Читать книгу Revenge of the Saguaro - Tom Miller - Страница 10
ОглавлениеNOTHING HAPPENS ALL THE TIME IN THE SIERRA DEL PINACATE. This region of extinct volcanoes, lava flows, and sand dunes, covering more than 600 square miles just beyond the Arizona border in Sonora, Mexico, supports little life and less industry. Throughout history, hunters, smugglers, and missionaries have walked the Pinacate floor; writers, artists, and soothsayers have sung its praises. Traces of Indian life from the first millennium have been found just beneath its surface. Astronauts destined for lunar voyages have trained in its craters. Earth must have looked like the Pinacate before man evolved, and I imagine Earth will again resemble this haunting and seemingly infinite land when no one remains to appreciate it.
The Sierra del Pinacate embodies some of North America’s most striking contemporary themes: wilderness exploration, space travel, environment, contraband, nature’s delicate balance, immigration, and solitude. In the course of my occasional wanderings there by foot and truck, I have uncovered shining exemplars of them all.
When I first visited the Pinacate in the mid-1980s, the region fell under the jurisdiction of a Mexican bureaucracy seemingly too stingy to maintain the land’s pristine qualities. It was a staging ground for illegal foot and contraband air traffic, a feature that has changed only somewhat. Longtime Pinacate junkies—for the most part, an agreeably ornery bunch of weathered scientists, adventuresome artists, and hard-core campers—fear that more visitors there will forever damage the delicate landscape and ruin their magnificent and eerie turf. The Pinacate beetle, Eleodes armata, which when threatened stands on its head and gives off a slightly foul odor, provides both the region’s name and perhaps the best perspective from which to view this unfriendly land. Militant naturalist writer Edward Abbey, a man intimate with inhospitable desert land, described the Pinacate terrain as “the bleakest, flattest, hottest, grittiest, grimmest, dreariest, ugliest, most useless, most senseless desert of them all.”
Fernando Lizárraga Tostado, the Pinacate’s one-man ranger-caretaker-policeman-host-naturalist for most of the 1980s, appreciated the capricious relationship man has had to the land here. He worked for a Mexican ministry that appropriated less money for maintaining the Sierra del Pinacate than the U.S. National Park Service allotted for toilet paper in its adjoining land. Back then, Fernando told me, his bosses took away the trailer that housed his family and office, and he seldom got enough gas money to top off the tank in his pickup.
For many years, an American group gave informal aid to ecological causes in Mexico, including efforts to protect the Pinacate. The organization, Friends of ProNatura, gave a camera to Fernando as well as a two-way radio, typewriter, gas money, and data on bighorn sheep that roam back and forth between Mexico and the United States. In 1993, after years of agitation from naturalists, wilderness advocates, and environmentalists from both countries, the Mexican government declared the region a Biosphere Reserve, part of which lies within the Patrimony of Humanity—a UNESCO program that makes funds and preservation possible—in the Upper Gulf of California. Officially, the land is called La Reserva de La Biósfera de El Pinacate y Gran Desierto de Altar, and it includes the Sierra Blanca range to the south and the sand dunes closer to the Golfo de California on the west.
Fernando, in plaid shirt and brown trousers, invited me into his pickup after we met for breakfast in the Mexican border town of Sonoyta. “To use the Pinacate,” he instructed as we headed down the highway, “you must know the rules: The park is not closed to the public, but you have to register with me.” Even then, visitors were restricted to Cerro Colorado and Elegante Crater. Before using the land, visitors had to sign the Pinacate Pledge: “I am aware of the established rules and promise to promote conservation of this marvelous open-air museum.” Under a new system gradually implemented in the late 1990s, Mexico’s Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources has opened a visitor’s center and set up picnic tables at designated campgrounds. With more elaborate and explicit rules regulating noise, pets, hiking, cooking, and alcohol, the guidelines boil down to this: Behave yourselves!
Eventually Fernando and I drove south in his battered, muddy Chevy pickup, down narrow roads lined with clumps of creosote bushes and small paloverde trees. In the western distance, two low volcanoes interrupted the desert flatness. Fernando pointed out the tracks of some bighorn sheep. “The sheep—they’re illegal to capture, but we have hunters who come in here and shoot them for sport. They just want them for trophies. Someday they’ll be in danger of completely disappearing. For many years the hunters had an orgy of blood here.”
