October 2021: I am driving with Gary Paul Nabhan along the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Arizona, the botanist, activist and author’s natural habitat. For 50 years, the Borderlands have been his research site and laboratory, his scholarly and artistic setting, his home — he lives a mere 22 miles from the Nogales port of entry — and also his heart. It is the same region I’ve been drawn to most of my life, and it is Gary who has taught me that the border is much more than a line in the desert sand. 

Gary has been visiting, living on and crossing the border since the early 1970s. I’ve followed in his footsteps, witness of the human and more-than-human drama on the line since 1984. Today, he is wearing his typical field uniform: scrunched-up khaki baseball cap, faded T-shirt calling upon peasants to “rise up” in Spanish, a small, simple wooden cross hanging from his neck. Fulsome gray whiskers flow from his chin, a pleasant belly hangs slightly over his worn loose jeans. He has the look of a farmer, which he is, and oh, his eyes: deep gray-blue pools that shimmer as he talks to you in a gentle rasp. 

“It’s OK to have boundaries in our lives,” Gary once told me, apropos of the line that fascinates us both. “But if we were to glue all the pores on our skin shut, or all the stoma on a plant leaf shut, we would die. So we really need porous borders, because it’s a time-tried way to enrich life rather than strangle it.”

We are driving along the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide easement along 632 miles of the border that was established for security purposes by Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. We are on the U.S. side, in the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, a vibrant ecotone between desert scrub and grasslands in the Chihuahuan Desert. Roosevelt could hardly have imagined what it has become today: a militarized cyborg desert, crawling with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents in trucks, on ATVs and horseback, operating a vast network of surveillance towers and drones, glaring at night with spectacular carceral lighting. 

Here is the wall: 30-foot-high rust-hued bollards carved into the impossibly cerulean blue of an early autumn desert sky. We plow through pools of muddy water from late-season monsoon thunderstorms. I want to keep my eyes fixed on the view to the left, our north, to the beautiful ecological contradiction of the refuge: the riparian desert. Sprays of sacaton grass bend in the breeze, stands of creosote, that most stoic desert species, offer up a swatch of yellow flowering; nearby, cottonwoods rise thick-trunked, light sparkling on their fluttering leaves.  

Springs, creeks and ephemeral draws historically sustained wetlands here that hosted a carnival of flora and fauna, including hundreds of species of birds and dozens of mammals and reptiles, amphibians and fish (including the endangered Yaqui chub and Yaqui topminnow and the threatened Yaqui catfish). The waters were depleted throughout the 20th century by human development; the designation of the refuge in 1982 began a significant process of restoration.  

But the refuge was also among the hundreds of miles targeted for the construction of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful wall.” Dozens of environmental and cultural protection statutes were waived. During the first Trump administration, $408 million was earmarked for the area, and crews dug a well adjacent to the refuge to draw water for mixing tons of concrete — a move that damaged the fragile desert wetland biome. Once finished, the wall stopped most cross-border mammal traffic, though it probably had little or no impact on drug smuggling, since it is estimated that more illicit drugs flow through official ports of entry. 

We rattle east along the line, nothing but time to reminisce and reflect on how much has changed in just a few decades. I tell Gary about the time I saw crews building a border fence west of here near the Santa Cruz River, designed with holes big enough to prevent desert windstorms from toppling it over but small enough to prevent any human from getting a grip with their fingers and managing to scale it. When I visited, a swarm of grasshoppers popped nimbly through the holes — undocumented more-than-humans thwarting the human barrier.  

Gary brings up the San Miguel Gate on the Tohono O’odham Nation, which straddles dozens of border miles, an informal crossing where the fence simply ended (the “gate” was symbolic), historically respected by the Border Patrol because of O’odham ceremonial routes and binational Indigenous families. It’s been closed to vehicular traffic for years now, but not by CBP. In a cruel irony, an actual gate was put in place and welded shut by a Mexican landowner on the other side. 

“If we were to glue all the pores on our skin shut, or all the stoma on a plant leaf shut, we would die. So we really need porous borders, because it’s a time-tried way to enrich life rather than strangle it.”

We both fondly remember another informal crossing, the one in Big Bend National Park at Boquillas on the Río Grande, where an old man would ferry you across when the river was low so you could get a cold one on the Mexican side, no Border Patrol in sight. (Denizens of West Texas and fans of Americana may recall the song about it by singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen.) 

The nostalgia makes today’s fence even more painful to behold: At 30 feet high, it cuts across the desert plain for dozens of miles, looking as out of place as the black slab that drives the early hominids to violence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. There is nothing remotely this shape or color anywhere in the desert, a foreign object shanked into the land, irremediably altering it.  

And then, it’s gone. 

We stop and get out of the truck. The most recent monsoon storm flooded the wash the fence straddles, tearing a series of bollard gates off their hinges, essentially blowing the wall wide open. The Army Corps of Engineers designed the gates for such flooding, but they were meant to be opened manually before monsoonseason. At one point during the storm, 290 cubic feet of water per second — about 112,200 gallons every minute — ran north to south, smashing into the wall in a surge that may have reached as high as 25 feet. 

For a scale photo, I ask Gary to stand at the ruins of the wall, his body inches from the Mexican side. The debris line is several feet above his head. A few yards away there is a Border Patrol surveillance tower.

I say to Gary, “The Border Patrol’s gotta show up any minute.” 

They never show up. 

For those few moments, Gary and I share a glimpse into the past before the wall. And into the future, when all hominid barriers are swept away by time.  

THERE ARE SO MANY GARYS. The MacArthur “genius award”-winning  ethnobotanist who was on the leading edge of transforming the field by marrying “objective” science with social witness and accompaniment — the practice, inspired by Catholic social teaching, of simply showing up and being of service if and when you were needed — in Indigenous communities. The scholar and activist of the Arizona and Sonora Borderlands on which he’s worked and lived for half a century. Gary, co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, a pioneering arid lands seedbank. Spirit-quest Gary, member of the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans, inspired by St. Francis of Assisi’s regard for human and more-than-human holiness and vulnerability. Gary, the prolific writer crossing many borders of genre — scientific articles, narrative nonfiction, poetry — with 36 books to his name (almost all monographs). In these works, he freely roams not just across forms but among places and peoples and more-than-human life: the biological-cultural-spiritual presence of mesquite trees; how and why we tipple the distilled hearts of agaves; a collection of vignettes of American and more-than-American activists, artists and visionaries; a Christian Gospel-oriented guide for farmers and fishers. This summer, he published Water in the Desert, his first true autobiography. The book reads like an attempt to weave all these threads together, a unified field theory braiding matter, history and spirit.  

From the very beginning of his study and witness of the Borderlands as a college student, he has registered loss — of habitat and species, of civil rights, of desert vistas without walls. His very first book, The Desert Smells Like Rain, chronicled the tenuous future of the Tohono O’odham peoples’ millenary dryland-farming traditions. More than four decades later, Water in the Desert documents the radical degradation of the border biome near his home in Patagonia, Arizona. Across his career, he has maintained a consistent tone of Old Testament-like lament leavened by wry humor and an easy way with puns — writing about the rhizomatic relationality of mesquite trees in the desert Southwest, mènage a trois becomes “mènage a tree” — ultimately cycling through grief to finally, and always, arrive at hard-won seeds of renewal and recovery. 

