Dalva (37 page)

Paul looked through a file cabinet, found an envelope, and handed it to me, saying that it wasn't too important but he had meant to send it to me while I was in Brazil in the mid-seventies. He and his friend Douglas had written it so I would remember the Loreto area as it was during my recovery, not what had become of the the area in recent years. Douglas had introduced me to the Cabeza Prieta and I asked how he was doing. Paul said that he was busy shocking normal folks and had just headed north with his family to spend the summer with grizzly bears. Douglas was another living fatality of our last war but, unlike Duane, had the sort of functional and literate intelligence that gave him the perspective to stay alive.

Ruth arrived at the last minute before dinner, running late because she had been reading a book called
Arctic Dreams
and had been carried away—the book must have been fascinating because Ruth was one of those overly punctual souls who arrived everywhere quite early. When we were girls she'd suggest we go riding at eight-fifteen in the morning and she meant eight-fifteen on the dot. I suppose I'm the opposite—dates and numbers have always been an abstraction to me.

It turned out she rather liked Paul's neighbor, Fred, the divorced rancher. I felt noncommittal about him after a half-hour's chat; he wore slightly too much cologne, his informal ranch clothes were too precisely tailored and didn't seem quite comfortable, the sort of clothes a CEO would wear at a chuck-wagon outing at a Phoenix convention. He was terribly bright and knowledgeable, but lacked the “indentations,” the unique character traits I look for in men. I imagined that he ate donuts with a fork and folded his underpants. This trace of bitchiness in me reminded me of what my Santa Monica gynecologist
friend had told me—that I was too “autolelic,” i.e., I only did things for and of themselves and lacked an overall “game plan.” At least with Fred there were no edges against which one could bruise—he had taken care of himself so well he'd likely grow old and die in a single minute when the time was appropriate. In contrast to these observations, which mostly meant I was overdue in getting out of southern California, Paul and Fred were having an engrossing discussion about the Apache wars wherein it finally took five thousand U. S. Army troops to capture the last seven Apaches. Then Fred began a semi-speech, I guessed for Ruth's benefit, about “the freedom and the heraldic mysteries of the desert,” and how “the heritage of freedom represented by this wild country must be preserved.” Paul became a little irritable, perhaps not noticeably to anyone else, but I could tell by the peculiar way his eyes began to shine. His voice remained soft which always served to make people more attentive.

“You can't make the desert represent a freedom you should have organized for yourself in your bedroom or living room. That's what is so otiose about nearly all nature writing. People naturally shed their petty and inordinate grievances in the natural world, then resume them when the sheer novelty dissipates. We always destroy wilderness when we make it represent something else, because that something else can always fall out of fashion. Freedom to the all-terrain-vehicle addict, the mining and oil and timber companies, has always meant the absolute license to do as they wish, while ‘heritage' is a word brought up by politicians to recall a virtue they can't quite remember. The only traceable heritage related to our use of the land is to exhaust it.”

“You're trying to tell me you feel as free on the crapper as we did down in the Baranca del Cobre?” There was a trace of pink in Fred's earlobes that he hoped to diminish by a witticism.

“I feel as free—which is your word, not mine—though naturally not as exhilarated. When you first come to the desert, and I suspect it's true of any wild area, it's just a desert, an accretion of all the bits and pieces of information and opinion you've picked up along the way about deserts. Then you study and walk and camp in the desert for years, as we both have,
and it becomes, as you say, heraldic, mysterious, stupefying, full of auras and ghosts, with the voices of those who lived there speaking from every petroglyph and pottery shard. At this point you must let the desert go back to being the desert or you'll gradually become quite blind to it. Of course, on a metaphoric level the desert is an unfathomably intricate prison, and you may understandably wish to play with this fact, comparing it to your own life. By not letting places be themselves we show our contempt for them. We bury them in sentiment, then suffocate them to death in one way or another. I can ruin both the desert and the Museum of Modern Art in New York by carrying to them an insufferable load of distinctions that disallows actually seeing the flora and fauna or the paintings. Children are usually better at finding mushrooms and arrowheads because they are either ignorant of or unwilling to carry the load.” He paused, slightly embarrassed, then bustled out into the kitchen to get another bottle of wine. I felt a specific admiration for Fred because he acted as though he had just heard something fascinating, which I thought we all had. Paul was genuinely apologetic about his speech.

