Eating Stone (16 page)

Sea level, the weight of the water on our high-desert bones, pushes heavy, heavy dreams into our sleep. None of us can remember so much dreaming, dreaming made thicker, we think, with the night's high tide.

Mark dreams that he throws carrots into the laps of Arabs. We wonder, Are thrown carrots considered insults in Islam? In Joe's dreams: a convertible hearse. In mine: long dives into emerald water, dives to retrieve dozens of hats, except for one with heavy blinders, which I let go in a gust of wind.

For several nights, shrimp trawlers from the mainland work offshore from the bluffs. Their engines grind out our peace. They drop and drag nets with a rakelike dredge that rips up the ocean floor, scraping shrimp, plants, sea fans, anemones, and everything else off the bottom. On trawler nights, my dreams slide into nightmares.

More windstorms come. Where turquoise water lay as glass against white sand, churning, frothy waves now pile up, throwing sea upon land in full force. The ceviche bowl is empty and my dreams spill their darkness into the waking hours.

I read in a Baja California history how the padres scorned the natives for the absence of words in their language—no equivalent for the words envy, virtue, danger, decency, pious, virgin. I read about Indian children at the mission schools who could only use two hands for counting material objects because, higher than that, there was not that much of anything.

On a night toward the end of our stay, damp, swollen clouds roll over the Gulf from the Pacific and obliterate Orion, said by southwestern tribes to be the constellation of mountain sheep. In our bed beneath wind-rattled windows, I whisper to Mark, “I need…”

“A fish?”

“I want…”

“Zombie drugs?”

“I think I must have …”

“A glass of water?”

My voice grows raspy and small. “Spooks. I need …”

“Sheep? That saint with the broom?”

Like acute sensitivity to changes in light, to an unfamiliar shadow that suddenly hovers in the corner of a familiar room, to a faint slip in the rift that holds this peninsula in paralyzed friction, these things are hard to explain.

What I am trying to say to my beloved, who has fed me from the sea with his own hands, is this: I need boojums.

Under a sapphire sky, the inland desert fills a broad valley in all directions, hemmed only by mountains that rise so abruptly from the flats, you would knock your forehead on them if you walked toward them blindfolded. Jagged white veins zigzag through their brown faces, giving them the look of giant chunks of raw agate. A shallow arroyo furrows the valley's lowest point. Haloed by the low sun, cardén and cholla cover the land in a swathe of glowing bristles.

This gulf of open desert between ribs of mountains soothes the bone and muscle needed to cross it. There is a balance between sky and terra firma; they are complementary mirrors of infinity. Here, forms and shapes reveal themselves through patient inquiry and the luxury of enough carried water to let you trace them. Beyond the horizon lies the azure sea if we need it.

The truck lurches over a scant track. Near the arroyo, Mark puts it into four-wheel drive to cross the rough and pitted gravel of erosion. Often, Joe and I get out and walk in order to avoid suffering concussions on the truck cab's roof, and to feel the air. In another season, we would be baked to leather, babbling about milk shakes or waterfalls or swimming pools before we dived headfirst into the ground for one last mouthful of sand.

We have seen no one. The valley is uninhabited. The last structure sighted was a roofless cement block sprouting antennae of bare rebar, waiting in forlorn desolation for the construction workers to come back from their ten-year lunch break.

The truck crawls up the valley. I am noticing high, bold faces of rock that are bighorn country. I am not noticing that the valley ends ahead of us, squeezed into a narrow slot in the mountains. The airy dreaminess of open desert pinches into a tight black crack. From where we are, the crack feels like distance, but here, in this valley, distance breeds mirage.

Sixty miles back, before we left the main road, we encountered a man who told us about this arroyo and how it is a watering place for bighorns. He also spoke of a graveyard in the sierra in the opposite direction.

The borrego cimarrén, he said, go to that place to die. He pointed to mountains overlaid in blue on blue until the farthest layer was only slightly less pale than air. It is not a watering place, he insisted, but a bone place; scattered skeletons, curled horns, teeth and femurs and spines, rib cages with the wind in them. I cannot tell you more about this graveyard and I am not sure why.

