2 minute read
LOOK AND SEE
Wallace Stegner’s lyricism in his famous “Wilderness Letter” soughs into my consciousness as I follow the migrant footpath through Organ Pipe Cactus Wilderness, across the imagined line that creates the National Monument, and into the valley below Kino Peak, named for Father Eusebio Kino, a priest who explored, mapped, and tended missions in this region. Migrants navigate by its more useful moniker, La Muela, the rock formation jutting from the surrounding Bates Mountains like a single molar on a jawbone. This valley is one route north through yet more wilderness, the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, for migrants seeking Gila Bend and Phoenix, water and work. A “geography of hope.”
A lovely wilderness as ever I’ve walked: lovely the Gambel’s quail covey running beneath the mesquite, lovely the timbre of cactus wren’s song, lovely the palo verde’s shade. I imagine the starry ecclesia resounding with organ pipe cactus music, juniper incense carrying prayers heavenward. A kind of church, the safety of Sunday morning, where those who, lacking “the strength or youth to go into [wilderness] and live can simply sit and look.”
Perhaps anything more is ill-advised: look, how lovely; see, how terrible. On faint, impossible trails through loose, ankle-twisting, bone-breaking lava rubble and sole-piercing, flesh-seeking cholla spines, migrants wend north, hunted, slipping through moonlight, in too much or too little heat, always with too little water. Some die, and more die than are found, if anyone is even looking. Sleepless in my bag in the valley’s darkness, gripped by an edginess I cannot shake, I watch the nearly full moon change La Muela’s visage from tooth to headstone. A terrible wilderness.
A day later I cross Cabeza Prieta’s Growler Valley, heading for Temporal Pass. Hard to look, but I see: “broken and worn until its bones are exposed,” one white skull, stark against the brown rockscape, a second just over there. The lower jawbones are gone. I see toenail clippers, a pink-handled toothbrush, shoes, a shirt, a few other bones. These human temples are hollow, not holy. Dead prophets, Christ crucified. Lives ending terribly in this terrible wilderness. Mr. Stegner, how can this be “a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope”?
I camp atop the pass that night. Wrapped in my sleeping bag, I simply sit and look at the wilderness. The setting sun fires the sky a red curtain, then draws it back for the night show. Is the bat I’ve just seen the endangered lesser long-nosed bat? Probably not. Miles distant, two rescue beacons flash a thin, fragile hope. To the south, the Bates Mountains now seem faint charcoal rubbings. Who passes under La Muela’s forbidding shadow tonight? In the moonlight, the desert’s inside out: veinlike arroyos on gray skin, then all those bones. So many bad journeys, tragedies, a land with many ghosts. Look, yes, but see, too. It is a lovely and terrible wilderness.
Tayo Basquiat writes to pay attention and teaches philosophy to pay the bills.