I WANTED TO WRITE THIS STORY in 2021, but I couldn’t write, period. Five years went by, and I only recently started to write again, having cycled through my own losses. Gary, who is a little over a decade older than me, was one of the big reasons that I began writing again. I’ve reached AARP-mailer age, and among the revelations that come with the season is that being an elder doesn’t mean you don’t still need elders older than you to help light the path ahead, even as you increasingly play the elder for those younger than you. 

I am writing, then, of my elder. But Gary is also, especially in the desert West, our elder, for those who care for the land and all that lives on it. 

The writing led me to his house and out on the road, in what began as a journalistic project and has become a deepening mentor- and friendship. Even when I thought I would never write this story, we kept talking. Rather, he stayed in touch with me. I’d be hiking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park (I lived a few blocks away from it for years), foggy breeze whooshing through Monterey cypress boughs (mirroring my depression-soggy brain), and he’d call just to talk about a new book he’d read about the Sanctuary movement, or about folk music or the great thunderstorm that had just blown across the desert. I think that he was quite intentionally accompanying me through my darkness.  

His voice and his texts have been keeping me company for years. The pile of books on my desk, lectures on YouTube, the two of us talking in his Prius (with the peeling “No Border Wall” sticker in cholo-style Old English script along the top edge of the driver’s-side door) as we rolled along southern Arizona roads. Dozens of iPhone shots and videos on my phone, Gary in my laptop journals and in indecipherable reporter’s notebooks. 

To journey alongside Gary is to be in dialogue with the world, to see it up close in landscape and species, in policy and poetry.  

I’M LISTENING TO A RECORDING from a 2021 visit we made to Quitobaquito, a natural spring only a few dozen yards from the border and one of the most sacred sites of the Hia-C’ed O’odham and Tohono O’odham peoples. Like the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, it is a key crossroads, maintained to this day for Indigenous peoples’ historical migratory and ceremonial routes, as well as for desert flora and fauna.

Bulrushes encircled the pond like a reedy picket fence; a couple of old cottonwoods nearby stood taller than anything else in the vicinity except Border Patrol surveillance towers. I’d heard about Trump’s wall here, but nothing prepared me for the juxtaposition of the miraculous spring — the largest such water source for dozens of miles — and the wall, with the same 30-foot-high bollards as at San Bernardino, over 200 miles east as the crow flies. 

Aside from the traffic on Mexican Highway 2 just across the line, things were quiet. Joe Biden was in the White House, and construction of the wall had stopped. Gary and longtime friend and Tohono O’odham leader Austin Nuñez had recently published a manifesto in the New York Times about healing the wounds perpetrated throughout the Borderlands during Trump’s first term:

We must reimagine the landscapes we share with Mexico. The border should not be a line that divides cultures and fragments their desert environment. It is a juncture where two nations connect, where history is shared, where cultures are alive and where a common future must unfold.

We had no idea, of course, that this moment of hope was only a temporary respite. The modest reclamation that took place under Biden would not only be undone in Trump’s second term, but a new wave of violence was coming — preparations for a second wall parallel to the first, an even graver wounding than under Trump I. At the time, we innocently imagined an open-ended recovery.

A lone coot, long pale beak contrasting sharply with his flat-black feathers, chugged across the center of the main pond, indifferent to its human visitors. Rivulets of water that fed the pond created small pools where the endemic and endangered Quitobaquito pupfish, one of the scrappiest desert natives, has adapted to high salinity and water temperatures over 100 degrees. It had also somehow survived border wall construction and the rumbling of Border Patrol vehicles along the Roosevelt Reservation.  

I noticed an obvious, uniform change of color on the bulrushes — lime-green turning to oatmeal about 3 feet above the water line. 

I asked about the groundwater depletion. “They pumped 800,000 gallons per mile of border wall to do the concrete footing,” Gary said, “and this is a fragile aquifer.” The flow from the spring into the pond had been in decline even before the wall, owing to agriculture on the Sonoran side. With record-breaking heat, it reached the second-lowest level in known history.

On the recording, I kept sighing and saying “God!”  

The impacts on the pond correlated with a steady decline in bird population. According to research Gary conducted for a study published in the Journal of Arid Environments, 45 bird species promptly disappeared, although there was at least a temporary gain of 15 others — mostly accidentals like sandpipers and dowitchers migrating from the Gulf of California, adapted to lower water levels and mudflats.

Gary has been visiting this site since the 1970s. The pause in wall construction did not undo the decades of damage that had already been done.  

“See those two cottonwoods there?” Gary pointed at them, green leaves shimmering in the breeze. “There used to be 15, 20 of them. I lowered my son down to the water to have him baptized with a Catholic priest and an Indian medicine man right off that cottonwood there.” Then he pointed at the bones of a collapsed tree. “It died three or four years ago. So, there’s been a complete habitat decline since I did my dissertation here in 1982.”

We returned to the pupfish one more time. I have poor eyesight and didn’t see them clearly when we first walked by the shallow pools in the filtered light of a mesquite thicket. This time, I knelt and caught flashes of iridescence — blues and silvers (males and females). The guppy-like fish was critically endangered before wall construction began, with such a high probability of extinction that Biosphere 2 scooped up a few dozen and introduced them to a stream environment in the “desert biome” at the research center, a sanctuary to perpetuate the species should it disappear from Quitobaquito. 

Gary was carrying a beloved volume of desert verse, his friend Tohono O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda’s Ocean Power. He sat at a peeling, splintered picnic table and wrote a letter to her on the blank pages at the end of the book, saying that he wanted to “speak” to Zepeda from this, her sacred place, where there was no cell reception whatever. He had listened to her talk about her childhood visits to Quitobaquito, and he was grateful for her mentorship on O’odham dialects.   

Zepeda’s poems are tidy, limpid, spare desert verse. Take “Morning Air”:

The early morning air,
enveloped in heavy moisture.
I go outside and it lays on my shoulders.
I go about my business,
carrying the morning air
for the rest of the day.

Which is how desert dwellers, human and more-than-human, survive: The moisture is both material and spiritual. It emerged into the world with the wet breath of creator-god I’itoi from a cave high up on Baboquivari Peak, the fantastic, ruddy, heart-shaped sky island that dominates the Tohono O’odham’s landscape and cosmology. A place where arroyos and tinajas fill during the sudden deluges of summer and the long soaking rains of winter. I visited once by myself and got lost on the mountain — clearly, I was not prepared, or welcome. Decades ago, Gary, already years into his work alongside the “people of the desert” (the literal translation of “Tohono O’odham”),  hiked up to I’itoi’s cave with young O’odham pilgrims. In The Desert Smells Like Rain, he described the offerings in this emergence place, the rosaries and gum and cigarettes and a multitude of others hanging in the dimness. The experience prompted this reflection: 

There is always something hidden in this world, that you can’t just realize from the outside. You need to make contact with it now and then, to nod your head in knowing, to receive its blessing.  

In a landscape of loss and grief, this contact means holding the spirit of what came before, what remains of what is even now being lost, and what will be — perhaps even what will be again, reborn from drought, fire or flood, from steel slashing through the desert. 

The healing must be both a science and an art. A policy and a prayer, a poem.

Sacred activism.  

THE FIRST WHISPER OF MY DIALOGUE with Gary took place long before I met him, sometime in the 1990s when I first read The Desert Smells Like Rain, considered a classic in arid- and Borderlands ethnography and botany. The book opens with the blessing of a summer monsoon shower on the Tohono O’odham Nation; a young Native boy made the poetic remark that became the title, a reference to the fragrance released when raindrops activate the resins on creosote leaves. The nation’s traditional lands stretch along and beyond a border that was established in 1853, meaning that the frontier, 173 years old, has been around for less than 2% of the 10,000 years the O’odham and their ancestors have made the Sonoran Desert their home.