“This Burgundy is a little fancy for Henry's
carne seca,
but then I rarely get to see my nieces at the same time. Maybe I'm getting Alzheimer's. I sat down on a rock up Sycamore Creek last week and lost track of five hours. If Daisy here hadn't started barking from hunger I might still be there.” He patted the yellow Labrador beside his chair and fed it a tidbit of meat.

“Maybe one of your abandoned ghosts kept you there,” I said.

“Probably. When you're old you tend to stick to a place if you like it. I saw a girl in the museum in Nogales the other day and that upset me. She was very beautiful and I was sure I had seen her in Tucson in 1949. Ruth, will you play something morose and sentimental?”

Ruth gave Fred a friendly pat, got up, and went to the piano with an un typically crazy smile. She began with a harpsichord imitation, lapsed into a polka, then slid into the Debussy she knew Paul favored. In turn he laughed, closed his eyes, then smiled. When I looked at him I couldn't help wondering what sort of man my father would have become.

I slept badly and got up just before daylight to leave for Nebraska. In my dreams I had been chased around the desert, finally escaping to the high country near Paul's ranch, where my invisible pursuers had trapped me at the spring I had visited with Paul the day before. I was relieved when the sound of the first rooster drove them away.

A small stovelight was on and coffee was made. In the first bit of light I could see the outline of Paul at a table out on the small veranda that adjoined the kitchen. The birds had become very loud and the roosters down the valley sounded as if they were trying to fight the wild birds with sheer noise. It is out of fashion now but there is something endearing and absurd about the way a rooster behaves, the comic indomitability of his walk.

We had a pleasant half-hour and then said goodbye. He thought he might drive up for a visit in late July or August, partly to give Michael a hand. He laughed softly when he mentioned Michael's name, saying there was something of Petrouchka in his character. Paul wanted to show me a few things in the basement of the farmhouse and wondered if I knew they were there. I said I did but Grandfather had asked me to wait until this summer to take a look. Paul had wanted to make sure in case he “kicked off” because they were so well hidden they wouldn't otherwise be found.

My drive north was wonderful because I had taken the trip many times and was anticipating favorite places with pleasure. I cut off at Lordsburg for Silver City and the Caballo exit on Route 25, making Socorro by evening and checking into the same dreary but favorite motel. I drove a few miles south to the village of San Antonio for dinner at a cafe that I had discovered with Charlene twenty-five years before. It was near the Bosque del Apache bird refuge that Naomi loved so much. Over dinner I took out the envelope from Paul and Douglas.

Dear Woman of the World,

Here are a few notes from two thoroughly irresponsible men who study things that won't buy you a drink. Come back, little Sheba!

LORETO AREA

Standing on the coarse sand beach of Loreto, even when heading north, the eye is drawn south along the increasingly rugged coast and out to the midrift islands, past Isla Carmen to turtle-shaped Monserato and beyond to Isla Catalina. In the calm of daybreak the islands and headlands shift in the sea, mirages, making the actual landscape impossible to tell even half a mile off shore. The colors run a wider spectrum than the Pacific, rose and mauve of dawn turning royal purple then more shades of gold and crimson at dusk. Along the south coast the Sierra de la Gigante dominates the landscape; there are desert bighorn sheep and deer and lion in these rugged mountains and mysterious rock paintings in hematitic ocher splashed by ancient Indians on an overhang of granite fifteen to twenty feet overhead of life-sized and bigger figures and animals as if slapped on with pole-sized Matisse brushes by giants.

If the mountains are an intimidation (a wall of rotten barren rock rising along an escarpment 1,500 feet high perhaps totally without water) the islands to the east are inviting; it's hard to resist checking them out by sea. Not so much Carmen, the biggest; Monserato though low has rocky coasts and pirate gold buried somewhere among the bursera (elephant trees), torote, cholla, and barrel cactus. By midday the early calm is replaced by mild breeze and choppy water. Even if out of your way you want to head for Catalina, best known for a species of rattleless rattlesnake found nowhere else. The truth is that everything living on each of these islands is a bit unique having evolved on volcanic peaks sinking in the waters filling the San Andreas Fault, which slipped violently, creating the Sea of Cortez some 15 million years ago. South of here melanism has prevailed in a species of jackrabbit living among gray andesties and scabrous vegetation—also unique. On Catalina, barrel cactus reach ten feet and nothing is like anything else. The only things familiar are feral goats released by 19th-century whalers in hope of future fresh meat.

