Eating Stone (12 page)

There are approximately 68 million owned dogs in the United States. This month, over half of them will receive Christmas presents.

I walk in a moonlike dune field of glistening gypsum crystals. Each crystal scatters cool December light from its minutely fissured surface. Water and ice shape the sand grains. The wind moves them. Beneath the wind, the dunes grow, crest, and slump, fluid in their advance.

The crests of the dunes glow snow-white above flanks that hold every shade of blue, from lapis in the deepest hollows to aquamarine between the delicate ribs of surface ripples. The swales fill the horizon up to the edge of the world: the indigo silhouette of the San Andres.

Anything that hunts or flees the hunter must reckon with white. Over time and adaptation, insects, a few lizards, and a pocket mouse have bleached themselves. The kit fox pales its otherwise earthy grays. The plants—few and stalwart—must resist burial. Their stems or blades check the wind. Behind the slowed runnel of air, the sand tapers into a raised streamer.

White Sands National Monument sprawls below the mountains: ephemeral ground, crumbly and friable beneath my feet. This is not a simple place. The scant rain that gravity collects in this drainless playa has no exiting river, no outlet from basin to sea. The wind flows across the mountains from the Rio Grande Valley. The dunes are creations of aeolian strength, duration, and direction. They are not fixed.

Dune physics slides into the mind with the taste of metaphor: parabolic dunes, star dunes, transverse dunes. Seif, or linear dunes (from saif, Arabic for sword), have narrow crests and steep slip faces on both sides. They drift in chains several miles long. Bar-khan, Kazakh-Russian for ram's horn, gives its name to barchan
dunes, which take the shape of crescents with pointed tips, their convex sides to windward.

The slip face of a barchan dune. This is where I am standing. The ambient light above the dazzling white sand has a thin silvery mass to it, untempered and seductive. The dune light induces some sort of craving. It fills a person with ecstasy and appetite, as if beauty were a destiny.

From this ram's horn dune, from so far away, I can barely distinguish the mountain that SAE 067 refuses to leave. It is one of many silken blue layers against a pallid winter sky. I open my silver hip flask and make a toast to her survival.

Up there on that rib of rock, that last-stand bighorn heaven, an extraordinary piece of evolution unraveled: the immemorial habit of society, locked tightly in a native bloodline. For so many months, this most gregarious of animals was alone. She saw no others of her kind, experienced no crashing of horns or lusty coursing, no brushing of blood-warmed shoulders and rumps, no postures of alarm rippling from animal to animal until, as one, they moved to safe ground. No one will know with certainty how her herd mates collapsed beneath the cascade of pressures against them.

The bighorn petroglyph at home, the sheep fed by the spiraling breath of the universe, must be this one. I will make it her, the last native, kept alive all this time by who knows what, some rarefied mystery of instinct and randomness, something purely wild. I have not laid my own eyes on her, but I have seen her place, and by this I can imagine how she kept the mountains from emptiness.

A few more hours in the dunes, walking along the slip faces, in love with the white. Dusk turns the blues to oyster gray and milky violet. I am a breeze-blown dot in a petrified sea of polished pearl. Then I drop down the last dune to the parking lot and my truck.

Two people, likely father and son, climb the high mound of sand. We say hello in passing; then they walk on to take their first look across the rippled white playa to the mountains. Until they reach the top the dune, they will be virgins to the view, as I was only hours before.

They stop on the crest of the dune. I sit on the tailgate and empty my shoes of sugary gypsum grains. The man's voice drifts down to me. He sighs and says, “Well, I guess they were right about this place. Just a great big whole lot of nothing.”

Shall we be honest about this? The mind needs wild animals. The body needs the trek that takes it looking for them. I am interested both in desert natives and in the places where they live. When I am lucky, desert bighorn geography may actually have sheep in it. More often, there are places where this mammal should be but is no longer, and in this emptiness, too, there is fieldwork to be done.