As is the case with many border scribes, Gary is not native to the region. Like so many other artists and thinkers, he came West to look for himself in a world of overlapping cultures, with its tensions and syntheses. The Borderlands have been geopolitically constituted on land that is itself a waystation, migratory to its essence in human and more-than-human terms, a place of transitions reaching back into deep time.

Gary grew up on the Indiana Dunes, an oasis of aridity on the edge of Lake Michigan, with an Irish Catholic mother, Lebanese American father and a larger paternal extended family. His attraction to the deserts of the American Southwest can be traced to the dunes of his youth and to his relatives’ roots in the arid lands between Lebanon, Syria and Israel. 

I was born in Southern California to an immigrant mother from El Salvador and a Mexican American father whose parents had roots in the arid North of Mexico; between my parents, a riparian desert. That is what Gary and I share: borders, and a ceaseless desire to cross them, as well as being beaten back by them, laughing at their absurdity, shouting at them till our voices are hoarse, despairing them, contemplating them, kneeling in prayer before them, mourning their terrible cost: the border dead, both human — at least 10,000 lives lost since 1994 on what the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration calls the “deadliest land crossing in the world” — and more-than-human.  

IN 2023, I TOOK ANOTHER ROAD TRIP with Gary, this time to the Sonoran coast on the Gulf of California, a profound origin point for him; he arrived at these traditional lands as a tender undergraduate at Prescott College, which has maintained a presence here since 1969. Getting there was not easy. On the way down, we visited with his friend Wenceslao Monroy, a well-known community leader (he has hosted delegations of Zapatistas from Chiapas) who told a harrowing tale of a close call with cartel violence that forced him to flee his family’s historic ranch for weeks. Later, Gary spent too long chatting with students at the Universidad de Sonora herbarium in Hermosillo, because that is when Gary is most Gary — with those hungry for knowledge and dialogue. Then it was night on an unlit two-lane desert road that, it seemed, only we were foolish enough to be driving. Not a car but ours for miles. But we made it safely to the shore, where the next day he grabbed a bunch of glistening eelgrass as a documentary film crew’s high-definition cameras rolled to capture his authority on what celebrity chefs have declared the new superfood — “sea rice,” the grain that sprouts from the grass. 

The attention was welcome for the Comcáac, an Indigenous people so remote from centralized Mexican government authority that they were tenacious about cultivating traditional identity and vulnerable to Mexico’s simultaneous romanticization of Indigenous history and disregard for the welfare of contemporary Indigenous communities.  

Here, in one of the communities Gary has visited for decades, the inevitable question about his positioning arose. It’s a question that I’ve been asking myself since I arrived on the borders of Indigeneity as a young writer. Fifty years ago, anthropology was still a field contaminated by a mostly unconscious colonial gaze, the inheritance of centuries of scribes recording Native geographies and identities in service of military conquest, economic exploitation and, at least according to the Church, spiritual salvation. Then, while Gary was in graduate school, Palestinian scholar and Columbia professor Edward Said published his groundbreaking Orientalism, exposing that gaze. The immediate result was a critique of the ethics of representation and increased scrutiny of “objective” research for the implicit imbalances of power between who was doing the gazing and who was being gazed upon. That critique did not actually begin with Said; it’s as old as the resistance to colonialism itself, and it is ongoing. 

To journey alongside Gary is to be in dialogue with the world, to see it up close in landscape and species, in policy and poetry.

If Gary were a tenderfoot grad student today wanting to research the Indigenous cultures of the Sonoran Desert, he would most likely have been questioned — by academic advisors, by Indigenous leaders — about the nature of his relationships with his research participants (previously referred to as “research subjects”). Would his mixed parentage (he refers to himself as Arab American) have been perceived as a more “horizontal” relationship, partially relieving him of colonial baggage? 

Today, Gary says he wouldn’t feel comfortable in such positions — that is, as an outsider with the privilege to come and go as they please, and with the power of representing Indigenous “others” in writing.  

Gary and I stand at a generational crossroads, witnesses to the changing of the guard. Slightly older than me, he was raised under the academic ancien régime of mostly white male researchers working in Indigenous communities. But we both were part of the post-Orientalism conversation that celebrated the border as the Borderlands, both a physical place and a cultural space, a site of violence and suffering but also of the intentional mixing and matching of languages and aesthetics — the theory and practice of building a third country, a distinct and transcendent region, as an act of creative and spiritual survival.  

But that moment too has passed, and in recent decades there has been a stricter defining of cultural boundaries, particularly between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, following the ideal and practice of Native sovereignty.

None of this changes the reality of Gary’s relationships with the Tohono O’odham or the Comcáac, certainly not in the social sense, which I witnessed on many occasions, nor in his body of research, nor in his allyship on urgencies like the border wall or the preservation of arid lands and seeds. What has changed is that the Indigenous communities of the Americas, North and South, have steadily taken over the means of representation themselves. 

This was clearly on display with the Comcáac. We spent time with Alberto Mellado Moreno, a brilliant young scholar who has authored a quartet of history books and built a healthy social media presence, posting spectacular drone shots of the Comcáac landscape. He is now an elected official in the community.  With a population that had dwindled to about 130 at the turn of the 20th century, the Comcáac have rebounded to over 1,000 today.

One afternoon on a sandy bluff above the green, eelgrass-bearing sea, the serrated mass of Tiburón Island heaving from the water only a few miles to the west, Mellado regaled us with the Comcáac origin story. In his essay “Heeno,” which Gary published in the anthology The Nature of Desert Nature, Mellado personifies the desert, which becomes the “skin” of creation: “… for I have grown a skin of sand and stone, of plants with spines and thorns, of leaflets small but fragrant, of miniscule pools of water that sparkle like gems in the sun.” 

So entwined is the story of the Comcáac with the story of the land that Mellado’s desert “skin” cannot imagine itself surviving without the Indigenous presence: “I knew that as long as they continued to live, I too would exist.” 

Which positions the Comcáac as guardians of that skin and summons the rest of us to follow their example — a call that came to me from Mellado through Gary. This is one of Gary’s essential roles: an interlocutor passing on the knowledge, continuing the conversation between those who were here before and still are, and those of us who, relative to the human history in the area, arrived just yesterday. 

MARCH 2026. NOW I’M HIKING with Gary in the Mojave. My elder has a steady, sure-footed pace. This morning, he was up at 6 a.m. for a 20-minute run.     

We’re staying at the 29 Palms Inn, one of the last of the old-school pre-Airbnb accommodations left in California’s high desert, with adobe cabins dating as far back as the 1920s. Joshua Tree National Park will be overrun by spring break legions today, so I suggest the little-visited Covington Flats area, which has fewer granite boulders, a wider vista and a nearly 30-year-old burn area that provides a research window into a key climate impact in arid lands: the desert on fire. 

It’s been a strange water year in the Mojave. Soaking rains arrived in November and December, followed by an unseasonably warm and dry January; modest rains finally returned in February, all of which caused the flora to dance out of rhythm. When I visited in early January, there’d already been enough rain and sun for the Joshua trees to prematurely sprout their big creamy blossoms; in the dense stand of trees along the road to Covington, it looked like corn kernels had popped in the spikey green bowl of a gentle draw. 

We park several miles in, no other cars in sight. 

