There are moments of awakening when we linger in the dream world and the last traces of the dream cling to our minds like water sliding down a rock. I often try to loiter there. Its lasts only a fleeting minute and my heart aches for that moment throughout the day. But on days when I wander off into the field, the dream world pursues me, as though suggesting all of this is a dream. There in the field I stare at the world in its wondrous manifestations, figuring out plants in all their magical forms, with dreams on subtle wings and visions of mountains and light.
These are the magical visions I saw in a place called Brown Canyon. It is a southeast trending canyon that's closed to the public and open to the four thousand foot rise of Baboquivari Peak above the canyon bottom. It is part of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, a 150,000+ acre refuge that sits along the Mexican border southwest of Tucson and is part of the larger Baboquivari Mountains. I spent four days in the valley collecting data for a vegetation map and got to stay in a house nestled near its heart. The words of John Burroughs stuck with me, "So far as seeing things is an art, it is the art of keeping your eyes and ears open. The art of nature is all in the direction of concealment."
Agave palmeri, Palmer's agave
Agave palmeri II, writ large
Passiflora foetida, fetid passionflower
Hybanthus attenuatus, western greenviolet
Cylindropuntia spinosior, walkingstick cholla
The pods of an Agave palmeri
The leaf of an Eysenhardtia orthocarpa, the Tahitian kidneywood
Commelina erecta, the whitemouth dayflower
Echinocereus pectinatus, the rainbow hedgehog
An unopened bud of Tecoma stans, the yellow trumpetbush
Agave buglandia
One curiosity about spending several days doing nothing but staring at plants is you get to see the most remarkable things. Perhaps it is the slower rhythm, perhaps it is the time spent huddling on the porch as the remnants of a tropical storm plow into the Baboquivari mountains, perhaps you are just paying attention. But these are just some of the many moods of Baboquivari Peak, the most holy and important mountain to the O'odham People.
At the bottom of the picture above you see the small collection of buildings known as the Brown Canyon Environmental Education center. Home for a few days. Here are a few move visions from out there...
Heading into Jaguar Canyon
Rainbow agave
The approaching storm. There is nothing quite as frightening as having to walk back down off a slope in the midst of a really violent lightning storm, perils of the job. This photo was about ten minutes before the storm arrived.
The monsoon can create convection quickly in August. How is it that we see this? It is water, heat, convection, rain, and life. Why exactly do we not see the planet as an organism we inhabit?
The Convection Sequence, Las Cienegas National Conservation Area
Driving into the Empire Ranch south of Tucson early an August morning. The convection was awake as I left Tucson and I resolved to wander through the Las Cienegas looking for what plants were blooming. Instead, I discovered moisture creating a storm. Twenty minutes elapses between images one to three. I'm fifteen miles from the storm.
Convection 1
Convection 2
Convection 3
Humboldt Canyon, Patagonia Mountains
The photo below is of a canyon under threat because of the 1872 Mining Act. Essentially, arbitrary economic claims on the public good mean we the public do not get to choose whether to have an alternative economy. A law from the 19th century explains the public's right of ownership over mineral resources below the ground. There are alternative economic structures emerging that will support a viable alternative economic model–that model is a restoration economy.
The crest of Aztec Canyon, Patagonia Mountains
This sequence of three images is taken from the crest of Aztec Canyon. It looks northwest toward the Santa Rita Mountains, with Mt. Wrightson in the center. This is the thick monsoon light of moisture as a storm moves in from the northeast. We were digging ocotillo sprouts for restoration research on private land and had walked to the crest of the hill, looking to the northwest and the shifting light as it settled on the near and far ground. The mountains shone. My friend took us to an Agave parviflora plant, a plant whose type locality was collected nearby. the smallest flowered Agave.
The Ocotillo hug the southeast facing slopes, looking south directly into Mexico.
Amsonia grandiflora
From the Whetstone's to the Huachucas
Looking across Las Cienegas NCA, the sky held the immense heaviness of moisture. The rain was coming.
Tucked into southeastern Utah is the Dark Canyon. It is south of Canyonlands National Park and the Needles district, on the east bank of the Colorado River. It is an interesting mix of canyons and federal land management agencies, with the BLM, Forest Service, and Park Service each owning a little bit of the canyon and the surrounding systems.
It is roughly 37 air miles long from the watershed crest at 9055 ft to the downstream end emptying into the southern end of Cataract Canyon at 3740 ft. The watershed of the Dark Canyon alone is roughly 264 square miles and covers approximately 162,000 acres. There are at least a half dozen canyons out at the end of the road, which go in various directions down to the Colorado and are all completely separate from the Dark Canyon system. The end of the road was approximately 82 miles from Blanding, Utah, 81 of which is dirt. This is the beginning of the vacation flora. I think it will take about a decade, at least.
Upcanyon from the Sweet Alice Hills
The light changes.
The road less traveled, heading southwest.
The Henrys, the last named mountains in the US.
Across the woodland to the edge of Youngs Canyon, an access to the canyon bottom.
Looking into Bowdie Canyon, one of the other canyons in the system.
