Eating Stone (14 page)

Ocotillos shoot up from the ground like bouquets of crazy whips, topped with blossoms of flaming red. The pitahaya, the organ-pipe cactus with the fruits eaten by the natives in binges, grows in clusters of thick columns. The saguaro cousins, the cardéns, raise their massive cylindrical arms skyward, holding a vulture or two on their tops.

On a walk, I discover a fallen cardén, its pleated trunk over ten inches thick and showing woody brown ribs beneath a waxy green skin. Under this toppled giant lies the skeleton of a goat. The goat took the blow across its chest.

Pencil-thin stems of candellila grow in candelabra clusters. Barrel cacti dot the desert floor. Lomboy ooze a bloodred sap, said to heal wounds. Spiky chollas fling chunks of themselves, which become affixed to my leg. So instant and strong is their grip when they sense a passing host, they seem to fly through the air. Chollas want to go with you. They are best removed with a comb. None of us has a comb. Our hair looks like the ocotillos.

Most of all, I love the boojums. Baja's boojum trees are shaped like upside-down electrocuted carrots. Their ivory trunks, thick at the base, taper at the tip into a pronged fork or a tuft of white blossoms. Their foliage grows in a full-nerd sprout of green body

hair, erect and prickly. Top-heaviness on mature boojums sends the upright trunk into a swooping bend groundward, then up to the light again in a crazy loop. On a hot day, don't plan to lounge in their shade unless you are a caterpillar.

The boojums’ winter leafiness, their green spook fur, makes them quite endearing. I go on a walkabout among them often. Whenever I feel blue, Mark tells me, “Go hug boojums.” I lace up my boots, grab a water bottle, and go. There is something so … so vegetablelike about walking through a forest of looped boojums. I love boojums. I love them because they are plant geeks.

Recent rains have covered the boojums in leaves that are surprisingly delicate and moist to the touch. In the dead of summer, when the trees are nearly leafless, their shape reveals their more botanically dignified Spanish name, cirio, or church candle. Endemic to Baja California, with a sprinkle of habitat across the Gulf, on the coast of Sonora, the cirio is in a family of succulents that includes ocotillos.

Hurricanes blow them over. A complex array of insect species pollinates them. They grow fifty feet tall and higher, upright or looped, in the central peninsula, diminutive and lateral on the windier Pacific side. They grow in Baja California by the millions: Planet of the Hair Carrots. Whenever the warmongering slugs of the corporate-oil U.S. presidency insult the world with their appalling hubris, the whole lot of them, I think, should be taken to the boojums and let loose in their boxer shorts.

In the broken hills beyond camp, near a water hole, we find bighorn scat. Joe and Mark brave a jungle of cholla to reach a piece of fishable shore. They return with a halibut the size of a small air mattress. We wrap the meat in foil and cook it over coals of dead and fallen cardén ribs. We hang the skin and bones from a paloverde branch for the coyotes, who yip and sing in ecstasy. On this bajada above a darkened sea, the mammals have full bellies.

Father Francisco María Piccolo, who, in 1702, published one of the earliest accounts of desert bighorn sheep, was many things, but this is what I like best about him: He was a gardener. To the “thornful rock” of Baja California, he introduced maize. With the help of Father Juan de Ugarte, a fellow gardener, he brought seed and stock from the mainland and planted olives, figs, avocados, grapevines, pomegranates, and other fruit trees. Piccolo and Ugarte tested soils and set their workers to build dams and route scant freshwater into narrow hand-dug canals, or acequias, and then on to water fields and seedlings.

To Baja California's native fan palms, the padres added the exotic date palm. Coconut palms would come later. When the mestizos from mainland Mexico showed the local Indians how to extract and eat the palmitos, the tender cores of young palm trees, the hungry Indians finished off several groves in a short time.

The mission gardens were more oases than Edens, although water-blessed sites like Loreto, Mulegé, and San Ignacio surely seemed miracles of greenery, as they do today. Perhaps Piccolo knew, as most desert gardeners know, that planting edible crops in a parched land is, more than anything, a gamble, that a crop can sprout on a promise, then die in a single afternoon. Some years, the mission villagers ate mangoes; in others, they ate shoe leather.