A sweeping view — the land descends steeply southward and then rears up again; a rock-walled canyon opens to the east, while modest, mildly formed peaks rise to the west. 

Back in 1999, the Juniper Complex Fire burned nearly 14,000 acres, a finger of it coming within a few hundred yards of the community where I lived at the time. I visited Covington Flats in the immediate aftermath of the fire and, with zero scientific authority, believed that the desert I knew and loved was forever lost. 

Humans bear losses with the rituals we’ve developed in grief, both an intimate and communal journey. The more-than-human world suffers losses, too, and its corollary to grief is adaptation, which is both species-specific and “communal” — no species is an island. On our walks, Gary is constantly pointing more to cooperation than competition among organic life, noting a mature piñon pine “nursing” a Joshua tree seedling with its shade. 

The fire did not kill the desert. 

You can hear our footsteps crunching the pebbly earth on my iPhone recordings, the wonder in our voices. The Joshua blossoms, the carpet of brittlebush shoots with their yellow daisy-like flowers across the loamy plain, desert bluebells nodding their otherworldly cobalt hue, evening primrose loving the berms of the road, its flowers starting to turn inward mid-morning for protection as the early spring sun silvers the land. 

He has the look of a farmer, which he is, and oh, his eyes: deep gray-blue pools that shimmer as he talks to you in a gentle rasp.

The devastation from decades ago is most apparent in the charred skeletons of old junipers. The Joshua trees that burned are long gone; fire consumes their fibrous internal structure more rapidly and completely. But what was lost to the fire mulched the soil with potash that is helping baby yuccas, junipers and piñons to emerge. In any event, the damage was not uniform. Here, a nearly barren hillside; there, a stand of centuries-old piñon in a gully the fire leapt over. 

I notice a silky-silvery cloud in a wolfberry bush, which my untrained eyes initially mistake for a catclaw. A spider web, I wonder?  

No, Gary corrects me, it’s a caterpillar tent. It hangs like cotton candy, woven around the bush’s intricate branching. Now I realize that there are at least a dozen tents aglow in the wolfberry patch. Taking a close-up look, I see hundreds of wriggling caterpillars inside each cloud. Within days, says Gary, they will become buff-colored moths floating amid the green of spring. Once out of the chrysalis, they feed, mate and die within a week, urging the next generation on by laying eggs on the very same twigs where they were born. 

The caterpillars jog my memory. 

I tell Gary about an essay titled “The Desert” by Aldous Huxley that I read years ago. (Gary immediately remembers it; I think he’s read every essay ever written about the desert.)

The most arresting scene in the piece is of Huxley walking out into the Mojave, where he lived during the 1940s, and seeing a carpet of caterpillars, the same species we’re looking at now. Huxley juxtaposes their wild persistence with a visit to a nearby military research site, where he ruminates on the atomic bomb and how it heralded annihilation at the dawn of the Cold War.    

Forget humans and their “common sense,” Huxley advises. We’ve had tens of thousands of years developing language and its symbols, and look where it’s gotten us. Look to the caterpillars, Huxley urges: “To intelligence that operates on the organic level.” There’s something more: “And beyond survival,” he writes, “is transfiguration; beyond and including animal grace is the grace of that other not-self, of which the desert silence and the desert emptiness are the most expressive symbols.”

Maybe when we are our “not-selves,” like the caterpillars, we’ll find a way out of the climate crisis we face today, every bit as dangerous as the nuclear shadow Huxley lived under.  

As Gary and I stand amid the wriggling mini-accordions inside the glowing silk of their tents, I remember the grasshoppers popping through the fence years ago and think of the jaguar that’s been caught on wildlife cameras crossing the border not far from Gary’s house. I think, too, of the human migrants in both his and my family lineages, of the migrants who even today arrive at the wall and dream of ways across it. 

Mingling the ideas of both Gary and Comcáac chronicler Alberto Mellado Moreno, there is the skin of our bodies and the “skin” of the land and the necessarily porous border between them. The same could be said regarding the porousness between the skins of distinct cultures and, for that matter, in the blending of academic disciplines and literary genres: Growth happens when difference is allowed to freely roam. At a time when borders bring so much harm to the human and more-than-human realms, Gary Paul Nabhan stands steady at the line and beckons us to cross it.  

“Morning Air” from Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert © 1995 Ofelia Zepeda. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the September 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Desert Sage.”

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On the road with a desert sage