A massive ruin about three hundred feet off the floor of Fable Valley, a north trending canyon that ultimately becomes part of Gypsum Canyon and then down to the Colorado.
View into the heart of Bowdie Canyon.
The heart of Bowdie Canyon (the middle of the shot above), the canyon bottom was not visible and appeared to be a slot canyon that went down several hundred feet.
The exhausted and hot Xochi resting after running and jumping about in a side canyon to Bowdie.
There's a line from the indie pop band Ivy that says, "at the edge of the ocean we can start over again." It's been that way for me, returning to the surrogate natal landscape of the Oregon coast. Of all the wild and amazing places I've gone in my life, I've come back again and again to my aunt's house in Lincoln City. It's a landscape where the ocean is relentless, the cold intensity of the water, the tension of sand underfoot, the roll of fog and clouds as they run into the headlands. It's been a long journey over these last months and I'm here standing and staring, toeing the starting line on the rest of my life. I've come to the edge of the ocean to start over.
The curvature, down the 500 foot drop from Cape Foulweather
There is a journey in every garden. It starts with a blank sad waste of dry bermuda grass, a tiller, and voila you have a garden. But over the years you actually get to know it, to pay attention to not only how the sun falls on the space, but the shift of light through the day after many days of watching and paying attention. Watching cycles of artichoke rise and fall and live to see another season, and another, and another. The cycles of a land trapped within a city, but filled with the city's life. The cooper's hawk that would perch on the fence beside the hens, their nervous clucks. Watching the cooper's hawk chow down in the tree next door, poor dove. There are the coveys of quail that know the cover of the Atriplex bush out front of the house. The whiptail lizards, the scorpion that bit Mona on the paw the first month in the house. This was life. This was home.
We are so lucky to live on the planet for even a short time, so lucky to share in all the relationships, all the beauty, all the wonder. This garden was a journey in and of itself. It was me planting the posts and the fences and the grasses and the tomatoes. It is a journey into the simple question of how do I live here? This was how I interpreted my answer.
The Blank Slate.
February 17, 2010
1.
May 7, 2010
2.
May 15, 2010
3.
May 19, 2010
4.
June 17, 2010
5.
July 8, 2010
6.
August 5, 2010
7.
November 12, 2010
8.
May 11, 2011
9.
November 3, 2012
10.
December 9, 2012
11.
February 14, 2013
12.
May 16, 2013
The end of Buckleyfarmlandia I is nigh. The house went into escrow yesterday. I stand on the fulfilled side of owning a home, knowing full well all the love and effort that resides now within these walls. It is all good work. All of it. Even the hard stuff. This is my final love letter to the Rita Garden House.
The
fence reaches twenty feet in the air here, the eight inch square posts rising
solid out of the gray concrete sixteen feet up, to the four foot plate steel at
the top. Two hundred yards up the line from where I stand the massive rusting
hulk of the wall ends, back to a low vehicle barrier and finally to the tawdry
twist of barbed wire that strings up and over the hill between embedded
t-posts, marking the line. The Line, la linea, the United States-Mexico border.
I see the scrawl instantaneously, at the highest point of the fence, upside
down from my angle. "Diego fue aqui" it reads. Diego was here. In one
instant the steel is torn down, rendered utterly obsolete and foolish,
revealing in a moment the literal absurdity of walling off one country from
another to halt forces much more than the wind of a late summer storm against
the wall. A wall scaled by an immigrant or a smuggler, regardless his name
there to mock the wall.
The wall in all its infinite wisdom
to stem the flow of needs and wants. The solution to the problem of nineteen
foot ladders. I stand at the base of that wall, standing on the deeply eroding
border road at the very end of the Huachuca Mountains, standing on National
Park land, not wondering at all why it was washing away. It was obvious. I was
wondering who in their right mind thought a road straight up the hill, plowed
down to accommodate the heavy machinery necessary for the wall's construction,
who would think it could sustain against the rains of August? Who in their
right mind would think that a taller wall would stop the flow of drugs, or
people, or water?
The economics of the wall ignore the
economics of the soil releasing individual grains into the flow of falling
rain, it ignores the persistent ethos of erosion. It ignores the complexities
of animal migration and pays no attention to the dynamic of fire as it moves
across the grassland, swirling as it does. The economics of the wall are
emblematic of the ignorance of our economics, of our continuing failure to see
that economics means nothing when compared to the sustenance and resilience of
our ecologies. Our modern idiom of economics supports an intellectual structure
for an ideology of utter devastation. The principles of economics continue to
believe only the intellectual models that provide support for its continuing
dominance as a way of organizing the world. Our failing ecological
infrastructure is but an externality.
A beginning economics teacher offers
only the simplest models to his students, arguing they need only evaluate the
simplicities of straight lines and linear relationships. Try to ignore the
externalities, try to ignore the complex interactions of the atmosphere and our
exhaust pipes. Try to ignore the disparity of our cultures and chalk it all up
to the beautiful market, the ever beautiful market. The ever expanding App
Store, the online bazaar, the rising gas prices, the rich buying our elections;
these you must see as natural expressions of the market, the market that makes
the wisest of decisions. The market driving the car toward that cliff up ahead.
