D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
July
2008
Sitting on the Shore of the Universe
Contemplating why did the coyote cross the road and other wild mysteries.
During this relatively peaceful spell in Palomas — a month without a murder as of this writing — I feel like turning away to a saner world, where the creatures are not blowing each other's brains out so often. I'm talking about the world of the natural forces around us in southern New Mexico.
I'll always remember, when I first moved here, the guy who was laying down the linoleum on my floor with his pre-teen son. He said to me, so feelingly, that the desert looked barren, "but it's teeming with life." It's so absolutely true.
After the shock of arriving at what seemed to be the barren moonscape of Deming began to wear off, I started seeing the rabbits that run rife in my neighborhood, the flocks of sparrows shawling the mesquite and creosote in the spring wind, the bees in the mountains, the lovely, varied wildflowers that proliferate when there's a bit of rain, the thousands of ants on my half-acre.
This remote part of the United States, the Chihuahuan desert, is especially raw and open, as if you can almost see the creative forces at work.
Bird nests are more visible here, in the absence of all the leafy trees there are in the north, where I'm from. The mourning doves throw a few pieces of straw in a crook of a branch of the cholla cactus and start producing their young there.
There's a really great abandoned cactus-wren nest in a cholla in front of my house, spectacularly draped with clear plastic strips (including some that bind the Desert Exposures I deliver) that give it a fetching look like an extravagant Parisian hat. The nest is lined with cotton from fields nearby, plus a bunch of feathers and long rakish pieces of straw.
On the flanks of the Florida Mountains to the east, you see wrinkles being created in the topsoil that is sliding down the sides. I don't know if the process takes decades or centuries, but I know, at my age, I kind of reluctantly identify with the mountain. The small rocks at the sides of the trails are in a very active process of splitting apart and reproducing their rough sedimentary harvest.
Every once in a while I stop and ponder the awesome fact that the granite at the heart of this five-mile-long mountain chain is considered "pre-Cambrian," the oldest period of geologic history, before 542 million years ago. Frankly, I can't grasp this fact, and I don't know exactly when I will. They used to say that's the period before there was life on earth, but since then they've discovered single-celled creatures that existed before.
The communing with the primeval and wild is what makes some people stick to this place like a burdock, or cactus prickers.
When I see a coyote crossing the road, I look at it calmly at first as if it were a dog, and then do a double-take and realize it's a wild species. In appearance it's the same as the doting, dependent dogs I've had, but this thing is self-sufficient, not needing any bowls of food, a bit of emotional assurance, or even my existence. Creatures like it have been here for millennia all by themselves, without me.
A little shiver comes over me from the friction existing at the intersection of our two worlds, from their unexpected juxtaposition. His universe, primeval — mine, the tamed.
I've heard their wild songs so often at night, their upward-blowing spouts of looping voices that sound as if they're singing backwards. The dens that you find sometimes in the mesquite mounds are almost like caves. The hundreds of cute paw-prints surrounding it, and a little stuffed animal that has been torn apart by a bunch of coyotes playing, give the wild coyotes a human, homey personality. But they're themselves alone.
Early last spring, I drove into town to put up my sign at Peppers to get rid of my kittens, but just didn't quite have the courage to give up my babies just yet. So I went driving around until I discovered a dirt road that led to one of the treeless mountains on the west side of town.
Right at the base I saw a javelina family of two adults and five or six "teens." They looked like pigs, but they're not. (They are in fact collared peccaries, not even the same family as pigs.) They've been in this hemisphere about 3 million years. They may not have lived in this particular area very long, but they are as aboriginal as a piece of turf from the ground they graze on.
I've been told javelinas can be fierce and are almost blind, so I kept at least a hundred feet from them as I walked around. At a point west of them, they suddenly caught my scent and burst into a run in the other direction. The last little one sounded more like a little puppy yapping than a piglet.
I felt a shudder from this encounter with the primeval. They're built something like prehistoric creatures, like a triceratops or tyrannosaurus. But they're as contemporary as I am and living their lives out as separate from humans as they can.
Up in the Floridas there is a kind of colony of 400 wild goats from Iran, Persian ibexes, that you can catch glimpses of in the summer evenings. I feel a quiet thrill when I see one or a few peering over the top of the rocky cliff to the right up in Spring Canyon, with the three- or four-foot-long horns they wear with unconscious majesty.
I've been up on a cool day on the trail near the top of the mountain ridge, where the winds are colder and wilder. I've been about level with some ibexes at the pointy top of the big cliff. It was a mother and her two capering kids, and I shivered to see them up in the same rarefied air.
I usually go up in the Floridas in the evening and get back to my house when it's almost dark, when the stars appear a few at a time.
Although I live in a flat area where you can see lights all around, the night sky is still stunning when it is totally dark. The dry spray of stars of the Milky Way looks like the sand on the sides of your calves after spending a day at the beach (although the closest beach is a few hundred miles away).
In this wild, empty place, we feel as if we're sitting on the shore of the universe. And it's how some of us like it.