by Rubén Martínez, High Country News
September 4, 2026

<h1>On the road with a desert sage</h1> <p class="byline">by Rubén Martínez, High Country News <br />September 4, 2026</p> <p class="has-drop-cap"><strong>October 2021: </strong>I am driving with Gary Paul Nabhan along the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Arizona, the botanist, activist and author’s natural habitat. For 50 years, the Borderlands have been his research site and laboratory, his scholarly and artistic setting, his home — he lives a mere 22 miles from the Nogales port of entry — and also his heart. It is the same region I’ve been drawn to most of my life, and it is Gary who has taught me that the border is much more than a line in the desert sand. </p> <p>Gary has been visiting, living on and crossing the border since the early 1970s. I’ve followed in his footsteps, witness of the human and more-than-human drama on the line since 1984. Today, he is wearing his typical field uniform: scrunched-up khaki baseball cap, faded T-shirt calling upon peasants to “rise up” in Spanish, a small, simple wooden cross hanging from his neck. Fulsome gray whiskers flow from his chin, a pleasant belly hangs slightly over his worn loose jeans. He has the look of a farmer, which he is, and oh, his eyes: deep gray-blue pools that shimmer as he talks to you in a gentle rasp.&nbsp;</p> <p>“It’s OK to have boundaries in our lives,” Gary once told me, apropos of the line that fascinates us both. “But if we were to glue all the pores on our skin shut, or all the stoma on a plant leaf shut, we would die. So we really need porous borders, because it’s a time-tried way to enrich life rather than strangle it.”</p> <p>We are driving along the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide easement along 632 miles of the border that was established for security purposes by Theodore Roosevelt in 1907. We are on the U.S. side, in the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, a vibrant ecotone between desert scrub and grasslands in the Chihuahuan Desert. Roosevelt could hardly have imagined what it has become today: a militarized cyborg desert, crawling with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents in trucks, on ATVs and horseback, operating a vast network of surveillance towers and drones, glaring at night with spectacular carceral lighting.&nbsp;</p> <p>Here is the wall: 30-foot-high rust-hued bollards carved into the impossibly cerulean blue of an early autumn desert sky. We plow through pools of muddy water from late-season monsoon thunderstorms. I want to keep my eyes fixed on the view to the left, our north, to the beautiful ecological contradiction of the refuge: the riparian desert. Sprays of sacaton grass bend in the breeze, stands of creosote, that most stoic desert species, offer up a swatch of yellow flowering; nearby, cottonwoods rise thick-trunked, light sparkling on their fluttering leaves. &nbsp;</p> <p>Springs, creeks and ephemeral draws historically sustained wetlands here that hosted a carnival of flora and fauna, including hundreds of species of birds and dozens of mammals and reptiles, amphibians and fish (including the endangered Yaqui chub and Yaqui topminnow and the threatened Yaqui catfish). The waters were depleted throughout the 20th century by human development; the designation of the refuge in 1982 began a significant process of restoration. &nbsp;</p> <!-- RTT removed image (346643) --> <p>But the refuge was also among the hundreds of miles targeted for the construction of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful wall.” Dozens of environmental and cultural protection statutes were waived. During the first Trump administration, $408 million was earmarked for the area, and crews dug a well adjacent to the refuge to draw water for mixing tons of concrete — a move that damaged the fragile desert wetland biome. Once finished, the wall stopped most cross-border mammal traffic, though it probably had little or no impact on drug smuggling, since it is estimated that more illicit drugs flow through official ports of entry.&nbsp;</p> <p>We rattle east along the line, nothing but time to reminisce and reflect on how much has changed in just a few decades. I tell Gary about the time I saw crews building a border fence west of here near the Santa Cruz River, designed with holes big enough to prevent desert windstorms from toppling it over but small enough to prevent any human from getting a grip with their fingers and managing to scale it. When I visited, a swarm of grasshoppers popped nimbly through the holes — undocumented more-than-humans thwarting the human barrier. &nbsp;</p> <p>Gary brings up the San Miguel Gate on the Tohono O’odham Nation, which straddles dozens of border miles, an informal crossing where the fence simply ended (the “gate” was symbolic), historically respected by the Border Patrol because of O’odham ceremonial routes and binational Indigenous families. It’s been closed to vehicular traffic for years now, but not by CBP. In a cruel irony, an actual gate was put in place and welded shut by a Mexican landowner on the other side.&nbsp;</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> <p>“If we were to glue all the pores on our skin shut, or all the stoma on a plant leaf shut, we would die. So we really need porous borders, because it’s a time-tried way to enrich life rather than strangle it.”</p> </blockquote> <p>We both fondly remember another informal crossing, the one in Big Bend National Park at Boquillas on the Río Grande, where an old man would ferry you across when the river was low so you could get a cold one on the Mexican side, no Border Patrol in sight. (Denizens of West Texas and fans of Americana may recall the song about it by singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen.)&nbsp;</p> <p>The nostalgia makes today’s fence even more painful to behold: At 30 feet high, it cuts across the desert plain for dozens of miles, looking as out of place as the black slab that drives the early hominids to violence in <em>2001: A Space Odyssey</em>. There is nothing remotely this shape or color anywhere in the desert, a foreign object shanked into the land, irremediably altering it. &nbsp;</p> <p>And then, it’s gone.&nbsp;</p> <p>We stop and get out of the truck. The most recent monsoon storm flooded the wash the fence straddles, tearing a series of bollard gates off their hinges, essentially blowing the wall wide open. The Army Corps of Engineers designed the gates for such flooding, but they were meant to be opened manually <em>before</em> monsoonseason. At one point during the storm, 290 cubic feet of water per second — about 112,200 gallons every minute — ran north to south, smashing into the wall in a surge that may have reached as high as 25 feet.&nbsp;</p> <p>For a scale photo, I ask Gary to stand at the ruins of the wall, his body inches from the Mexican side. The debris line is several feet above his head. A few yards away there is a Border Patrol surveillance tower.</p> <p>I say to Gary, “The Border Patrol’s gotta show up any minute.”&nbsp;</p> <p>They never show up.&nbsp;</p> <p>For those few moments, Gary and I share a glimpse into the past before the wall. And into the future, when all hominid barriers are swept away by time. &nbsp;</p> <figure class="wp-block-gallery alignwide has-nested-images columns-2 is-cropped"> <!-- RTT removed image (346645) --> <!-- RTT removed image (346644) --> </figure> <!-- RTT removed image (346646) --> <p><strong>THERE ARE SO MANY GARYS.</strong> The MacArthur “genius award”-winning&nbsp; ethnobotanist who was on the leading edge of transforming the field by marrying “objective” science with social witness and accompaniment — the practice, inspired by Catholic social teaching, of simply showing up and being of service if and when you were needed — in Indigenous communities. The scholar and activist of the Arizona and Sonora Borderlands on which he’s worked and lived for half a century. Gary, co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, a pioneering arid lands seedbank. Spirit-quest Gary, member of the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans, inspired by St. Francis of Assisi’s regard for human and more-than-human holiness and vulnerability. Gary, the prolific writer crossing many borders of genre — scientific articles, narrative nonfiction, poetry — with 36 books to his name (almost all monographs). In these works, he freely roams not just across forms but among places and peoples and more-than-human life: the biological-cultural-spiritual presence of mesquite trees; how and why we tipple the distilled hearts of agaves; a collection of vignettes of American and more-than-American activists, artists and visionaries; a Christian Gospel-oriented guide for farmers and fishers. This summer, he published <em>Water in the Desert</em>, his first true autobiography. The book reads like an attempt to weave all these threads together, a unified field theory braiding matter, history and spirit. &nbsp;</p> <p>From the very beginning of his study and witness of the Borderlands as a college student, he has registered loss — of habitat and species, of civil rights, of desert vistas without walls. His very first book, <em>The Desert Smells Like Rain</em>, chronicled the tenuous future of the Tohono O’odham peoples’ millenary dryland-farming traditions. More than four decades later, <em>Water in the Desert</em> documents the radical degradation of the border biome near his home in Patagonia, Arizona. Across his career, he has maintained a consistent tone of Old Testament-like lament leavened by wry humor and an easy way with puns — writing about the rhizomatic relationality of mesquite trees in the desert Southwest, <em>mènage a trois</em> becomes “mènage a tree” — ultimately cycling through grief to finally, and always, arrive at hard-won seeds of renewal and recovery.