In October 2021, I found myself driving with Gary Paul Nabhan along the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Arizona, a landscape that has served as the esteemed botanist, activist, and author’s lifelong laboratory and sanctuary. For half a century, these Borderlands have been his domain of research and artistic expression, his home – residing a mere 22 miles from the Nogales port of entry – and, profoundly, the landscape of his heart. It is a region that has also held a deep fascination for me, and it is through Gary’s teachings that I’ve come to understand the border as far more than an arbitrary line etched into the desert sand.

Gary’s intimate connection with the border region began in the early 1970s, through his continuous visits, habitation, and crossings. I, in turn, have followed in his footsteps, bearing witness to the intricate human and ecological dramas unfolding along this frontier since 1984. On this particular journey, Gary was clad in his characteristic field attire: a well-worn khaki baseball cap, a faded T-shirt bearing a Spanish slogan urging peasants to "rise up," and a simple wooden cross adorning his neck. His chin was framed by a full cascade of gray whiskers, and a gentle belly rested comfortably over his loose-fitting jeans. He possessed the unmistakable bearing of a farmer, and his deep gray-blue eyes, pools of shimmering light, animated his face as he spoke with a soft rasp.

"It’s okay to have boundaries in our lives," Gary once shared with me, reflecting on the very line that captivates us both. "But if we were to seal shut all the pores on our skin, or all the stomata on a plant leaf, we would perish. Therefore, we truly need porous borders, for it is a time-tested method of enriching life rather than stifling it."

Our journey took us along the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide federal easement established by Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 for security purposes, stretching across 632 miles of the international boundary. We traversed the U.S. side, within the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, a vibrant ecotone where desert scrub transitions into grasslands within the Chihuahuan Desert. It is a landscape that Theodore Roosevelt could scarcely have envisioned in its current state: a militarized, hybridized desert, teeming with Customs and Border Protection agents in trucks, on ATVs, and on horseback, operating an expansive network of surveillance towers and drones, illuminated nightly by stark, carceral lighting.

There stood the wall: 30-foot-high, rust-hued bollards starkly silhouetted against the impossibly cerulean blue of an early autumn desert sky. We navigated through puddles of muddy water left by late-season monsoon thunderstorms. My gaze was drawn northward, to the exquisite ecological paradox of the refuge: the riparian desert. Sacaton grass swayed in the breeze, stands of creosote, the stoic desert dweller, offered splashes of yellow blossoms, and nearby, thick-trunked cottonwoods reached skyward, their leaves catching and sparkling in the sunlight.

Historically, springs, creeks, and ephemeral washes sustained wetlands here, fostering a rich diversity of flora and fauna, including hundreds of bird species and dozens of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, such as the endangered Yaqui chub and Yaqui topminnow, and the threatened Yaqui catfish. While human development had depleted these water sources throughout the 20th century, the designation of the refuge in 1982 initiated a significant restoration process.

However, this refuge was also among the hundreds of miles targeted for the construction of President Donald Trump’s "big, beautiful wall." Numerous environmental and cultural protection statutes were bypassed. During the initial Trump administration, $408 million was allocated for the region, and crews dug a well adjacent to the refuge to supply water for mixing concrete, a move that inflicted damage upon the delicate desert wetland biome. Once completed, the wall effectively halted most cross-border mammal migration, though it likely had minimal to no impact on drug smuggling, as it is estimated that the majority of illicit substances enter the country through official ports of entry.

As we rattled eastward along the border, we found ourselves immersed in reminiscence, reflecting on the profound changes witnessed over just a few decades. I recounted to Gary the time I observed crews constructing a border fence west of our current location, near the Santa Cruz River. This fence was ingeniously designed with openings large enough to prevent desert windstorms from toppling it, yet small enough to deny any human handhold for scaling. During my visit, a swarm of grasshoppers nimbly navigated through these openings – undocumented, more-than-human entities circumventing the human-made barrier.

Gary then brought up the San Miguel Gate on the Tohono O’odham Nation, a territory that spans dozens of border miles. This had been an informal crossing where the fence simply ceased, the "gate" being largely symbolic. For years, it had been respected by the Border Patrol due to O’odham ceremonial routes and the presence of binational Indigenous families. While vehicular traffic had been halted there for years, it wasn’t by the CBP. In a twist of cruel irony, an actual gate was erected and welded shut by a Mexican landowner on the opposite side.

