Desert and Mountains

I have lived most of my life surrounded by the Chihuahuan Desert and spent time in all the great deserts of the Western U.S.  I immediately learned to love the desert upon encountering it as a child.  My love only grew as I learned to understand its diversity, its synergies, and its connections to the biomes bordering it: the relict forests (that retreated to the cooler, wetter slopes and tops of great, rugged mountains as the basins became dry and hot after the last ice ages), the riparian zones created by rivers and streams that came down from the mountains and cut through the arid landscape, and the great grasslands with their reliable patterns of rainfall, which gradually replaced the true desert at its norther-and-easterly limits.  In the desert itself, the rain was fickle, but essential. Each year the landscape would be shaped by the unpredictable patterns of precipitation.  Spotty rains of the monsoon season would create floods in one place and leave others untouched.

I saw the ways in which plants and animals adapted to living in a land of scarce water; and how, if left undisturbed, the desert that sustained them always remained a land of inexhaustible variety.  As a child, I marveled at the strangeness of the devil’s claw seed pods, which seemed like objects from another planet--or perhaps they truly were the devil’s claws.  I would look out on the desert in spring, or after the rains, and see a million flowers that had opened in an instant, many for only one short day or night.  I was full of awe, tinged with a sense of disbelief, at the sheer size of the vine that produced a melon known as the buffalo gourd.  The vine would grow impossibly fast, adding meters of grey-green foliage almost overnight.  And by the end of its season, nothing would be left but tangled, dead tendrils and bright yellow little gourds with an odd smell.  I remember learning about the tiny yucca moths, the only insects that could fertilize the yucca—the desert lily—with its great clusters of white flowers, and I remember examining dried yucca pods in the fall and finding the remnants of seeds eaten by the moths’ larvae, who always left some intact so that the collaboration between yucca and moth could continue.

I knew all of this was magical, but also fragile: that a single bulldozer was capable of leveling acres of desert for some new development, that cactus poached from a site or region might not return in my lifetime, and that a clear-cut relict forest would be gone forever.  I also knew that a grave where the ancestors slept could not be restored once it was desecrated, plundered for artifacts.  Tire tracks didn’t disappear in an arid landscape, and overgrazing reduced areas of biological diversity to mere sand dunes dotted with half-buried mesquite bushes.

I learned that nature is sacred: that the mountains are sacred, the rocks are sacred, the desert woodrat’s ungainly nest is sacred, and that each life is precious and necessary for the well-being all.