&nbsp;</p> <!-- RTT removed image (346648) --> <p><strong>I WANTED TO WRITE THIS STORY</strong><em><strong> </strong></em>in 2021, but I couldn’t write, period. Five years went by, and I only recently started to write again, having cycled through my own losses. Gary, who is a little over a decade older than me, was one of the big reasons that I began writing again. I’ve reached AARP-mailer age, and among the revelations that come with the season is that being an elder doesn’t mean you don’t still need elders older than you to help light the path ahead, even as you increasingly play the elder for those younger than you.&nbsp;</p> <p>I am writing, then, of my elder. But Gary is also, especially in the desert West, <em>our</em> elder, for those who care for the land and all that lives on it.&nbsp;</p> <p>The writing led me to his house and out on the road, in what began as a journalistic project and has become a deepening mentor- and friendship. Even when I thought I would never write this story, we kept talking. Rather, <em>he</em> stayed in touch with <em>me</em>. I’d be hiking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park (I lived a few blocks away from it for years), foggy breeze whooshing through Monterey cypress boughs (mirroring my depression-soggy brain), and he’d call just to talk about a new book he’d read about the Sanctuary movement, or about folk music or the great thunderstorm that had just blown across the desert. I think that he was quite intentionally accompanying me through my darkness. &nbsp;</p> <p>His voice and his texts have been keeping me company for years. The pile of books on my desk, lectures on YouTube, the two of us talking in his Prius (with the peeling “No Border Wall” sticker in cholo-style Old English script along the top edge of the driver’s-side door) as we rolled along southern Arizona roads. Dozens of iPhone shots and videos on my phone, Gary in my laptop journals and in indecipherable reporter’s notebooks.&nbsp;</p> <p>To journey alongside Gary is to be in dialogue with the world, to see it up close in landscape and species, in policy and poetry. &nbsp;</p> <!-- RTT removed image (346650) --> <p><strong>I’M LISTENING TO A RECORDING</strong> from a 2021 visit we made to Quitobaquito, a natural spring only a few dozen yards from the border and one of the most sacred sites of the Hia-C’ed O’odham and Tohono O’odham peoples. Like the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, it is a key crossroads, maintained to this day for Indigenous peoples’ historical migratory and ceremonial routes, as well as for desert flora and fauna.</p> <p>Bulrushes encircled the pond like a reedy picket fence; a couple of old cottonwoods nearby stood taller than anything else in the vicinity except Border Patrol surveillance towers. I’d heard about Trump’s wall here, but nothing prepared me for the juxtaposition of the miraculous spring — the largest such water source for dozens of miles — and the wall, with the same 30-foot-high bollards as at San Bernardino, over 200 miles east as the crow flies.&nbsp;</p> <p>Aside from the traffic on Mexican Highway 2 just across the line, things were quiet. Joe Biden was in the White House, and construction of the wall had stopped. Gary and longtime friend and Tohono O’odham leader Austin Nuñez had recently published a manifesto in the <em>New York Times</em> about healing the wounds perpetrated throughout the Borderlands during Trump’s first term:</p> <p>We must reimagine the landscapes we share with Mexico. The border should not be a line that divides cultures and fragments their desert environment. It is a juncture where two nations connect, where history is shared, where cultures are alive and where a common future must unfold.</p> <p>We had no idea, of course, that this moment of hope was only a temporary respite. The modest reclamation that took place under Biden would not only be undone in Trump’s second term, but a new wave of violence was coming — preparations for a <em>second</em> wall parallel to the first, an even graver wounding than under Trump I. At the time, we innocently imagined an open-ended recovery.</p> <p>A lone coot, long pale beak contrasting sharply with his flat-black feathers, chugged across the center of the main pond, indifferent to its human visitors. Rivulets of water that fed the pond created small pools where the endemic and endangered Quitobaquito pupfish, one of the scrappiest desert natives, has adapted to high salinity and water temperatures over 100 degrees. It had also somehow survived border wall construction and the rumbling of Border Patrol vehicles along the Roosevelt Reservation. &nbsp;</p> <!-- RTT removed image (346651) --> <p>I noticed an obvious, uniform change of color on the bulrushes — lime-green turning to oatmeal about 3 feet above the water line.&nbsp;</p> <p>I asked about the groundwater depletion. “They pumped 800,000 gallons per mile of border wall to do the concrete footing,” Gary said, “and this is a fragile aquifer.” The flow from the spring into the pond had been in decline even before the wall, owing to agriculture on the Sonoran side. With record-breaking heat, it reached the second-lowest level in known history.</p> <p>On the recording, I kept sighing and saying “God!” &nbsp;</p> <p>The impacts on the pond correlated with a steady decline in bird population. According to research Gary conducted for a study published in the <em>Journal of Arid Environments</em>, 45 bird species promptly disappeared, although there was at least a temporary gain of 15 others — mostly accidentals like sandpipers and dowitchers migrating from the Gulf of California, adapted to lower water levels and mudflats.</p> <p>Gary has been visiting this site since the 1970s. The pause in wall construction did not undo the decades of damage that had already been done. &nbsp;</p> <p>“See those two cottonwoods there?” Gary pointed at them, green leaves shimmering in the breeze. “There used to be 15, 20 of them. I lowered my son down to the water to have him baptized with a Catholic priest and an Indian medicine man right off that cottonwood there.” Then he pointed at the bones of a collapsed tree. “It died three or four years ago. So, there’s been a complete habitat decline since I did my dissertation here in 1982.”</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed alignright is-type-wp-embed is-provider-high-country-news wp-block-embed-high-country-news"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-national-park-services-efforts-to-protect-quitobaquito-springs-almost-destroyed-it/ </div> </figure> <p>We returned to the pupfish one more time. I have poor eyesight and didn’t see them clearly when we first walked by the shallow pools in the filtered light of a mesquite thicket. This time, I knelt and caught flashes of iridescence — blues and silvers (males and females). The guppy-like fish was critically endangered before wall construction began, with such a high probability of extinction that Biosphere 2 scooped up a few dozen and introduced them to a stream environment in the “desert biome” at the research center, a sanctuary to perpetuate the species should it disappear from Quitobaquito.&nbsp;</p> <p>Gary was carrying a beloved volume of desert verse, his friend Tohono O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda’s <em>Ocean Power</em>. He sat at a peeling, splintered picnic table and wrote a letter to her on the blank pages at the end of the book, saying that he wanted to “speak” to Zepeda from this, her sacred place, where there was no cell reception whatever. He had listened to her talk about her childhood visits to Quitobaquito, and he was grateful for her mentorship on O’odham dialects.&nbsp; &nbsp;</p> <p>Zepeda’s poems are tidy, limpid, spare desert verse. Take “Morning Air”:</p> <p>The early morning air,<br />enveloped in heavy moisture.<br />I go outside and it lays on my shoulders.<br />I go about my business,<br />carrying the morning air<br />for the rest of the day.</p> <p>Which is how desert dwellers, human and more-than-human, survive: The moisture is both material and spiritual. It emerged into the world with the wet breath of creator-god I’itoi from a cave high up on Baboquivari Peak, the fantastic, ruddy, heart-shaped sky island that dominates the Tohono O’odham’s landscape and cosmology. A place where arroyos and tinajas fill during the sudden deluges of summer and the long soaking rains of winter. I visited once by myself and got lost on the mountain — clearly, I was not prepared, or welcome. Decades ago, Gary, already years into his work alongside the “people of the desert” (the literal translation of “Tohono O’odham”),&nbsp; hiked up to I’itoi’s cave with young O’odham pilgrims. In <em>The Desert Smells Like Rain</em>, he described the offerings in this emergence place, the rosaries and gum and cigarettes and a multitude of others hanging in the dimness. The experience prompted this reflection:&nbsp;</p> <p>There is always something hidden in this world, that you can’t just realize from the outside. You need to make contact with it now and then, to nod your head in knowing, to receive its blessing. &nbsp;</p> <p>In a landscape of loss and grief, this contact means holding the spirit of what came before, what remains of what is even now being lost, and what will be — perhaps even <em>what will be again</em>, reborn from drought, fire or flood, from steel slashing through the desert.