We both fondly recalled another informal crossing, the one at Boquillas in Big Bend National Park, on the banks of the Rio Grande. There, an elderly man would ferry visitors across when the river was low, allowing them to enjoy a cold beverage on the Mexican side, with no Border Patrol in sight. (Residents of West Texas and aficionados of Americana may recognize this spot from a song by singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen.)

The wave of nostalgia made the sight of today’s fence even more poignant. Stretching across the desert plain for dozens of miles, its 30-foot height made it appear as incongruous as the black slab that incites violence in early hominids in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the natural desert landscape, there is nothing of this shape or color; it is a foreign object violently inserted into the land, irrevocably altering it.

And then, it was gone.

We stopped the truck and disembarked. The most recent monsoon storm had flooded the wash that the fence spanned, tearing a series of bollard gates from their hinges, effectively blowing the wall wide open. The Army Corps of Engineers had designed these gates for such flooding, but they were intended to be opened manually before the monsoon season. During the storm, water flowed north to south at a rate of 290 cubic feet per second – approximately 112,200 gallons per minute – crashing into the wall in a surge that may have reached heights of 25 feet.

For a sense of scale, I asked Gary to stand near the remnants of the wall, his body mere inches from the Mexican side. The debris line extended several feet above his head. A Border Patrol surveillance tower stood a few yards away.

"The Border Patrol is going to show up any minute now," I remarked to Gary.

They never arrived.

For those brief moments, Gary and I shared a glimpse into the past, before the wall’s imposition. And perhaps, a glimpse into a future where all human barriers are ultimately swept away by the currents of time.

There are many facets to Gary. He is the MacArthur "genius grant" recipient ethnobotanist who revolutionized his field by harmonizing "objective" science with social witness and accompaniment – a practice, inspired by Catholic social teaching, of simply being present and offering service when and where needed within Indigenous communities. He is the scholar and activist of the Arizona and Sonora Borderlands, a region where he has dedicated half a century to study and life. Gary is also a co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, a pioneering arid lands seedbank. He embodies the spirit-questing individual, a member of the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans, inspired by St. Francis of Assisi’s profound reverence for both human and more-than-human sanctity and vulnerability. Furthermore, Gary is a prolific writer whose work transcends genre, encompassing scientific articles, narrative nonfiction, and poetry, with 36 books to his name, almost all of them monographs. In these works, he fluidly traverses not only forms but also places, peoples, and the more-than-human world, exploring the biological-cultural-spiritual essence of mesquite trees, the cultural significance of distilled agaves, curating vignettes of American and non-American activists, artists, and visionaries, and offering a Gospel-oriented guide for farmers and fishers. This past summer, he published Water in the Desert, his first true autobiography, a book that reads as an ambitious attempt to weave together these diverse threads into a unified field theory, braiding together matter, history, and spirit.

From his earliest days as a college student studying and observing the Borderlands, Gary has meticulously documented loss – the erosion of habitat and species, the erosion of civil rights, and the diminishing desert vistas now punctuated by walls. His debut book, The Desert Smells Like Rain, poignantly chronicled the precarious future of the Tohono O’odham people’s ancient dryland-farming traditions. More than four decades later, Water in the Desert details the profound degradation of the border biome near his home in Patagonia, Arizona. Throughout his career, he has maintained a consistent tone, characterized by an Old Testament-like lament, tempered by wry humor and an effortless command of puns. He writes about the interconnectedness of mesquite trees in the desert Southwest, playfully transforming "ménage à trois" into "ménage à tree." Ultimately, his work cycles through grief, consistently arriving at hard-won seeds of renewal and recovery.

I had intended to write this story in 2021, but found myself unable to write at all. Five years passed, and only recently have I begun to write again, having navigated my own profound losses. Gary, who is a little over a decade my senior, was a significant catalyst for my return to writing. I have reached an age where AARP mailers arrive regularly, and one of the revelations of this season is that being an elder does not preclude the need for elders older than oneself to illuminate the path ahead, even as one increasingly fulfills that role for those younger.

Therefore, I am writing about my elder. But Gary is also, particularly in the desert West, our elder, for all who cherish the land and its myriad inhabitants.