Everywhere are birds, gulls of three species and terns and boobies, particularly around seamounts and dolphin-slashing schools of herring, which you can see dive-bombing the baitfish a mile distant. Along the coasts brown pelicans and cormorants perch on rocks and headlands.

In these open waters you see manta rays, the biggest maybe fifteen feet, leaping perhaps to dislodge parasites and hammerheads checking out the boat. Finback whales are resident and before the sea grows rough dolphinfish cruise by. Sometimes you see roosterfish, yellowtail, or bonito ripping into balls of baitfish the size of baseball diamonds accompanied by the diving birds which turn the ocean surface greasy.

Underwater the mass of critter life boggles the mind. The upwellings teem with plankton making the sea a bit cloudier than the crystalline Caribbean. Swimming along any of these islands you see triggerfish, parrotfish, needlefish, grouper of several kinds; close up scorpion fish, blowfish, and gobies, and rafts of smaller fishes everywhere. Ten feet off a cliff of Catalina you see a school of yellowtail in April beyond the 4-inch spines of sea urchin covering the rock you cling to in the surf. To eat there are cabrilla and black sea bass. Cruising the sandy bays you see 5-foot-wide eagle rays so numerous in four feet of water you can barely find standing room in between; deeper are brown electric rays with a spot on their back and smaller rays closer to shore. Garden eels wave like grasses growing out of the sandy ocean bottom. Among the rocks there are moray eels, some spotted, who look frightening when caught in the open. Three miles south of the yellowtail is the best shallow-water spiny-lobster area in the gulf.

At night you burn driftwood, which often flames green and red or orange from trace elemental metals, because the local bursera and paloverde make poor firewood. During the long nights of winter's new moons you might learn the constellations as never before, beginning with the great square of Pegasus and waking every three hours to identify the new ones swinging in on the celestial clock from the east until Sagittarius fades in the light of dawn. In a tiny cave on the side of a wash 4-inch black scorpions by the dozens mate combatively by flashlight. The unique species of rattlesnake is aggressive by Arizona standards and shakes his rattle less tail under a huge native fig tree whose big green leaves seem out of character next to the jungle of sweet-and-sour pitahaya cactus overgrown with a thick cobweb of dried vine on the slopes above; close up the live strands of vine lacing the spines of a pitahaya dulce have tiny bell-shaped white flowers.

Heading north of Loreto the coast is gentle with coves separated by headlands and small rocky islands. There are palmas in the larger washes and an occasional rancheria. Sometimes you see wild burros on the beach and in protected coves and on secure wave-cut benches sleep herds of sea lions whose racket can keep you awake two miles away during the full moon. You find clams and mussels most anywhere though especially in the
mangroves rich in shellfish and red snapper,
huachinango al mojo de ajo
broiled over root of saltbrush which is fished by green and black-crowned night herons and egrets; the call of the mangrove warbler is distinct once you see one chipping; fortunately the more distant males do the singing. Oysters are not as abundant as they once were though the beaches are covered with winged oyster shells fished out by 19th-century pearlers.

Reaching the mouth of Bahía Concepción the same is true of butter clams and Pacific crayfish. This intertidal zone was once known for powderhorn-shaped pinshells whose hinge muscle eaten raw with a
picante
sauce of tomato is a treat. From earlier trips you mjght notice the depletion of large sailfish, marlin, and tortuava though the gulf still feels like Nebraska maybe did in 1870—there were still so many of them.

The ocean can be rough, sometimes for days in winter and spring, though the big
chubascos
are in summer. Except for rare mornings there is always a breeze, important in summer when clouds of gnats and mosquitoes hover along beaches and mangroves.

Walking the beaches, you see grunion in spring or late winter a few days before those big tides of the full moon and roosterfish-slashing baitfish in the breaking waves only a few feet from shore. Tiny gastropods, clams of several species, and shells of cowries require worm-eye viewing. Some beaches are covered with pink murax shells. On calm March mornings a thin line of krill might lie at the high-tide mark. Larger relatives, six-inch Pacific-type shrimp, swim along the boat in deep water and hide under piers. At night you can always see dinoflagelates phosphoresce in the surf, seasonally blooming as red tides. On the rocky shores and islands the easiest way to travel is often at low tide on the wave-cut benches below the cliffs and headlands, being careful not to get caught below sheer cliffs with rising tides. . . .