Just short of the black crack, the arroyo is as wide as a riverbed. A narrow ribbon of water meanders down its course but soon disappears into the sand. A snow-white crust of dried salt lines the stream's edges. The water runs clear over settled minerals the color of rust.

We are heading into the crack, into a gorge of jagged night-dark rock. The stream flows there, too, and sheep tracks come
to the water from nowhere. Each time we trace the tracks away from the water, they vanish. I do not want to enter the gorge, but Mark and Joe do, and they pull me along the slipstream of their curiosity.

A mile inside the gorge, we park the truck and make camp. Any farther and the road would be nearly impassable, and none of us is fond of pushing vehicles through dry streambeds or streams, even if they are streams of salt and sulfur. Others have driven this way, but their tracks are faint and weathered. There are signs of old mines, of the earth's skin torn off. This reckless exposure may be what gives the gorge its ominous air.

Before dinner, we hike up-canyon to look for signs of bighorn or the bighorns themselves. At one point, the black gorge opens to softer walls of gold and red, and something tight around my chest loosens. Around a bend, we find scattered palm trees, fan palms with stocky trunks, a thatch of wild grasses in their shade, and rustling fronds that hint of paradise.

There is good sheep habitat here: water, food, bedding places, and escape terrain above the canyon and in a far-off spine of mountains turning to indigo in the evening light. Wherever you think the vertical rock is impossible, that is where you may find desert bighorns.

In his natural history of Baja California, written in the mid-1700s, Jesuit missionary Miguel del Barco related the curious acrobatics of the peninsular bighorn. As native hunters pursue a sheep, he wrote, “the sheep approaches the edge of a precipice and jumps off, taking care to land squarely on his head so that his thick horns can absorb the impact of the fall. Once down, he gets up and runs away.” From the heights, the hunters look down “without venturing themselves to attempt a similar trick.” The horns are so well made, Barco remarked, the sheep's entire head can take the blow of the fall without injury.

I have seen Blue Door Band sheep make extraordinary leaps.

When they slip, they never flatten themselves, legs splayed, and claw for footholds as they slide. Instead, when they lose a foothold, they land on one below it, or the one below that. I have never seen one land on its head. They prefer not to show me this trick.

We leave the fan palms and turn back to camp. Mark and I hike the arroyo. Joe takes the talus above us, looking for signs of sheep until the walls become too steep and he must either descend to join us or be rimrocked.

How much work for all that meat, how difficult it must have been to hunt them, I think. We cannot even find them. The most skilled hunters could herd an animal toward their compadres, who waited with bows and arrows, only to watch their prey fling itself into thin air, flying into the abyss, horns-first.

Back in camp, the wind begins. Soon it blows with the fury of something trapped, bottlenecked inside this narrow gorge, desperate to get out. The wind tries to blow our dinners off our plates. The wind pushes my discomfort into an ill-tempered gloom.

I do not like this place, I tell Mark, although the reasons elude me. The banditos are back in town, drinking tequila. The ax murderer cracked his differential en route. Monsters prefer swamps so that they can drip. In the list of terrors in creepy places, that leaves only the dreaded inner storm known as Self.

The rock is glassy and dark; the walls struggle with the light. Between the canyon walls, the sandy arroyo is hardly two hundred feet wide, and this is the space, so narrow and grim, like an earthquake fault in a primordial schist brain, that we inhabit.

The wild of this desert is a wild held intact by its own raw hostility, a reminder of nature's capacity to awe as well as kill you. Sunsets and bloodred ocotillo flowers and turquoise bays do no harm. I am neither hungry nor thirsty, nor am I punctured with
thorns. I have the luxury of attention to insistent beauty. I live in a universe of sensation. But I could not survive here.

The wind cannot find its way out. It tears at our clothes and hair with nothing to temper its howl and grit. A stocky elephant tree barely shelters our bedroll. The night thickens into sepulchral dark. When the full moon rises, it weighs too much. I try to make the canyon into thoughtless space.

After our long sojourn on the sea and wide-open bajadas, it seems strange that we have come here. It is a choice that can be undone, I propose, but Mark and Joe want more reasons to change camp than the pathetic assertion that the rock is the wrong color.

Before sleep, we sit together on the sand with boulders for backrests. Joe tells us a bedtime story.