The pursuit of this writing project led me to his home and onto the road, evolving from a journalistic endeavor into a deepening mentorship and friendship. Even when I believed I would never complete this story, our conversations continued. More accurately, he maintained contact with me. I would be hiking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park (where I lived for years), the fog-laden breeze rustling through Monterey cypress boughs, mirroring the sodden state of my mind, and he would call, simply to discuss a new book he had read about the Sanctuary movement, or about folk music, or about a magnificent thunderstorm that had just swept across the desert. I believe he was intentionally accompanying me through my period of darkness.

His voice and his texts have been a constant companion for years. The stack of books on my desk, lectures on YouTube, our conversations in his Prius (its driver’s side door bearing a peeling "No Border Wall" sticker in cholo-style Old English script) as we navigated the southern Arizona roads. Dozens of iPhone photos and videos on my phone, Gary documented in my laptop journals and in my indecipherable reporter’s notebooks.

To journey alongside Gary is to engage in a profound dialogue with the world, to perceive it intimately through its landscapes and species, its policies and its poetry.

I am listening to an audio recording from a 2021 visit to Quitobaquito, a natural spring mere dozens of yards from the border and one of the most sacred sites for the Hia-C’ed O’odham and Tohono O’odham peoples. Like the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, it serves as a critical crossroads, maintained to this day for Indigenous peoples’ historical migratory and ceremonial routes, as well as for the sustenance of desert flora and fauna.

Bulrushes encircled the pond like a reedy picket fence; a pair of old cottonwoods nearby stood taller than anything else in the vicinity, save for the Border Patrol surveillance towers. I had heard about Trump’s wall in this area, but nothing could have prepared me for the stark juxtaposition of this miraculous spring – the largest water source for many miles – and the wall, featuring the same 30-foot-high bollards as those at San Bernardino, over 200 miles to the east as the crow flies.

Aside from the distant traffic on Mexican Highway 2 across the line, the atmosphere was tranquil. Joe Biden was in the White House, and the construction of the wall had been halted. Gary, along with longtime friend and Tohono O’odham leader Austin Nuñez, had recently published a manifesto in the New York Times advocating for the healing of the wounds inflicted upon the Borderlands during Trump’s first term: "We must reimagine the landscapes we share with Mexico. The border should not be a line that divides cultures and fragments their desert environment. It is a juncture where two nations connect, where history is shared, where cultures are alive and where a common future must unfold."

At the time, we had no inkling that this moment of hope was merely a temporary reprieve. The modest reclamation efforts undertaken under Biden would not only be reversed in Trump’s second term, but a new wave of violence was imminent – preparations for a second wall, running parallel to the first, promising an even graver desecration than under Trump I. In our innocence, we envisioned an open-ended period of recovery.

A solitary coot, its long pale beak sharply contrasting with its flat-black feathers, glided across the center of the main pond, seemingly indifferent to its human visitors. Rivulets feeding the pond created small pools where the endemic and endangered Quitobaquito pupfish, one of the most resilient desert natives, had adapted to high salinity and water temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It had also, remarkably, survived the border wall construction and the rumbling of Border Patrol vehicles along the Roosevelt Reservation.

I noticed a distinct, uniform color change on the bulrushes – a transition from lime-green to an oatmeal hue approximately three feet above the waterline.

Inquiring about the groundwater depletion, Gary explained, "They pumped 800,000 gallons per mile of border wall to construct the concrete footing, and this is a fragile aquifer." The flow from the spring into the pond had been diminishing even before the wall’s construction, largely due to agricultural practices on the Sonoran side. Coupled with record-breaking heat, it had reached its second-lowest level in recorded history.

On the recording, I can hear myself repeatedly sighing and exclaiming, "God!"

The impact on the pond correlated with a steady decline in bird populations. According to research Gary conducted for a study published in the Journal of Arid Environments, 45 bird species promptly disappeared, though there was a temporary increase of 15 others – primarily accidentals like sandpipers and dowitchers migrating from the Gulf of California, species adapted to lower water levels and mudflats.

Gary has been visiting this site since the 1970s. The pause in wall construction did not undo the decades of damage that had already occurred.

"See those two cottonwoods there?" Gary pointed, their green leaves shimmering in the breeze. "There used to be 15, 20 of them. I lowered my son down to the water to have him baptized by a Catholic priest and an Indian medicine man right off that cottonwood there." He then gestured to the skeletal remains of a collapsed tree. "It died three or four years ago. So, there’s been a complete habitat decline since I did my dissertation here in 1982."