Lizárraga pointed to Celaya, a volcanic mountain he boasted was “rich in human history.” A little bit farther on he stopped the truck not far from Celaya and motioned me to follow him on foot. We stood near a slightly shaded area just above a dry natural water tank. “A long time ago an Indian community lived nearby,” he said, referring to the Hiac’ed O’odham, better known as the Sand Papago. More immediate to Fernando, though, was that for decades a Tucson archaeologist named Julian Hayden had come to the Pinacate and knew the contours of its land better than any other human. “I call this spot ‘Julian’s Fireplace.’ He stays here when he comes. He’s here for a day and a half and then he leaves. He talks to the coyotes, Julian does. He has good conversations with them! When Ron Ives died”—Ives was among the first modern scientists to study the region—“Julian tossed his ashes off the top of a hill near here. I want to erect a plaque here marking ‘Julian’s Fireplace.’ We call him ‘El Burro Viejo.’” A picture of the Old Burro hung prominently on the wall of Fernando’s home. After El Burro Viejo died in 1998 at age 87, some of his ashes were spread near Julian’s Fireplace.
Back in the truck we passed some kids kicking around a soccer ball at a few shacks that make up an ejido—a government-designated community on cooperatively tilled land. “They farm alfalfa, wheat, and cotton,” Fernando explained. “At least when there’s rain. And when it comes, it’s sudden. The sky darkens and the ground gets drunk.”
A few miles farther on we saw a couple of ragged men tending some goats. “There’s another ejido here, but it’s just a small operation. That little area”—we drove past a few ramshackle buildings by the road—“that’s Papalote. Illegals cross there up into a big arroyo on the U.S. side. From there they go to La Paloma, a ranch west of Organ Pipe,” the 516-square-mile national monument in Arizona just north of the border.
Poachers arrived soon after Highway 2 was paved in the 1950s. They hunted, they set up clandestine mining operations, and they carted away ironwood trees. The wood made good furniture and even-burning fires—and, they figured, it wasn’t doing anyone any good wasting away in El Gran Desierto. Depleting the Pinacate’s ironwood forest disrupted different food chains, including that of the bighorn sheep, who munch the leaves of ironwood and other trees for survival. When the poaching of ironwood trees by colonists became frequent in the mid-1980s, Fernando once confronted some poachers and switched from affable naturalist to authoritarian cop: Surrender your settlement documents, he reportedly ordered, or you’ll see the army next. The men had Fernando outnumbered and outgunned, but they gave up. At one point he was actually paying squatters not to cut a particularly large ironwood tree.
Just off the highway Fernando spotted tire tracks on a new, unauthorized dirt road heading back to a supposedly abandoned cinder mine. Cinder mining—illegal in the Pinacate—involves processing small cinder particles built up into cones that result from volcanic eruptions. The cinder itself finds commercial use as blocks and other construction material. Fernando checked the tracks, then talked with a tired old man we found sitting beneath a lean-to he had made from the nearest building material, the ribs of dead cactuses. “We have problems with unauthorized trails. I’ll have to call headquarters about this.”
Soon we arrived at the home of Pablo, a spry 71-year-old who lived next to a clandestine cinder mine which operated only a few months of the year. In season, the cinder from Pablo’s mine was trucked north across the border to a construction company in Phoenix. Pablo, the off-season caretaker for the mine’s foreign owner, was at this particular moment fixing his lunch. A grandson 50 years younger lived with him in a spare two-room shack with chickens and a dog underfoot. Pablo was delighted to have company and rambled on about his life and wives.
“Heh-heh, I like the young ones. I’m a robaverde. How do you say that in English?”
“You’re robbing the cradle,” I suggested.
Fernando unloaded two oil drums filled with water, enough to last Pablo until his next visit the following week. As we left, Pablo returned to flipping tortillas above his ironwood-powered stove.
INSPIRING ABSOLUTE FEELINGS IS THE TIMELESS STRENGTH of the Pinacate; few other natural settings can claim this. The first outsider to travel through the Pinacate, Padre Eusebio Kino, established Jesuit missions in the late 17th and 18th centuries throughout the Pimería Alta region, in what are now the states of Sonora and Arizona. The natives, he noted, wore scraps of rabbit fur and ate insects, roots, and fish. Looking southwest from the top of one mountain in the Pinacate range, Kino saw the Golfo de California and Baja California beyond. He is credited with ascertaining that Baja California is a peninsula rather than, as previously imagined, an island.
Authors such as Zane Grey (Desert Gold), Louis L’Amour (Last Stand at Papago Wells), Jeanne Williams (A Lady Bought with Rifles), and Kristin Michaels (Williams’s pen name—The Magic Side of the Moon) have drawn on the starkness of the land and the power of the sun to invent dramas involving cowboys, Indians, and tall, dark strangers.