The farming of souls, too, was a gamble. Piccolo's laborers in the garden were the Indians to whom the padres offered shelter and salvation, Christ and cultivation. When they arrived, the padres had to know where to find a pool of sinners and how to assess the obstacles: native customs, traditions, and morals (in their view, the lack thereof) to be stripped away for the fresh veneer of a Christian life.

Piccolo had to learn the native languages and dialects quickly.

He needed to know where the water was. Maps to water came through stories, so he had to learn the stories.

Across the Gulf from the mainland, the padres ferried cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and pigs, as well as doors, shoes, bowls, nails, cloth, scissors, chalices, and bells. They tried to discourage their garrison, the soldiers who guarded the holy enterprise, from running off to the godless enterprise of diving for pearls.

Forthe duration of the Jesuit era, from 1697 to 1768, the changers urged their flock to trade a nomadic life for a sedentary one, a line of social engineering not always acceptable to the changees. All that “lying about in the open air,” the padres insisted, could do them no good. They needed houses to sleep in. Still, many of the native converts went back and forth from the new way of life to the old, from mission to desert. Over the years, there were rebellions and bloodshed. At one mission, the locals pierced a priest with “countless arrows” as he walked from house to church.

Many of the natives were endless reciters of prayer and psalm. On and on went their recitations. Many were so zealous about the cross, they erected its likeness on every path, wore it, and painted it on their foreheads or other body parts when they were ill. They embedded wooden crosses with bits of pearled blue shell and polished them to shine like mirrors.

Father Francisco María Piccolo was born in Palermo, Sicily. Like most in the Society of Jesus, he was a learned man, well educated in the humanities, sciences, and philosophy, as well as in theology. He arrived in Mexico at age thirty and spent time among the Tarahumara of Chihuahua. Father Juan María de Salvatierra, another Italian, led the Jesuit entrada into Baja California and founded its first mission, which was in Loreto. He was joined by Piccolo, who ended up doing everything. More priests, and nearly twenty mission sites up and down the peninsula, followed,
with Piccolo itinerant or gardening at Loreto, Mulegé, and San Javier.

According to one history of the Roman Catholic Church, the early years of the Society of Jesus found them “devoted to the following of Christ, as though there were nothing else in the world to care for.” Eventually, members of this religious order mixed their “heroic sanctity” with mundane labor, charity, missionary work, and other needs of the day.

The Jesuits are perhaps best known for their belief that priests can be both holy and brainy. As early as their founding, in the mid-1500s, the Jesuits considered the acquisition of knowledge— empirical, rational, scientific—a spiritually profitable endeavor. By Piccolo's time, the Jesuits had produced a formidable body of writing on every subject from medicine, mathematics, and physics to acoustics, engineering, botany, and zoology.

One treatise on astronomy unfolded as a voyage through outer space. Another told the Pope how to repair the dome of St. Peter's. A political satire on the languages of animals landed its author in prison. Among religious orders, the Jesuits were, in short, the charismatic, pointy-headed intellectuals.

Half a world away from his homeland, the Mexican desert made a scholarly Society of Jesus man like Piccolo into a multilingual horticulturist, ethnographer, hydraulic engineer, and cartographer; explorer of mountains and beggar for mission subsidies; weaver, winemaker, teacher, carpenter; a builder of adobe bricks and stone churches, or at least the supervisor thereof, for the hands that dug the dirt and lifted the stone were native.

Ultimately, the natives would perish not from hard labor, evangelization, or the incessant pressure to emerge from the Stone Age to become full-fledged, tax-paying Spaniards. Instead, within barely a century, disease would decimate them and tip their culture into oblivion.

In the garden of a friend in San Ignacio, I eat a legacy of food brought to the desert by the Jesuit padres. The friend grows grapes, lemons, oranges, bananas, mangoes, papayas, and other fruit, as well as vegetables, herbs, and leafy shrubs I cannot identify. I pick a basil leaf and inhale its spicy scent. I imbibe the bright red, pink, and gold of flowers scattered everywhere. Water runs in rivulets into the garden, lined with cilantro and drawn from the padres’ original acequias.

