What We Carry Home from a Walk in the Desert
What We Carry Home from a
Walk in the Desert
My work puts me in front of a lot of people,
usually for a reason and for a short time. But I take those meetings
personally. A stranger can become a friend in the middle of a conversation.
Even if all we get is a couple of hours, I take that time seriously.
My walk yesterday organized by Experience Scottsdale walking through
the Desert Botanical Garden with three visiting gents, journalists and a PR
Agency from France was one of those moments. It mattered to me. It mattered to
them. And it mattered to the plants.
I got there early and walked
the perimeter outside the Garden, looking at a moment in time that is rare and
celebrated, The desert rich in remnants of a heavy rainstorm.
We'd just had heavy rain,
which is a gift in the desert. The creosote and the brittlebush were plump. The
Texas sage, whose flowers are rain indicators were screaming purple, the way it
only gets when the humidity wakes up its flowers. Tiny blooms were just
starting to pop. The air was rich with the smell of creosote and the oils of
the other desert plants. I could see everything pulsing, something my plant
teachers taught me in the beginning of my learnings, how to observe.
That smell is the signature
of the Sonoran Desert after rain. Shrubs like creosote, bursage, and
brittlebush seem to wake up after a good soaking, sending out new leaves and
flowers that feed the pollinators and the people who know them. The desert
feels dry, but water is always moving here, underground and in brief, powerful
rains. That morning, you could feel it.
The sun was coming up over
the east. It was about 8:30 and already bright, and I stood there breathing the
desert in, deep.
I was born and raised here.
Every time I've left to live somewhere else, I couldn't wait to get back. That
morning took me right back to my young childhood, when the desert hadn't been
swallowed up by asphalt and concrete. It was a beautiful moment, and I let
myself have it.
Then Olivier, the translator
from the PR agency in France, texted me. He Eric the photographer and Alain
the editor of Dandy Magazine had pulled over on the drive in because the light
on the landscape was so beautiful and their photographer wanted to take some
pictures for the piece they were working on. I was doing the same thing, just a little
further down the road.
I'm never bored in a place
like that, and I'm never in a hurry to move through it. For me it's a time of
contemplation and remembrance. When you're connected to nature, you're always a
student, because she is always teaching you something, showing you something
you might not have seen before.
I met the gentlemen at the gate,
and we began the way I start all my plant walks, with the land before it was
a desert. The Ice Age. The ice melting, and how the plants and animals began to
develop here. The Sonoran Desert, as we know, took shape as the region grew
warmer and drier, about 12,000 to 9,000 years ago. The desert tortoise is one
of the few creatures that was here through all of that, and its species changed
right along with the land.
I told them what makes this
desert unusual. We get two rainy seasons, gentle winter storms and powerful
summer monsoons. That double rhythm is a big reason the Sonoran is one of the
most diverse deserts on Earth. More than 2,000 native plant species grow here,
and more than 500 kinds of animals live among them, including at least 60
mammals, 350 birds, 100 reptiles, 20 amphibians, and about 30 native fish.
Roughly one-fifth of the desert's plants are edible, and nearly 540 of them are
documented as food by more than fifty Indigenous cultures. Many of them are
medicine too.
Then we walked and talked
about photosynthesis, about thorns and why they developed, about food sources
and the microbes beneath our feet. As we moved deeper into the Garden, I shared
some of my own story with plants, and about my mother and my grandmother.
They were curious. How does
a man with a Scottish father and an Indigenous mother come to be such a
traditionalist in his stories? I laughed, and I told them I was raised in my
mother's culture. I never knew my father. They were married, but they couldn't
reconcile their cultural differences and what mattered to each of them, and she
came back to Arizona. I was born here. My family is Cora and Yaqui of Mexican
origin, and I believe it was a gift to be raised in her world, and in my
great-grandmother's world.
As I showed them the
saguaros, the saguaro skeletons and boots, the agaves and the prickly pear, I
did what I always do. I told them the plants are relatives, not scenery.
The saguaro is the great
one. Its ripe red fruit is picked in early summer, eaten fresh, boiled into
syrup, or made into ceremonial wine. The seeds are dried and ground into a
rich, oily meal. For the Tohono O'odham, the saguaro harvest marks the desert's
new year, welcoming the rains and renewing the relationship between people,
plants, and clouds. Those saguaro boots we stood looking at are what's left
when a woodpecker drills a nest and the cactus heals around the wound. The scar
hardens into a tough little room, and one day another bird moves in.
The prickly pear gives us
nopales, the pads, eaten fresh or cooked like a vegetable, and tunas, the
fruit, turned into juice, jelly, and syrup. Its gel has long been used as a
soothing balm for sunburn and skin irritation. We talked about the cholla, whose
flower buds are picked before they open, de-spined, and roasted or boiled, an
old calcium-rich food that O'odham communities gathered every season.
At the agave, I told them
that it is a pantry and a hardware store in one plant. The hearts were
slow-cooked in earth ovens until they turned sweet and caramelized. The leaves
were twisted into cord, nets, sandals, and mats, and the dry stalks became poles
for building. Agaves live for years, send up one tall flower stalk, and then
die, often leaving pups behind. The stalk feeds bats, moths, bees, and
hummingbirds, one bloom becoming a festival. Across the desert you can still
find agaves growing in old planting lines and rock grids, the living remains of
farming that Hohokam and O'odham people did hundreds of years ago. I shared with
them that these are not food practices from the past. All over the Americas
these plants still feed, clothe and nourish humans in their homes and communities.