You know you are in desert bighorn country, sheepless or not, by some of the words tethered to its heart. Sun, stone, sierra, salt-bush. Arroyo. Acrophobia. Desire and desolation. Dust and imagination. Absolute clarity, extreme blue. In a few more lifetimes, you might finish this list, only to discover that most of the words are about yourself.

There are dry mountains and deep canyons where bighorns have died out; places where they persist, tenuously, but may not survive much longer; and places with viable herds, the islanders in habitat scattered across the American and Mexican deserts. And there are places where people will tell you, “Wild sheep live here; we have seen them.” You will be skeptical; you will look at those hellish cliffs and think, I'll die, and if you do go, you will never know if the animals you see, or think you see, are phantoms or dreams or flesh, or all three.

In some places, the sheer tenacity of a rare desert creature has given it this chimerical quality. Such a place lies along the cordillera of Baja California, a spine of stark vertical desert that rises between two seas. You cannot come to this country with nothing.

Bring water. Bring that notebook. You will have to stay within the margins of safety, close to your food cache, close to one of those two seas.

It is said that the people of Baja California are the toughest of all Mexicans because of their resourcefulness on land as sere as old bones, surrounded by water that is undrinkable. The Baja California we try to inhabit, as best we can, is this republic of resourcefulness.

During a winter sojourn outside the Colorado Plateau, we trade the high-desert cold for the lowland warmth of Baja California's three deserts—the Sonoran, the Vizcaíno-Magdalena, and the Gulf Coast—during their least fierce season. Mexico is our neighborhood; it feels local. It does not have superpower anxieties. This is a great relief.

Mark, our friend Joe, and I pack fishing and camping gear and head south. For much of the trip, we caravan with friend Katie Lee and her “Pal Joey.” Katie's attachment to Baja is four decades deep. The back roads are her songlines, filaments of deep memory stitched up and down the peninsula.

Behind us, the Blue Door Band still had not emerged from its vanishing. I had seen no sheep since the rut ended. When they disappeared forty years ago, they were presumed extinct. To some degree, many of the same threats still hovered: human incursion, predators, poachers, pneumonia, parasites. Had one of the rams wandered about until he met the upriver flock of domestic sheep, then taken fatal microbes back to the herd? Had they all dropped dead like the sheep that ate the poison leaves of the sacahuiste?

I fretted and worried over the Blue Door Band. Then I put my butt in the truck bound for Mexico. I betrayed them for their macho Mexican cousins, for the borrego cimarrén—O cheatin’ in-grate, for foreigners!

To reach the wilder fringes of this country, we plow through the core, the thick gringofied culture that straddles much of northern Baja California and puts Americans on the beaches in barred compounds of second homes and RVs and the Mexicans in the wind-sheared scrub behind them, in shacks, their country by the water lost to them. To the giant columnar cardén, the Mexican relative of the saguaro cactus, we announce our arrival in Mexico only after we have driven several hundred miles south of the border.

Then we traverse the desert back roads at a slowed pace, inching closer to the Tropic of Cancer, relishing the feast that our home desert lacks: an ocean lapping its prickly flanks. This seam of land and sea grips us. From it, we make forays outward in a small boat or inland into the sierra, where the phantom borregos live.

Underfoot, the Pacific Plate scrapes and rasps against its tectonic opposite, the North American Plate of mainland Mexico. Between peninsula and mainland, the Sea of Cortés—the Gulf of California—floods the cleft above the San Andreas fault. Baja California is, geologically speaking, bound for Alaska, and we are riding the rift.

The main roads of Baja California have been upgraded from bad to less bad. We avoid them and drive the old tracks of rocks and ruts, throwing up plumes of white dust behind us. When these roads are too civilized, we drive the euphemisms.

Once in awhile, to change position and cross to remote camps, we have no choice but to travel a piece of the main transpeninsu-lar highway, the asphalt death ribbon that runs the eight hundred miles from border to tip, bringing most of El Norte, gringos and goods, south in buses, mammoth motor homes, and semitrailers that pass us on one and a half lanes of highway, but only when
there is a blind hill or oncoming traffic and the possibility of killing us is high.