The garden and orchard cover a few acres in the town's oldest sector, off the main plaza. The pattern of planting is not in stern gringo monorows, sprayed every four minutes by robotic nozzles dispensing pesticides. The planting is random and somewhat shaggy, like my own garden. It pleases me to discover that I may not be so horticulturally inept after all. This Mexican garden is a model of motley, of devotion and puttering, of rapt attention to the birds it draws.

The proprietor of all this bounty, a San Ignaciano in his sixties, grows food for his extended family and for barter with the townsfolk. When his grapes are harvested and his wine is ready, many neighbors come with bottles and jars.

He also makes toys of sorts. My favorite is a handmade relief model of one of the most treacherous stretches of the transpenin-sular highway, the infamous Cuesta del Infiernillo, the Descent of Little Hell: a gauntlet of steep ascents and tight switchbacks, with blind curves and heart-stopping drop-offs mere inches from the edge of the pavement; nonstop Virgin niches; fewer guardrails than is medically advisable; and vehicle carcasses stacked at the foot of the cliffs like dead Japanese beetles.

The gardener-toymaker has re-created in miniature a mountain with a hairpin turn, a blind curve perched high on the cuesta. With a minicar in each hand, I make vrroo-oom noises and send the cars around the hairpin curve into a head-on collision, screeching their brakes and letting out bloodcurdling pretend screams, wrestling the cars in a wild flurry of my fingers. Off the fake cliff
they roll, wheels spinning, another scream, this one with a nice fade at its end.

Everyone laughs. This is what everyone does when they see the cuesta miniature: They make the cars crash. Down the center of the black highway, where no driver could possibly see around the bend, runs a single line: broken yellow, indicating it's okay to pass.

Before we leave, our host climbs a ladder and picks an orange for each of us. The fruit has a faintly salty taste. The dates, the famed dates of San Ignacio's many palm trees, are ripe and our pockets bulge with them. The lanky palms tower above town, their topknots bronze in the setting sun. An oasis.

We leave the garden and walk beneath the plaza's laurel trees to the mission church. Our passage to the church is blocked by an albino mastodon of a motor home, whose driver cannot quite park it at an angle without rerouting plaza traffic around the master bedroom (ballroom? maid's quarters? lap pool?), which seems to occupy most of its back end.

The driver parks anyway and emerges with a child-carrier backpack strapped to his shoulders. Inside the backpack, head up to take in the sights along the route directly to the church, is a poodle.

I am too snobby to share a church with a poodle, so we sit in the mission garden for a while, relaxing under a pomegranate tree near beds of white roses. Ancient carved wooden doors lead to clerical offices in the wing off the main church. In places, remnants of blue paint cling to the gray stone, and I wonder if this whole wing was once peacock blue.

Misién San Ignacio itself rises skyward with the palms, its walls of pale rose stone four feet thick, quarried from Baja California's hard-rock heart. The colonial-style facade is busy with stone lions, crowns, castles, and saints in niches, some heads knocked off completely, others eroded to the point that they are just pins.

Padre Piccolo baptized the indigenes on this site in 1716, in a brush shelter, then turned souls and construction over to a colleague. The present edifice, dating from the late eighteenth century, replaced the Jesuits’ earlier ones.

When the church is poodle-free, we pass under the pinheaded saints and walk through massive wooden doors. The cruciform floor plan is simple, the stone beneath our feet well worn. It is the smoothness of this stone, I think, that gives the church its calm.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola himself, founder of the Society of Jesus, stands at the center of the retablo, the wall behind the altar, in one of several paintings set among ornately gilded pillars and frames. The paintings are dark with age, their saint scenes barely discernible beneath a murky veneer. In a niche along a nave wall, above the pews, stands the statue of a cleaner saint. He holds a real broom. I want this saint, I want him for the dust-bunny war at home. The painted ceiling dances with clouds and putti heads, their baby cheeks rosy and plump. Throughout the church, there is the aroma of roses, candle wax, and fresh tortillas.