We returned to observe the pupfish one more time. My eyesight is poor, and I had not seen them clearly when we first walked by the shallow pools in the filtered light of a mesquite thicket. This time, I knelt down and caught glimpses of iridescence – flashes of blues and silvers from males and females. The guppy-like fish had been critically endangered even before the wall construction began, with such a high probability of extinction that Biosphere 2 had collected a few dozen specimens and introduced them to a stream environment within their "desert biome" at the research center, serving as a sanctuary to perpetuate the species should it vanish from Quitobaquito.

Gary was carrying a cherished volume of desert verse, by his friend, the Tohono O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda, titled Ocean Power. He settled at a peeling, splintered picnic table and began writing a letter to her on the blank pages at the end of the book, stating his desire to "speak" to Zepeda from this sacred place, where cell reception was nonexistent. He had listened to her recount her childhood visits to Quitobaquito, and he expressed his gratitude for her mentorship in O’odham dialects.

Zepeda’s poems are meticulously crafted, limpid, and spare desert verses. Consider her poem, "Morning Air": "The early morning air, / enveloped in heavy moisture. / I go outside and it lays on my shoulders. / I go about my business, / carrying the morning air / for the rest of the day." This is how desert dwellers, both human and more-than-human, endure: the moisture is both a tangible substance and a spiritual essence. It emerged into the world with the moist breath of the creator god I’itoi from a cave high atop Baboquivari Peak, that magnificent, ruddy, heart-shaped sky island that dominates the Tohono O’odham landscape and cosmology. It is a place where arroyos and tinajas fill during the sudden deluges of summer and the long, soaking rains of winter. I visited once on my own and became lost on the mountain – clearly, I was neither prepared nor welcome. Decades ago, Gary, already deeply immersed in his work alongside the "people of the desert" (the literal translation of "Tohono O’odham"), hiked to I’itoi’s cave with young O’odham pilgrims. In The Desert Smells Like Rain, he described the offerings within this sacred emergence place: rosaries, gum, cigarettes, and a multitude of other items hanging in the dimness. This profound experience prompted the following reflection: "There is always something hidden in this world, that you can’t just realize from the outside. You need to make contact with it now and then, to nod your head in knowing, to receive its blessing."

In a landscape marked by loss and grief, this act of making contact signifies holding onto the spirit of what has come before, what endures of what is even now vanishing, and what will be – perhaps even what will be again, reborn from drought, fire, or flood, from the harsh steel that slices through the desert.

The path to healing must be both a science and an art, a policy and a prayer, a poem. It is sacred activism.

The initial whisper of my dialogue with Gary occurred long before we met, sometime in the 1990s when I first read The Desert Smells Like Rain, a work widely regarded as a classic in arid and Borderlands ethnography and botany. The book opens with the blessing of a summer monsoon shower on the Tohono O’odham Nation; a young Native boy’s poetic observation became the book’s title, a reference to the fragrance released when raindrops activate the resins on creosote leaves. The nation’s ancestral lands extend across and beyond a border established in 1853, meaning this frontier, now 173 years old, has existed for less than 2% of the 10,000 years the O’odham and their ancestors have called the Sonoran Desert home.

As is often the case with scholars of the borderlands, Gary is not a native to the region. Like many artists and thinkers, he journeyed West seeking self-discovery within a world of intersecting cultures, with its inherent tensions and syntheses. The Borderlands, geopolitically defined, are situated on land that is itself a waystation, migratory in its very essence, both in human and more-than-human terms, a place of transitions stretching back into deep time.

Gary grew up amidst the Indiana Dunes, an unexpected oasis of aridity on the shores of Lake Michigan. He was raised by an Irish Catholic mother and a Lebanese American father, with a large extended paternal family. His profound attraction to the deserts of the American Southwest can be traced to the dunes of his youth and to his relatives’ ancestral roots in the arid lands between Lebanon, Syria, and Israel.

I was born in Southern California to an immigrant mother from El Salvador and a Mexican American father whose parents hailed from the arid North of Mexico; between my parents, a riparian desert landscape was forged. This shared experience of borders, and a ceaseless desire to traverse them, coupled with the experience of being repelled by them, of laughing at their absurdity, of shouting at them until our voices are hoarse, of despairing at them, contemplating them, kneeling in prayer before them, and mourning their terrible cost – the border dead, both human (at least 10,000 lives lost since 1994 on what the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration terms the "deadliest land crossing in the world") and more-than-human – is what Gary and I share.