Wendell Berry spoke in his recent
Jefferson Lecture of our need of affection for places and the land.
"Without this informed, practical, and practiced affection, the nation and
its economy will conquer and destroy the country." This affection he
forcefully linked to Leopold's Land Ethic to tie us to a larger whole, to
broaden our vision beyond the walls we have built, to see the effects of the market
on the land, to see the externalities and in so doing become a whole people. A
people of this place and of this continent. This was the vision of Leopold in
writing, "a system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest
is hopelessly lopsided."
Our hopelessly economic relationship
to the land provides for a higher valuation of national security over
ecological security. It engenders the philosophy of design driven by straight
lines, like the scar that grows with each passing day as the rain falls and
rocks release their hold and make their way down that fantastically linear
slope. Our hopelessly economic relationship fails to see a Mexican farmer being
able to stay on their land and grow corn of their culture and provide food
security for their communities and border security against the scary hordes of
farmworkers intent on stealing the back breaking work of harvesting our cheap
food. These are the symptoms of economics. These are the symptoms of an
ideology of utter devastation, a system constructed on the rational exhaustion
of each and all resources in its quest for the perfect curve, the linear model
of humans wanting profit.
There is no profit in the flower of
a plant. Except when it supports the life of a pollinator and stabilizes the soil
and supports the mycorrhizal life between its roots. No profit in the flower
when pollinated it transforms sunlight into fruit and a flycatcher snatches a
fly hovering too long near a beautiful bloom and the farmworker reaches down
through the haze of industrial pesticides and picks the food we eat. It is
profit when the middle man steps in, when the market takes hold of the precious
corn, packages it in flashy oil masquerading as plastic, and we suddenly have
food in our brief encounter with the sterile hum of the florescent light of
endless shelves and our courtesy card that tracks our purchase, and there we
have our cheap land ethic.
This unwillingness to see that it
takes thought to produce better food, that food doesn't come from the
supermarket, it is the same unwillingness that drives the growing scar cutting
deeper beside the border wall. It is a scar of our own making and it is a scar
on our own side. As though our own self-revulsion of knowing we know better, of
knowing that wall is not the way to engage the world. The simplicity of an
economic way of life is in its ability to convince us to ignore all the
elements that actually matter in the construction of the model. The ever
interchangeable producer and the ever interchangeable consumer as measured
against each other to a vanishing point.
The theory of economics is
predicated on the rational exhaustion of all possible resources. It is our
undoing as a species. Unless there is an ethical restraint, an understanding of
the importance found in beauty, joy, wonder, and especially affection for the
natural world beyond economics, then Homo
sapiens sapiens will not prove so wise wise after all. It is in the
manifestation of the land ethic, in the understanding that we must make human
culture responsive to the needs of the land in order to survive. The late
author of the brilliant novel Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach, had a way of putting
our dilemma into words. "Taking care of each other is one practical step
at a time, most of them requiring help from at least one other person; survival
is a team sport."
I would add that we need desperately
the help of the pollinator and the soil microbe. We need the absorptive
capacity of every bit of organic material in our soils. We need the radical
diversity of our human family as much as we need the radical diversity of our
agricultural seed collections in order to grow all the food we are going to
need in the places we are going to need it. We need the complex diversity that
is the flora and fauna of our home ranges, and we need the attitude of mind
that it is all essential. Like the tinkerer of Leopold, who keeps meticulous
track of all the parts, we must pay attention to the diminishing world around
us while simultaneously coaxing it back to its previous stability, resilience,
and diversity.
Reaching back to needs and wants and
we are back to economics at root. Economics says there are no needs beyond air
and water. There is no room for the life or the soul of the soil. Back to
economy, as Wendell Berry explains as "the making of the human household
upon the earth: the arts of adapting kindly the many human households to the
earth's many ecosystems and human neighborhoods." We are back to staring
again at the wall. Staring again to the simple words there upon the crest of
the multimillion dollar rusting core of our relationship to the land.
"Diego fue aqui", Diego was here. We see an arm snaking up and over
the wall, struggling to hold on with one hand and scrawl with the other. A
simple act of breaking down the wall. A simple act of reminder, as Berry would
have it. "We do not have to live as if we are alone."
Back from the Gila, a brief trip to the heart of the Miller Fire of 2011, downstream of 297,845 acres in the Whitewater Baldy complex of 2012. The sky was finally blue, rinsed by the rain of the night before. The first rain of the season. It was gentle and hard at the same time. It was building again as we drove home to Tucson.
Xochi was bitten by another dog really hard at the dog park on Thursday, hence the reason I am home. She is recovering but making me believe in resilience. She is a strong dog with a terrible wound on her side that had to be surgically repaired. The parallels at seeing the resilience in the headwaters of the Gila and seeing Xochi delicately hop for joy with stitches in her side, helps me believe in resilience.
Passiflora foetida, fetid passionflower
Hybanthus attenuatus, western greenviolet
Cylindropuntia spinosior, walkingstick cholla
Commelina erecta, the whitemouth dayflower
An unopened bud of Tecoma stans, the yellow trumpetbush
