Canals, Curanderos, and Bicycles in the Sonoran Desert

 

I left the house today at 3:30 in the morning, the kind of hour that still belongs to owls, street sweepers, and the last whispers of someone else’s dream. At this hour, I can often feel tens of thousands of dreamers tossing and turning in their sleepscapes. 

The asphalt was warm under my tires, holding the memory of yesterday’s heat like a low fever. Phoenix at that hour isn’t quiet so much as suspended. The traffic lights still cycle their colors, but no one’s asking anything of them yet. I clipped in, rolled forward, and felt something unlock in my legs that had been waiting a long time for this.

I meant to walk. That was the plan. But the water called louder than my own routine, like a distant drum I could feel in my ribs. So instead of the usual route, I started tracing the canals, letting the bike pull me into that old rhythm, the one my body still knows better than most things: balance, push, glide, breathe. The Arizona Canal spread out beside me, a hard line of concrete wrapped around moving sky. Even in the dark, it shone a little, catching whatever light the city would give it, carrying it east, west, who knows where, just always away, always along.

The Sonoran early morning is its own kind of desert bloom. Mesquite silhouettes leaning over the canal like old aunties watching kids at play, their thin leaves breathing out a faint green smoke of scent each time the breeze shifted. Creosote waited in clumps along the banks, quiet and resinous, like it is keeping a secret for the next rain. Saguaros standing back from the water, those tall, stubborn elders holding the line between city and desert, their arms raised not in surrender but in blessing. I felt them watching—these plant relatives who know how to store what they need and thrive in a harsh environment.

By the time I reached Arizona Falls, the canal had become something else entirely, a small storm contained in concrete. The water hurled itself over the drops, white and insistent, a torrent stitched into the city’s body. I sat there, bike at my side, and let the roar fill the spaces in my chest I didn’t realize had gone hollow. The air was cooler in the spray, a narrow band of mercy in an 86-degree dawn. The falls didn’t care about my deadlines, my inbox, or how many grant applications were waiting to be finished. They just kept falling, kept arriving, kept going.

Sitting there, I thought about how this water is not supposed to be here and yet has always been here, in some form, moving through different channels, different agreements, different violences. The canal is a scar and a blessing, a reminder of how much has been diverted, dammed, claimed, and yet, in these predawn hours, it becomes a prayer rug laid out for anyone who wants to kneel beside it. I watched its surface catch stray reflections of streetlights and early commuters, as if the city’s nervous system ran not along the freeways but right here, through this engineered river.

As I rode toward Old Town Scottsdale, the sky began to thin at the edges. Along the path, brittlebush crouched low, their spent seed heads haloed in a faint gray fuzz, like they were already dreaming of the next rain. Ironwood branches braided themselves into a dense, warm darkness above sections of the trail, sheltering mourning doves and the occasional insistent, sweet desert cottontail trying not to be a predator's meal. On the far banks, palo verdes held onto the last of their yellow confetti, blossoms scattered across their own green skin, each tree a small sun recalling another.

By the time I reached the Solari Bridge, the sunrise had started its slow-burning climb. The bridge was a ribcage of light, catching the first hints of color and bending them into something ceremonial. I sat and watched the sky pull itself up from lavender into peach, into the first serious blue. The canal below mirrored everything, an upside-down world rippling with each passing duck, each swallow of wind. The steel, the glass, the moving water all felt like an altar someone built without knowing they were building one, or did they?

From that spot, my mind slipped back years, to when my bike was not a choice but a necessity, my primary mode of transportation. I remembered the feel of sore thighs and the calculation of distance: how many miles to work, to the store, to wherever I needed to be. Back then, the bike was the thin line between possibility and escape. As I sat by the bridge, legs humming lightly from the ride, I could feel those years return, not as nostalgia but as muscle memory. My body slipped into position without asking, hands on the bars, back soft, breathing easy, as if those days had only been last week.

And then, as the light climbed higher, another memory rose to meet it, older than me and the canals, older than this particular morning. When I was a young man, I opened my first restaurant at the Mini Mall in Chandler. I had saved what I could, tucked away every spare dollar, because my mother’s dream was always to have a restaurant. So, I opened one for her, El Comedor Guadalajara, our little kitchen stitched into the strip mall’s concrete spine. The smell of simmering chiles and frying masa wrapped itself around the tables, our family’s recipes ladled into Styrofoam bowls and onto chipped plates. It was messy and beautiful and exhausting, but it was ours.

Next door to El Comedor was a yerbería—a Mexican herb shop that seemed, from the outside, like one more small business in a long row of them. Inside, though, it was its own world. Glass jars lined the shelves, filled with dried leaves and roots, seeds and barks with names that tasted like home on the tongue. The shop was run by an elder Pascua Yaqui Curandero named Don Francisco. He and my mother became fast friends. My mother, seeing how lost I was about direction, nudged me firmly toward him. It wasn’t a question so much as a path laid out: you’re going to get close to him, you’re going to work in his herb shop, and he’s going to teach you about plants and other things you don’t even know you need yet.

