a patchwork quilt of ranchland, nature preserve, townships, and government grazing leases. A handful of residents and environmentally minded Arizonans who love this river for what it is, rather than for what
they can take from it, are now working against the clock to set aside pieces of the water table and crucial tributaries, aiming to place them out of reach of human depletion.
But a river doesn't flow in pieces. Migratory routes can't skip over private property, and a fish has little use for a river that runs 90 percent of the time. Recently the San Pedro's troubles came to the attention of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, newly created by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). A study of the crucial migratory corridor connecting Mexico, the United States, and Canada was an appropriate first undertaking for this trinational body charged with fostering cooperative environmental responsibility. The findings were unequivocal: At the present rate of consumption, the report indicated, human occupancy will dry up the San Pedro in a matter of decades. Capping municipal growth here, limiting irrigation, and closing Fort Huachuca could significantly extend the river's life, but as the study conceded, these would be costly measures in human terms.
How can the San Pedro's case be argued in a human tongue whose every word for "value" is tied to the gold standard of human prosperity? I feel frustrated in trying even to frame the question, for it occurs to me the question is this: If life must be a race to use up everything we have, who exactly will win that race? The land offers other kinds of answers. This blue-green slice of life, fiercely bounded on every side, will continue to try to persist for all it is worth. To themselves and one another, the little lives in this watery sphere mean the world. But their delicate finned and feathered hopes are at this moment being weighed against thirsts beyond their ken.
This knowledge makes it harder for us, each time, to return to our beloved river, but impossible also to stay away. Our family goes back in every season now, not just for cool relief on hot days but to witness the autumn migration of hawks and stand under trembling cottonwoods as they cast golden leaves from their white-skinned arms. In winter we kneel at the base of a bare old netleaf hackberry to place our palms against its bark and feel the mysterious rows of raised bumps that stipple the trunk like letters in a manuscript written in Braille. What can we read there? How long before the pages of this book peel and dry to dust?