&nbsp;</p> <p>The healing must be both a science and an art. A policy and a prayer, a poem.</p> <p>Sacred activism. &nbsp;</p> <!-- RTT removed image (346649) --> <p><strong>THE FIRST WHISPER OF MY DIALOGUE</strong> with Gary took place long before I met him, sometime in the 1990s when I first read <em>The Desert Smells Like Rain</em>, considered a classic in arid- and Borderlands ethnography and botany. The book opens with the blessing of a summer monsoon shower on the Tohono O’odham Nation; a young Native boy made the poetic remark that became the title, a reference to the fragrance released when raindrops activate the resins on creosote leaves. The nation’s traditional lands stretch along and beyond a border that was established in 1853, meaning that the frontier, 173 years old, has been around for less than 2% of the 10,000 years the O’odham and their ancestors have made the Sonoran Desert their home.</p> <p>As is the case with many border scribes, Gary is not native to the region. Like so many other artists and thinkers, he came West to look for himself in a world of overlapping cultures, with its tensions and syntheses. The Borderlands have been geopolitically constituted on land that is itself a waystation, migratory to its essence in human and more-than-human terms, a place of transitions reaching back into deep time.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed alignright is-type-wp-embed is-provider-high-country-news wp-block-embed-high-country-news"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://www.hcn.org/issues/56-4/a-border-need-not-be-a-wall/ </div> </figure> <p>Gary grew up on the Indiana Dunes, an oasis of aridity on the edge of Lake Michigan, with an Irish Catholic mother, Lebanese American father and a larger paternal extended family. His attraction to the deserts of the American Southwest can be traced to the dunes of his youth and to his relatives’ roots in the arid lands between Lebanon, Syria and Israel.&nbsp;</p> <p>I was born in Southern California to an immigrant mother from El Salvador and a Mexican American father whose parents had roots in the arid North of Mexico; between my parents, a riparian desert. That is what Gary and I share: borders, and a ceaseless desire to cross them, as well as being beaten back by them, laughing at their absurdity, shouting at them till our voices are hoarse, despairing them, contemplating them, kneeling in prayer before them, mourning their terrible cost: the border dead, both human — at least 10,000 lives lost since 1994 on what the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration calls the “deadliest land crossing in the world” — and more-than-human. &nbsp;</p> <figure class="wp-block-gallery alignwide has-nested-images columns-default is-cropped"> <!-- RTT removed image (346652) --> <!-- RTT removed image (346653) --> </figure> <!-- RTT removed image (346654) --> <p class="has-normal-font-size"><strong>IN 2023, I TOOK ANOTHER ROAD TRIP</strong> with Gary, this time to the Sonoran coast on the Gulf of California, a profound origin point for him; he arrived at these traditional lands as a tender undergraduate at Prescott College, which has maintained a presence here since 1969. Getting there was not easy. On the way down, we visited with his friend Wenceslao Monroy, a well-known community leader (he has hosted delegations of Zapatistas from Chiapas) who told a harrowing tale of a close call with cartel violence that forced him to flee his family’s historic ranch for weeks. Later, Gary spent too long chatting with students at the Universidad de Sonora herbarium in Hermosillo, because that is when Gary is most Gary — with those hungry for knowledge and dialogue. Then it was night on an unlit two-lane desert road that, it seemed, only we were foolish enough to be driving. Not a car but ours for miles. But we made it safely to the shore, where the next day he grabbed a bunch of glistening eelgrass as a documentary film crew’s high-definition cameras rolled to capture his authority on what celebrity chefs have declared the new superfood — “sea rice,” the grain that sprouts from the grass.&nbsp;</p> <p>The attention was welcome for the Comcáac, an Indigenous people so remote from centralized Mexican government authority that they were tenacious about cultivating traditional identity and vulnerable to Mexico’s simultaneous romanticization of Indigenous history and disregard for the welfare of contemporary Indigenous communities. &nbsp;</p> <p>Here, in one of the communities Gary has visited for decades, the inevitable question about his positioning arose. It’s a question that I’ve been asking myself since I arrived on the borders of Indigeneity as a young writer. Fifty years ago, anthropology was still a field contaminated by a mostly unconscious colonial gaze, the inheritance of centuries of scribes recording Native geographies and identities in service of military conquest, economic exploitation and, at least according to the Church, spiritual salvation. Then, while Gary was in graduate school, Palestinian scholar and Columbia professor Edward Said published his groundbreaking <em>Orientalism</em>, exposing that gaze. The immediate result was a critique of the ethics of representation and increased scrutiny of “objective” research for the implicit imbalances of power between who was doing the gazing and who was being gazed upon. That critique did not actually begin with Said; it’s as old as the resistance to colonialism itself, and it is ongoing.&nbsp;</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> <p>To journey alongside Gary is to be in dialogue with the world, to see it&nbsp;up close in landscape and species,&nbsp;in policy and poetry.</p> </blockquote> <p>If Gary were a tenderfoot grad student today wanting to research the Indigenous cultures of the Sonoran Desert, he would most likely have been questioned — by academic advisors, by Indigenous leaders — about the nature of his relationships with his research participants (previously referred to as “research subjects”). Would his mixed parentage (he refers to himself as Arab American) have been perceived as a more “horizontal” relationship, partially relieving him of colonial baggage?&nbsp;</p> <p>Today, Gary says he wouldn’t feel comfortable in such positions — that is, as an outsider with the privilege to come and go as they please, and with the power of representing Indigenous “others” in writing. &nbsp;</p> <p>Gary and I stand at a generational crossroads, witnesses to the changing of the guard. Slightly older than me, he was raised under&nbsp;the academic <em>ancien régime</em> of mostly white male researchers working in Indigenous communities. But we both were part of the post-<em>Orientalism</em> conversation that celebrated the border as the Borderlands, both a physical place and a cultural space, a site of violence and suffering but also of the intentional mixing and matching of languages and aesthetics — the theory and practice of building a third country, a distinct and transcendent region, as an act of creative and spiritual survival. &nbsp;</p> <p>But that moment too has passed, and in recent decades there has been a stricter defining of cultural boundaries, particularly between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, following the ideal and practice of Native sovereignty.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed alignright is-type-wp-embed is-provider-high-country-news wp-block-embed-high-country-news"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://www.hcn.org/issues/50-5/tribal-affairs-how-the-u-s-mexico-border-has-split-the-tohono-oodham/ </div> </figure> <p>None of this changes the reality of Gary’s relationships with the Tohono O’odham or the Comcáac, certainly not in the social sense, which I witnessed on many occasions, nor in his body of research, nor in his allyship on urgencies like the border wall or the preservation of arid lands and seeds. What has changed is that the Indigenous communities of the Americas, North and South, have steadily taken over the means of representation themselves.&nbsp;</p> <p>This was clearly on display with the Comcáac. We spent time with Alberto Mellado Moreno, a brilliant young scholar who has authored a quartet of history books and built a healthy social media presence, posting spectacular drone shots of the Comcáac landscape. He is now an elected official in the community.&nbsp; With a population that had dwindled to about 130 at the turn of the 20th century, the Comcáac have rebounded to over 1,000 today.</p> <p>One afternoon on a sandy bluff above the green, eelgrass-bearing sea, the serrated mass of Tiburón Island heaving from the water only a few miles to the west, Mellado regaled us with the Comcáac origin story. In his essay “Heeno,” which Gary published in the anthology <em>The Nature of Desert Nature,</em> Mellado personifies the desert, which becomes the “skin” of creation: “… for I have grown a skin of sand and stone, of plants with spines and thorns, of leaflets small but fragrant, of miniscule pools of water that sparkle like gems in the sun.”&nbsp;</p> <p>So entwined is the story of the Comcáac with the story of the land that Mellado’s desert “skin” cannot imagine itself surviving without the Indigenous presence: “I knew that as long as they continued to live, I too would exist.”