The two best books to capture the Sierra del Pinacate are old and obscure. The first, Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava, recounts zoologist William T. Hornaday’s remarkable 1907 foray from Tucson into the heart of the Pinacate. The other, Campos de fuego (Fields of Fire), came out in 1928. Written by Gumersindo Esquer, a Sonoyta schoolteacher, it begins as a fairly credible book about a spur-of-the-moment trip into the Pinacate by a bunch of convivial folks but soon develops into a wild sort of psychedelically inspired Mexican science fiction.
Hornaday, who traveled with eight compatriots under the auspices of the Carnegie Desert Botanical Laboratory, commented that although the area was known to a few Indians and Mexicans, “to the reading and thinking world, it was totally unknown.” After traipsing southwesterly to a border crossing, the party made it into Mexico: “To be rain-soaked on our first day in el desierto of Sonora, and thoroughly chilled also, was like being prostrated by heat in Greenland; and wondering what would happen next to us unexpectedly, we thankfully devoured a shameless meal, and crept into the snug comfort of our sleeping bags.”
HORNADAY AND HIS CREW NAMED A CRATER after one of their own, Godfrey Sykes, who dutifully measured the height of each mountain climbed, the depth of each crater descended, and the diameter of each volcano hiked. “You seem to stand at the gateway to the hereafter,” Hornaday wrote of Sykes Crater. “The hole in the earth is so vast”—almost 750 feet deep—“and its bottom is so far away, it looks as if it might go down to the center of the earth.” Another volcano, Hornaday wrote, “was like Dante’s Inferno on the half shell.”
Zoologist Hornaday’s specific mission was to gather data about animal life in the Pinacate, a task he carried out with increasing bloodthirstiness. He and the others started off with solemn vows to kill sheep only for meat, but as their time in the dry-heat wilderness passed, the author—also a taxidermist—rationalized killing after killing, insisting that each was intended for a museum. Then he’d retreat into righteousness: “The sheep of the Pinacate could easily be exterminated in three years or less by the Mexicans of the Sonoyta Valley for meat or by the scores of American sportsmen who are willing to go to the farthest corner of Hades itself for mountain sheep.”
Campos de fuego, the extravagant Mexican science fiction, leads the reader from ground level, where the troops spy a lion, into a mile-long underground cave, a virtual city with bronze images of Christ and skulls, “which appeared to belong to a race of giants.” By attaching their tents to cactus ribs, the group parachute to the bottom of a crater, where they discover a crevice, behind which a passageway leads them into a labyrinth of underground tunnels and an abyss, “which it seemed would take us to the center of the earth.”
Both Hornaday and Esquer alluded to an underground life, and no wonder—the most volatile activity takes place below the earth’s surface, not above it. The peaks are not tall by any standards—the highest stands only 4,235 feet above sea level—and the surface, for the most part, lacks shade and water. The mountains were formed when the earth retched up ash and rock and flame. And that is the secret source of the Pinacate’s power: its tremendous energy comes from underground rather than from all that later metamorphosed on its surface.
FEW PEOPLE HAVE MADE PRACTICAL USE of the Pinacate region—legal, anyway—because it offers so little other than primitive camping and mental cleansing. It resembles the moon and it leads to hell. With the former in mind, Alan B. Shepard, Jr., and four other NASA astronauts came here in early 1970 to train for the Apollo 14 lunar flight. They could not have picked a more appropriate spot. They brought their Module Equipment Transporter—a hand-pulled cart nicknamed Rickshaw—and studied the remarkable geologic features the Pinacate offers. The astronauts’ trip to the region has never been a secret, but it has never been publicized, either.
Using word of mouth as our guide, Tucson astronomer Bill Hartmann and I set out one blistering hot day to find NASA’s needle in the Pinacate haystack. We were searching for a rock, rumored to be on the lip of a particular crater, where the moon-walkers literally left their mark. We each picked an area to search. I took a westward strip within 50 feet of the lip itself; Hartmann looked on the next hundred-foot outer ring. The rock we sought was said to be virtually flat, distinguished from a thousand other similar rocks only by scratches etched upon it decades earlier. The futility of the search was matched only by the lack of anything else to do. This was the only pinball machine in town. After a while my enthusiasm waned, and the foolish optimism I had brought to the task decreased with it. Bill backtracked over my section while I wandered aimlessly looking elsewhere.
“Here it is!” Hartmann shouted. “Here’s the rock!”