Then the trees. Mesquite
gives sweet pods ground into high-fiber meal, sap you can chew on the trail,
and teas for sore throats and upset stomachs. Palo verde gives green pods and
sweet flowers, and it nurses other plants as it fixes nitrogen in the soil.
Ironwood has wood so dense it makes long-lasting cooking coals, and it shelters
more life than almost anything else out here. A tree can be a pantry, a clinic,
and a shade structure at the same time.
And the shrubs, which are
the apothecary. Creosote, for teas, washes, and oils, and for cleansing and
protection. Brittlebush, whose resin is warmed into a salve for the chest,
chewed for sore gums, or burned as incense, which some call the poor man's copal.
Triangle-leaf bursage, the nurse shrub that shelters a young saguaro through
its first hard years.
The plants never walk alone.
I told the journalists that studying nature is never only about plants. It is
always about relationships.
The Gila woodpecker drills
the saguaro, then carries pollen and seed from cactus to cactus. The old holes
shelter elf owls, kestrels, and purple martins. White-winged doves arrive with
the heat to drink saguaro nectar and eat the fruit, and by summer, they are in
a way made of saguaro. Lesser long-nosed bats work the night shift at the
flowers while bees and birds take the day. The cactus wren, our state bird,
weaves its football-shaped nest in the cholla, where the thorns guard it, and
it scolds from the top of the saguaros. Gambel's quail which we saw on our
walk, run in family coveys beneath the mesquite, their comma-shaped plumes
bobbing. The roadrunner sprints after lizards, then stands in the early sun
with its dark back turned to the light, charging up.
On the ground, javelina
travel in small herds through the washes, eating prickly pear and turning the
soil with their rooting, which helps plant seeds. Coyotes yip at dusk and keep
the rabbits and rodents in balance. The jackrabbit cools itself through its
enormous ears. The kangaroo rat almost never drinks water at all. It gets what
it needs from the seeds it eats, which is the desert's whole water economy told
by one small animal. Mule deer, bobcats, and mountain lions move along the
edges of our trails more often than we realize, and we usually know them only
by tracks. The Gila monster, the horned lizard, and the desert tortoise each
carry their own part of this story, and hundreds of kinds of native bees do the
pollinating of mesquite, palo verde, and brittlebush.
I like to tell people that
ants can be read as a sign of moisture. Their behavior shifts when rain is
near. Indigenous farmers here have long read the sky, wind, ants, and birds as
a forecast, deciding when to plant, when to travel, and when to stay close to
home.
These men were curious about
everything, and it carried us far beyond the garden paths. Those were some of
my favorite conversations.
Standing at the prickly
pear, I was back in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, remembering the Amazigh, the indigenous
people of that land. I met them in their communities and they shared how they use prickly pear and other plants in their
daily lives. Same plant, another continent, other hands. As a world traveler, I
loved being able to revisit those places and those faces, in conversation right
her in the Sonoran Desert.
Their questions took us to
the Maya and the Mexica. To Sonora wheat and Father Kino, and how those seeds
became part of the food and memory of the borderlands. To Oaxaca, and the plant
culture of the Indigenous people who live there.
We talked about the sixty-eight
Indigenous peoples in Mexico, with more than 360 languages and variants. More
than 500 tribes in the United States. Think about the varieties of plants held
within all of those cultures, and how differently each one has used them. The
same plant can mean something entirely different from one community to the
next. That is where the richness is.
I asked them to imagine this
part of the continent with no borders at all. The Sonoran Desert reaches far
past Phoenix. The Apache, the O'odham, the Seri, the Pascua Yaqui, and other people
all lived and still live in this region, calling this landscape home as they move across it. I told them about S'edav
Va'aki Museum, and the chocolate and macaw wings that were found there, which
tell us how far these relationships stretched.
And these men, who live in
Europe, brought their own thoughts to the walk. They talked about what it means
to be human, and about freedom. They talked about the freedom of the wind and
the seeds, which have never once asked permission to cross a border.
I'll remember that one for a
long time.
Two hours went by. When we
got back to the front gate and said our goodbyes, I felt something I can only
call enchantment. I was standing with men from another part of the world, and
we had connected on a human level. I think that is what matters most when
people come to the desert. They take it back with them.
I gave each of them a
creosote bundle. I told them, when you're sitting at your desk, or reading a
book and your mind wanders to the desert, she is calling you, take in the scent of this bundle.
Remember this walk. Remember what we shared here.
I though in my heart as they
departed, it is a gift to the desert that they came, and that they wanted to
talk and write about her. And I know that sharing their company was also a gift to me.
Whenever I think of France, I will think of these men and the moments we shared
together as humans in the Sonoran Desert.
I don't know if our paths
will cross again. But I hope that somewhere far from Arizona, the smell of
creosote carries them back to that morning. And I hope what we talked about
keeps traveling, the way the wind and the seeds do.
Post walk note to Megan of Experience Scottsdale-
If you are a journalist, producer, or organization looking to tell the story of the Sonoran Desert, its plants, its animals, and the Indigenous peoples who have cared for it for generations, I would love to walk it with you. Reach me through Tarra Lazos Creative
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