&nbsp;</p> <p>Which positions the Comcáac as guardians of that skin and summons the rest of us to follow their example — a call that came to me from Mellado through Gary. This is one of Gary’s essential roles: an interlocutor passing on the knowledge, continuing the conversation between those who were here before and still are, and those of us who, relative to the human history in the area, arrived just yesterday.&nbsp;</p> <!-- RTT removed image (346655) --> <p><strong>MARCH 2026. NOW I’M HIKING</strong> with Gary in the Mojave. My elder has a steady, sure-footed pace. This morning, he was up at 6 a.m. for a 20-minute run.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;</p> <p>We’re staying at the 29 Palms Inn, one of the last of the old-school pre-Airbnb accommodations left in California’s high desert, with adobe cabins dating as far back as the 1920s. Joshua Tree National Park will be overrun by spring break legions today, so I suggest the little-visited Covington Flats area, which has fewer granite boulders, a wider vista and a nearly 30-year-old burn area that provides a research window into a key climate impact in arid lands: the desert on fire.&nbsp;</p> <p>It’s been a strange water year in the Mojave. Soaking rains arrived in November and December, followed by an unseasonably warm and dry January; modest rains finally returned in February, all of which caused the flora to dance out of rhythm. When I visited in early January, there’d already been enough rain and sun for the Joshua trees to prematurely sprout their big creamy blossoms; in the dense stand of trees along the road to Covington, it looked like corn kernels had popped in the spikey green bowl of a gentle draw.&nbsp;</p> <p>We park several miles in, no other cars in sight.&nbsp;</p> <p>A sweeping view — the land descends steeply southward and then rears up again; a rock-walled canyon opens to the east, while modest, mildly formed peaks rise to the west.&nbsp;</p> <p>Back in 1999, the Juniper Complex Fire burned nearly 14,000 acres, a finger of it coming within a few hundred yards of the community where I lived at the time. I visited Covington Flats in the immediate aftermath of the fire and, with zero scientific authority, believed that the desert I knew and loved was forever lost.&nbsp;</p> <p>Humans bear losses with the rituals we’ve developed in grief, both an intimate and communal journey. The more-than-human world suffers losses, too, and its corollary to grief is adaptation, which is both species-specific and “communal” — no species is an island. On our walks, Gary is constantly pointing more to cooperation than competition among organic life, noting a mature piñon pine “nursing” a Joshua tree seedling with its shade.&nbsp;</p> <p>The fire did not kill the desert.&nbsp;</p> <p>You can hear our footsteps crunching the pebbly earth on my iPhone recordings, the wonder in our voices. The Joshua blossoms, the carpet of brittlebush shoots with their yellow daisy-like flowers across the loamy plain, desert bluebells nodding their otherworldly cobalt hue, evening primrose loving the berms of the road, its flowers starting to turn inward mid-morning for protection as the early spring sun silvers the land.&nbsp;</p> <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"> <p>He has the look of a farmer,&nbsp;which he is, and oh,&nbsp;his eyes: deep gray-blue pools that shimmer as he talks to you&nbsp;in a gentle rasp.</p> </blockquote> <p>The devastation from decades ago is most apparent in the charred skeletons of old junipers. The Joshua trees that burned are long gone; fire consumes their fibrous internal structure more rapidly and completely. But what was lost to the fire mulched the soil with potash that is helping baby yuccas, junipers and piñons to emerge. In any event, the damage was not uniform. Here, a nearly barren hillside; there, a stand of centuries-old piñon in a gully the fire leapt over.&nbsp;</p> <p>I notice a silky-silvery cloud in a wolfberry bush, which my untrained eyes initially mistake for a catclaw. A spider web, I wonder? &nbsp;</p> <p>No, Gary corrects me, it’s a caterpillar tent. It hangs like cotton candy, woven around the bush’s intricate branching. Now I realize that there are at least a dozen tents aglow in the wolfberry patch. Taking a close-up look, I see hundreds of wriggling caterpillars inside each cloud. Within days, says Gary, they will become buff-colored moths floating amid the green of spring. Once out of the chrysalis, they feed, mate and die within a week, urging the next generation on by laying eggs on the very same twigs where they were born.&nbsp;</p> <!-- RTT removed image (346664) --> <p>The caterpillars jog my memory.&nbsp;</p> <p>I tell Gary about an essay titled “The Desert” by Aldous Huxley that I read years ago. (Gary immediately remembers it; I think he’s read every essay ever written about the desert.)</p> <p>The most arresting scene in the piece is of Huxley walking out into the Mojave, where he lived during the 1940s, and seeing a carpet of caterpillars, the same species we’re looking at now. Huxley juxtaposes their wild persistence with a visit to a nearby military research site, where he ruminates on the atomic bomb and how it heralded annihilation at the dawn of the Cold War. &nbsp; &nbsp;</p> <p>Forget humans and their “common sense,” Huxley advises. We’ve had tens of thousands of years developing language and its symbols, and look where it’s gotten us. Look to the caterpillars, Huxley urges: “To intelligence that operates on the organic level.” There’s something more: “And beyond survival,” he writes, “is transfiguration; beyond and including animal grace is the grace of that other not-self, of which the desert silence and the desert emptiness are the most expressive symbols.”</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed alignright is-type-wp-embed is-provider-high-country-news wp-block-embed-high-country-news"> <div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"> https://www.hcn.org/articles/what-sonoran-desert-fungi-are-teaching-scientists/ </div> </figure> <p>Maybe when we are our “not-selves,” like the caterpillars, we’ll find a way out of the climate crisis we face today, every bit as dangerous as the nuclear shadow Huxley lived under. &nbsp;</p> <p>As Gary and I stand amid the wriggling mini-accordions inside the glowing silk of their tents, I remember the grasshoppers popping through the fence years ago and think of the jaguar that’s been caught on wildlife cameras crossing the border not far from Gary’s house. I think, too, of the human migrants in both his and my family lineages, of the migrants who even today arrive at the wall and dream of ways across it.&nbsp;</p> <p>Mingling the ideas of both Gary and Comcáac chronicler Alberto Mellado Moreno, there is the skin of our bodies and the “skin” of the land and the necessarily porous border between them. The same could be said regarding the porousness between the skins of distinct cultures and, for that matter, in the blending of academic disciplines and literary genres: Growth happens when difference is allowed to freely roam. At a time when borders bring so much harm to the human and more-than-human realms, Gary Paul Nabhan stands steady at the line and beckons us to cross it. &nbsp;</p> <!-- RTT removed image (346656) --> <p><em>“Morning Air” from</em> Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert <em>© 1995 Ofelia Zepeda. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.</em></p> <p><em>We welcome reader letters. Email&nbsp;</em>High Country News<em>&nbsp;at&nbsp;</em><a href="mailto:editor@hcn.org"><em>editor@hcn.org</em></a><em>&nbsp;or submit a&nbsp;</em><a href="https://www.hcn.org/feedback/contact-us"><em>letter to the editor</em></a><em>. See our&nbsp;</em><a href="https://www.hcn.org/policies/lte"><em>letters to the editor policy</em></a><em>.</em></p> <p><em>This article appeared in the&nbsp;</em><a href="https://www.hcn.org/issues/58-9/">September 2026&nbsp;print edition of the magazine</a><em>&nbsp;with the headline&nbsp;“Desert Sage.”</em></p></p> <p>This &lt;a target=&quot;_blank&quot; href=&quot;https://www.hcn.org/issues/58-9/on-the-road-with-a-desert-sage/&quot;&gt;article&lt;/a&gt; first appeared on &lt;a target=&quot;_blank&quot; href=&quot;https://www.hcn.org&quot;&gt;High Country News&lt;/a&gt; and is republished here under a &lt;a target=&quot;_blank&quot; href=&quot;https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/&quot;&gt;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;img src=&quot;https://i0.wp.com/www.hcn.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cropped-HCN_Logo-Monogram_White_Sq-2.png?resize=150%2C150&amp;amp;quality=100&amp;amp;ssl=1&quot; style=&quot;width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;&quot;&gt;</p> &lt;img id=&quot;republication-tracker-tool-source&quot; src=&quot;https://www.hcn.org/?republication-pixel=true&amp;post=346640&amp;amp;ga4=G-0NS3WVPPTN&quot; style=&quot;width:1px;height:1px;&quot;&gt;&lt;script&gt; PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: &quot;https://www.hcn.org/issues/58-9/on-the-road-with-a-desert-sage/&quot;, urlref: window.location.href }); } } &lt;/script&gt; &lt;script id=&quot;parsely-cfg&quot; src=&quot;//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hcn.org/p.js&quot;&gt;&lt;/script&gt;

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