One of the things they did as kids growing up in southern Colorado, he says, was hunt for arrowheads. They searched land as flat as a pancake, chewed and cut and fenced to something entirely different from its original short-grass prairie but still yielding, once in a while, artifacts from its grassland past.

“My brothers and I were pretty young when we went arrowhead hunting,” Joe begins, “maybe ranging in age from five to eight years old. Sometimes our sister went, but it usually was just the boys. Our father woke us up early in the morning. He had us dress in jeans and long-sleeved shirts and cowboy hats.”

“The felt hats with the white braid looped on the edge of the brim? The cord chin straps with the wooden bead toggle?” I ask.

“Yes, those kids’ cowboy hats,” Joe replies. His voice is slow and deliberate, careful with this memory.

“We put on our cowboy hats and our dad drove us out to the prairie to look for arrowheads. When we got out of the car, he made us cinch up our chin straps and tie bandannas around our faces, folded into a V over the nose and knotted in the back, like stagecoach bandits. We had to help my littlest brother tie his. Each of us had a pair of goggles. The prairie dust was horrible,
so we had to be covered up. Dad made us hold hands so we wouldn't be separated.

“So, in our cowboy hats, kerchiefs, and little goggles, we three boys walked across the prairie, holding hands, following our father, who always walked ahead of us, searching the dirt for worked stone.”

It is the Mexican night, not a Colorado prairie, that wraps itself around us, yet the imagination can so easily make this leap. Stories lead the mind to calmer waters.

Natives of the Sonoran Desert who remember hunting bighorn recall that before the hunt they sat quietly in the night, conversing softly, telling stories about fat animals but, out of caution, never mentioning wild sheep.

When they were growing up in Montana, Mark and his siblings had those felt cowboy hats, I think as we slip into our sleeping bags beneath the moon. My brothers and I had those cowboy hats. Otherwise, we would have threatened to hold our breath or choke the family puppy until our parents gave in and bought them for us.

I cannot remember coffee, or putting on my sandals, or hiking down a chasm lined with purple shadows, leaving Mark and Joe to follow later. I only remember passing through the rocky portals and climbing the banks of the arroyo to the valley and the bajadas, to the sun.

My company is a scattered thatch of boojum trees and two coyotes. The low morning sun backlights trees and animals. Their auras—one of green leaves, the other of tawny fur—stand out in feline alertness. The coyotes are as lean as sticks. The ragged mountains float hazy blue on the horizons, holding sheep in their heights, occasionally spilling them into the dry washes, where the food grows. I am telling myself my own stories.

Older and beyond the cowboy hat phase, one of my brothers and I went through what I would call our “monk phase.” Our family lived in Rome, Italy, at the time. Grant and I often explored the city's lesser-known churches, abbeys, and monasteries. Among our favorites was the eighteenth-century quarters of Jesuit priests, open to the public as a museum.

Off a long corridor of cool stone, each priest had a room nearly as slender as a closet, with whitewashed stucco walls, a narrow bed with a frayed blue cotton coverlet, a bloody crucifix, and a wooden desk by a window overlooking a lush courtyard garden.

This was the life we wanted, we decided; we'd be monks. Each of us would have an elegantly simple room with books and rolls of parchment and lots of paints and delicate sable brushes and a pen for inscribing our knowledge, which, as brainy Jesuits, would be vast and important. Silent brothers in robes and Birkenstocks would bring us goblets of Chianti. The garden would soothe us. We would illuminate manuscripts.

It is this image that I bring to Father Piccolo in Baja California. His room overlooks orange and lemon trees. Its window frame is painted peacock blue. He is seated with his notebook. He writes exhaustive volumes on the local flora and fauna— cactus fifty feet tall, cactus the size of thumbs, bearing beads of sweet red fruit, trees that loop, trees that look dead until rain teases them into full leaf. He writes of pearled shells. He writes of a horizon of azure sea and soil the color of poverty.

His manuscripts are illuminated with fish, fish swimming about the pages like chips of light, fish nosing the gold leaf of decorative script, swirling in schools through the loops of Bene-dictus es. He describes whales in the lagoons and pronghorn antelope on the salt flats. He describes a cow-deer in the mountains. He refers to “precious pearls,” never to anyone “wretched.” He wears a deerskin cape in the morning chill.