I ran over. There it rested—a table-top rock of weathered basalt with a dark brown desert varnish. It read:
NASA 2/16/70
APOLLO 14
and the name Hilda. Hilda’s identity should be left to the imagination; likewise the location of the rock, for NASA’s rock symbolizes the unity of the core of the earth, the surface itself, and the sky beyond. It links the Pleistocene epoch of a million years ago with space travel. At that spot deep in the Sonoran Desert, nature and technology are married.
I won’t tell you where it is. If the site of the NASA rock were revealed, someone would roar through the Pinacate from the south in an ATV, which is strictly prohibited, and dig it out to smuggle back into the United States. I will tease you with this, however: The crater nearest the rock is named for the secretary of Mexico’s Departamento de Fomento at the time of William Hornaday’s trip.
I WAS UNPREPARED FOR HOW PROTECTIVE the handful of Pinacate buffs would be when they learned I’d be writing about their land. They all spoke of the region’s nakedness, its vulnerability, its virginity. The Pirates of the Pinacate, as I came to call the regulars, reminded me of a warning made by Daniel MacDougal, the botanist on Hornaday’s journey: “If you enter the deserts to study them, go in a receptive and tolerant frame of mind or do not go at all.”
“I’d hate to turn the public on to the Pinacate,” one of the pirates said. “It’s already so fragile.” Another guardedly showed me a large pot she had found, intact, on her annual camping trip. “The sand had been blowing over it for centuries. A little bit of it was sticking up, and we kept on digging. Very carefully. I knew in an instant what we had found.” An archaeologist has dated the pot from the 1300s, the days of the Sand Papago. A photographer no longer exhibits his pictures of the Pinacate, so fearful is he of enlarging the handful of Pinacate buffs: “The people who go there care.” Another desert rat simply clammed up when I asked his favorite campground. You’d think I had demanded the number of his Swiss bank account.
In a way, I had. After a few trips into the Sierra del Pinacate, I sensed the source of their fears and the treasure they hoarded. On the floor of one sandy and rocky crater, I was surrounded by bunches of saguaro and ocotillo cactus and clusters of mesquite and creosote. Looking out from the rim of another crater, it seemed a holocaust had struck Earth and this was all that remained. From a rugged hillside, I turned to find the source of distant thunder cutting through a land awash in silence: a dozen bighorn sheep were galloping eastward across the desert floor. From my elevation I was able to follow their graceful strides for miles. Never have I seen air so extravagantly clear, so brutally still.
Most of the Pinacate’s rattlers, vultures, and javelinas have never confronted shotguns, Nikons, or Jeeps. It reminded me of the volcanic Galápagos Islands, whose animals are likewise innocent of our imperial tendencies. Slabs of shimmering lava lie about the sides of some Pinacate volcanoes; barrel cactus, which the sheep break up with their hooves for moisture, spring from cracks in the rocky soil. Above ground, it is the Great Stinking Desert at its greatest and most stinking. New Mexico artist P. A. Nisbet speaks of “atmospheric clarity” and “a magical sense of deep space” when describing the Pinacate. The range, he says, “has the character of mystery and the quality of darkness about it. It’s primeval, terrifying, and reassuring at the same time. You feel as if you’re walking through the Pleistocene age.”
The pirates’ protectiveness was understandable; elitist antagonism was something else. Soon after returning from one of my trips, a call came in from out of state, quite unsolicited, from a man I didn’t know. He had heard through the grapevine that I hoped to write about his Pinacate for a weekly newspaper. “It’s a sacred place, and it shouldn’t be revealed to common street people,” his tirade began. “I don’t see any reason to draw attention to that area. It has a pristine quality, but you can sense the deterioration with each additional visitor. Last time I went I didn’t see another human for an entire week. I had 360-degree open vistas the whole time. Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon—they’re just amusement parks compared with the Pinacate. I’ve made 50 trips there over the past ten years. Most people who go there now are true explorers or geologists or anthropologists—scientists who have a love for the desert. If not another person were to find out about the Pinacate, except by his own personal exploration, well, that’d be fine. It’s one of the last strongholds of the Sonoran Desert.”
The pirates, of course, are further bothered by the more recent and better-organized Pinacate administration. “It’s hard to get around now,” one told me. “I’ve seen the Mexican army and American DEA in there. All the back roads and most of the campgrounds are now prohibited. It’s riskier to move around.” In other words, it ain’t what it used to be.