So I apprenticed with him. At first, I thought I was just stocking shelves, sweeping floors, and measuring out little paper packets of herbs for customers who came in with aches and worries. But slowly, the work shifted. Don Francisco began to name each plant for me—its Yaqui name, its Spanish name, its particular way of being in the world. He’d tell me what it could soothe, what it could stir, how it wanted to be harvested, how it did not like to be disrespected. He talked about plants, the way some people talk about relatives: with love, with exasperation, with old stories that spiraled off into the spirit world and then circled back.

We became fast friends. He was two-spirit, a very lovely man, soft and sharp at the same time, like a mesquite branch in bloom. I remember watching him move through the shop, that gentle authority in his hands, the way people relaxed when he looked at them. Outside of the yerbería, I would see him bicycling all over Chandler on his little red Schwinn with black tires, a splash of color in the long grid of streets. Don Francisco would smile and wave to me with his big mustache, his sun hat tipped just so. I wouldn’t just see him in Chandler; he’d appear like a small miracle in Tempe, in Mesa, always on that bike, always in motion, as if the whole Valley was his neighborhood.

He was in his mid-sixties then, but on that Schwinn, he felt ageless, part of the same current as the canals and the desert winds. When he passed away, something cracked open in me. It was a big loss, one of those departures that didn’t finish leaving. For many years after, he came to me in dreams. I’d see him standing in the doorway of the yerbería or riding that red bike down some side street that existed only in sleep. He would talk to me there, offer a plant name, a small joke, a bit of counsel wrapped in that beautiful laugh, the kind that made it impossible to stay entirely sad.

This morning, as I sat at the park near the Soleri Bridge, looking at my bike and thinking about my age, he came to mind again. The canal shimmered beside me, and for a moment, I could almost see a red Schwinn ghosting along its edge, a sun hat bobbing above the handlebars. I felt a beautiful smile rise inside my heart, warming me from the inside out. He is still with me. His teachings are still with me. His lessons are stitched into how I see the desert, how I listen to plants, how I move through this world. The way he rode those streets, trusting his body, trusting his little red bike—that lives in the way I find my balance again after too long away from the pedals.

Heading home, the path filled with humans in every possible arrangement, runners with high knees and bright shoes, older couples walking in slow tandem, a parent pushing a stroller, a teenager coasting past on a rented e-scooter, a man in work boots and a reflective vest moving steadily, purpose written into every step. Different bodies, different gaits, different colors of skin, all held within this narrow corridor of shared movement. For a moment, it felt like we were all part of the same quiet procession, each of us working something out with each step, each wheel-turn, each breath.

There was a tenderness in watching them—the way a woman in a big sun hat adjusted her pace for her dog, the way an older man carefully made room for me to pass, the way a kid’s small bike wobbled and then straightened as they found balance. It reminded me that this desert, despite its sharpness, makes room for difference: spines and soft leaves, shallow roots and deep taproots, annuals and ancient elders. A forest of saguaros and a grove of invasive tamarisk can coexist along the same canal, the story not simple, not pure, but undeniably real.

The heat rose with the sun, an invisible hand resting between my shoulder blades. At 86 degrees in the pre-dawn, you can already feel the promise of the furnace to come, the way the day will build and build until the air itself feels solid. But as I rode back home, the warmth on my back felt like an old friend leaning in, reminding me I live in a place where survival is an art. Creosote, with its rain-summoning scent; ocotillo, leafing out in a matter of days after a storm; cholla, throwing its improbable magenta blooms into the world as if to say, “Even here. Especially here.”

Each pedal stroke was a small spell. Forward, forward, forward. With every rotation, something clicked back into place inside me—some alignment between bone and memory, between this desert and the bodies that made me. My Cora and Yaqui ancestors walked other arroyos, other rivers, but the logic is the same: follow the water, listen to the plants, let the sky tell you what time it is. On the bike, I could feel their insistence humming along my spine, the way they learned to read landscapes for medicine, for food, for safety. Today, I was just reading the canal path, but the old skills made themselves known.

As central Phoenix gathered itself into daytime—cars thickening on the roads, planes already slicing lines across the sky—I was nearing home. The saguaro sentinels faded into backyards and side lots, hidden behind stucco walls and chain-link fences. A lone mesquite shaded the corner where I waited briefly for a light, its fine leaves filtering the hard sun into something gentler on my face. I breathed in the faint tar-and-earth smell rising from the pavement and thought, with a kind of quiet certainty: I am not done with this. Not with this bike, not with these canals, not with this endless choreography of water and desert and human bodies in motion.

And somewhere between the canal’s shimmer and the growing heat, I felt a quiet invitation: that when I go into the dreamworld again, when I close my eyes and step back into that other kind of night, Don José might visit me once more. Maybe he’ll be in the yerbería, maybe he’ll be on that red Schwinn, riding just ahead of me on a path that curves beyond the horizon. Either way, I know his laughter will find me, and I will recognize it as easily as I recognize the smell of creosote after rain.