For most of these weeks in Mexico, we inhabit the empty quarter of the sea-land seam, the Gulf of California littoral. Our back-road ride spews lug nuts, busts the seal on our truck's differential, and takes us across sand flats and lava beds, past isolated rancherías and ephemeral fish camps, around hairpin turns festooned with plaster Holy Virgins in niches and shrines memorializing dead drivers, through miles and miles of cardonal, forests of cardén cactus so thick you cannot walk between the hulky fifty-foot-high columns without impaling yourself on their thorns.

We are surrounded by bizarre plants, sunburned rock, meager granitic soil, scant water but a sea of salt, and mountains that look like the shaved recumbent bodies of formerly lush ranges. “Everything concerning California is of such little importance that it is hardly worth the trouble to take a pen and write about it,” bemoaned an early missionary.

Each night by a campfire, my pen swells field notes into a gnarly bulge. Everything is of such great importance, it is well worth the trouble to note it. At first, I become a list maker, naming plants, trees, fish, mountains, and coves in English, then in Spanish. Soon the names stop and the notes become mostly questions. Then the notes stop and I try to feel rather than think my way through. I try to distill this land. To borrow an image from a writer friend who lives on the peninsula, it ends up as a splintered mirror.

Coyotes yip close to camp, telling us something about our journey. Mark gets up from the bed tarp to a waning crescent moon slung below Venus. He starts a morning fire from the night's coals. Daylight flushes the horizon, then quickly fills the sky with
the seductive force of velvet. The sun's great orb rises crimson, sizzling its skirts in the Gulf's calm waters.

The scant desert scrub chatters and cheeps with songbirds, sounds we did not hear at home over the winter. Four vultures roost in a cardan, a hulking black bird on the tip of each upraised arm. They stare at us, hopeful at our slowness, thinking that maybe we're dead. They fly off when the caffeine kicks in.

Nearby is a windowless shell of an old bus, stripped to a hollow carcass of sun-blistered metal. The back of the bus holds an erupting biomorph that might have once been an armchair. Around us lie acres of onyx scrapings, the remains of a quarry that was abandoned when plastic eclipsed the use of this crystallized quartz for game pieces, ashtrays, bookends, paperweights, souvenirs. The onyx, with its mottled bands of brown and gold, is lustrous and nearly translucent. We are camped atop four million chess sets.

The sea spreads below us nearly half a mile away, azure and serene, edged by a faint scrim of high tide and dotted with small islands of lava and chalky pumice. The coastline falls to the south in a long, sweeping bay, empty but for a fishing village clustered at its far end.

One year, Mark and I fished this bay with a Mexican friend and his panga, a fiberglass skiff, catching yellowtail jack, cabrilla, and an occasional triggerfish. Sleek seals—our friend called them “lobos” (wolves)—followed the boat closely. Farther away, California gray whales rolled and showed their flukes.

The islands were covered with blue-footed boobies and preening brown pelicans. I saw one pelican scratch its chin with a foot like an itchy dog. The yellowtail had backs of midnight blue, chrome flanks, and tail fins the color of fresh lemons. The fish fought like crazy on Mark's line and emerged from an emerald sea with a burst of blinding silver in the bright sun.

Instead of fishing, today we turn inland to a jagged coastal
sierra with faces of steep broken rock. A narrow canyon cuts through the lowest slopes. Sheep country. I expect to see the bor-rego cimarrén here, a small band perhaps, perched high because we are here and they will be cautious.

Two of the four races of desert bighorns live in lower California. The Weems bighorn (Ovis canadensis weemsi) is found in the far-south Sierra de la Giganta and nearby mountains. The larger range of the peninsular bighorn (Ovis canadensis cremnobates) runs for much of Baja's length, save the Weems's southern enclave. All together, counting both subspecies, Mexico's conservation groups have roughly two thousand animals to worry about.