At night, northbound planes loaded with drugs have taken off from old airstrips originally built for mining operations. One of the Pinacate pirates told of running into armed men in a truck near nightfall on the western side of the Sierra, but he didn’t stay around long enough to learn their activities. Not far from there, I picked up a Mexican hitchhiker in his 60s whose face itself somewhat resembled the floor of the Pinacate, weathered and dry with sudden outcroppings. He said he lived on the outskirts of the range and confirmed what I’d been told up till then. “Oh, yes, of course, marijuana and cocaine cross there. I’ve seen the landing strips. But I don’t think they send a lot across at a time. It’s just too isolated.”
At the northern edge of the Pinacate, tongues of jagged lava called aa (a term from Hawaii) stop just shy of the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexico Highway 2 parallels the border, and Mexicans hoping to enter the United States often travel along the highway at the edge of the Pinacate before turning north into the unmerciful desert. Now and then too much heat and too little water leaves them deader than Hornaday’s sheep.
Three truck stops along the Pinacate’s northern expanse are considered takeoff points for smugglers called coyotes shepherding Mexicans and others into the United States. The café-gas station at Los Vidrios, which means pieces of glass, seems to get all the attention. Word among the pirates was that since the long-time owner sold the business to some strangers, it has been taken over by drug smugglers. One of the pirate kings said he refused to stop there any more—“Can’t tell who or what you’ll run into.” Another pirate, researching the splendid bighorn sheep, was a bit apprehensive when I suggested we go to Los Vidrios.
“Why don’t you just tell me about it afterward, okay?”
Any builder would be proud to claim Los Vidrios as his own creation. The three-building complex is made entirely of volcanic rock so solid and settled that it resembles a fortress more than a café. A water tower constructed of the same rock, filled three times a month with water trucked out from Sonoyta, sits in back. The Sierra del Pinacate is Los Vidrios’s front yard.
When I stopped by, a few truckers sat sipping beer while their rigs were prepped outside. Gimme caps filled part of one wall—from a furniture company in Mississippi, a construction outfit in Massachusetts, and one from Mr. Steak, address unknown. An unused wood-burning stove sat in the corner. Gas lanterns had replaced electrical lights a few weeks earlier when the power went out. Owner Alberto Soto Acosta came up to wait on me. “We don’t have a menu,” he said, “but you can order whatever you want. You can even get huevos rancheros at two in the morning if you’d like. Carne machaca is the most popular dish we serve.” Soto’s elderly relatives busied themselves in the kitchen. His wife lived in Phoenix. “She’s an immigrant. I don’t have papers.”
A truck filled with cabinets arrived from the central state of Michoacán; as the driver and his family unloaded them to sell in the parking lot, I asked Alberto about the Pinacate. “Oh, sure, I’ve seen bighorn sheep. But I’ve never gone south across the highway to explore.” We walked around back of the café and looked north into the United States. “People cross here, not contraband. The smuggling is closer to the cities. The wetbacks come in groups of anywhere from four to twelve. Mojados”—U.S.-bound migrants—“pass by from Oaxaca and Tabasco and other states where there’s real high unemployment. Usually they’ll stop and ask for water and food before they start out. The last group of four left a few days ago—all they had was a little container for water. It wasn’t enough. A galoncito.”
Soto motioned to the desert floor northwest of the café. “Rattlesnakes live there. Once we found some bones in that direction. We never knew if the person died from dehydration or from the rattlers.”
The biggest problem at Los Vidrios has nothing to do with smugglers or contraband. It’s jets from Luke Air Force Base. “They fly overhead,” Alberto said, and sometimes the windows break. We often feel the tremors. The whole house shakes,” a motion he demonstrated with his body. Although their air space ends at the border, the pilots above, like the migrants below, often don’t recognize the international frontier.
The best-known visitors to Los Vidrios have been Juan Matus, a Yaqui sorcerer better known as Don Juan, and Carlos Casteneda, the writer who chronicled Don Juan’s powers. In June 1968, with Casteneda at the wheel and Don Juan riding shotgun, the two stopped for a bite on their way to a peyote ceremony, according to A Separate Reality. Looking into the Pinacate at night from his table at Los Vidrios, Casteneda saw “black jagged peaks…silhouetted against the sky like huge menacing walls of glass slivers.” He assumed this was how the truck stop got its name. Don Juan replied that the name came from glass shards lying around the highway for years after a truck carrying glass had overturned there.
Following their meal, Don Juan noticed Casteneda feeling a bit queasy. “Once you decided to come to Mexico,” Don Juan admonished, “you should have decided to put all your petty fears away.” After pulling out to the east, Carlos looked in his rear-view mirror and saw what appeared to be headlights gaining on him. Don Juan knew different. “Those are the lights on the head of death,” he said. When Casteneda looked again, the headlights had vanished. Death had turned south into the Sierra del Pinacate.