In 2023, I embarked on another road trip with Gary, this time to the Sonoran coast on the Gulf of California, a significant origin point for him. He first encountered these traditional lands as an undergraduate at Prescott College, which has maintained a presence there since 1969. The journey was not without its challenges. On the way south, we met with his friend Wenceslao Monroy, a respected community leader (who has hosted delegations of Zapatistas from Chiapas), who recounted a harrowing tale of a close encounter with cartel violence that forced him to flee his family’s historic ranch for weeks. Later, Gary spent an extended period conversing with students at the Universidad de Sonora herbarium in Hermosillo, as this is when Gary is most authentically himself – engaging with those eager for knowledge and dialogue. It was then nightfall on an unlit, two-lane desert road that seemed to be frequented only by the foolishly intrepid, with no other vehicles in sight. Despite the challenging conditions, we arrived safely at the coast, where the following day, he gathered a bunch of glistening eelgrass as a documentary film crew’s high-definition cameras captured his expertise on what celebrity chefs have lauded as the new superfood – "sea rice," the grain that sprouts from the grass.

This attention was a welcome development for the Comcáac, an Indigenous people so geographically distant from centralized Mexican governmental authority that they have tenaciously cultivated their traditional identity, yet remain vulnerable to Mexico’s simultaneous romanticization of Indigenous history and its disregard for the welfare of contemporary Indigenous communities.

Here, in one of the communities Gary has visited for decades, the inevitable question regarding his positioning arose. It is a question I have grappled with since arriving at the borders of Indigeneity as a young writer. Fifty years ago, anthropology was still a discipline tainted by an often unconscious colonial gaze, the legacy of centuries of scribes documenting Native geographies and identities in service of military conquest, economic exploitation, and, at least according to the Church, spiritual salvation. Then, while Gary was in graduate school, Palestinian scholar and Columbia professor Edward Said published his groundbreaking work, Orientalism, exposing that very gaze. The immediate consequence was a critique of representational ethics and increased scrutiny of "objective" research for implicit power imbalances between the observer and the observed. This critique, however, did not originate with Said; it is as old as the resistance to colonialism itself and remains ongoing.

If Gary were a novice graduate student today seeking to research the Indigenous cultures of the Sonoran Desert, he would likely be questioned – by academic advisors and Indigenous leaders alike – about the nature of his relationships with his research participants (formerly referred to as "research subjects"). Would his mixed parentage (he identifies as Arab American) be perceived as fostering a more "horizontal" relationship, partially alleviating him of colonial baggage?

Today, Gary states he would not feel comfortable in such positions – that is, as an outsider with the privilege to come and go as they please, wielding the power to represent Indigenous "others" in writing.

Gary and I stand at a generational crossroads, witnessing a shift in leadership. Slightly older than I, he was educated under the academic ancien régime of mostly white male researchers working within Indigenous communities. However, we both participated in the post-Orientalism discourse that celebrated the border as the Borderlands – a physical place and a cultural space, a site of violence and suffering, but also of intentional blending and merging of languages and aesthetics, embodying the theory and practice of forging a "third country," a distinct and transcendent region, as an act of creative and spiritual survival.

But that moment too has passed, and in recent decades, there has been a more stringent demarcation of cultural boundaries, particularly between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, aligning with the ideal and practice of Native sovereignty.

None of this alters the reality of Gary’s relationships with the Tohono O’odham or the Comcáac, certainly not in the social sense, which I have witnessed on numerous occasions, nor in his body of research, nor in his steadfast allyship on critical issues such as the border wall and the preservation of arid lands and seeds. What has changed is that the Indigenous communities of the Americas, North and South, have steadily reclaimed the means of representation themselves.

This was vividly apparent with the Comcáac. We spent time with Alberto Mellado Moreno, a brilliant young scholar who has authored a quartet of history books and cultivated a robust social media presence, sharing spectacular drone footage of the Comcáac landscape. He now holds an elected position within the community. With a population that had dwindled to approximately 130 at the turn of the 20th century, the Comcáac have since rebounded to over 1,000 today.

One afternoon, on a sandy bluff overlooking the green, eelgrass-laden sea, with the serrated mass of Tiburón Island heaving from the water just a few miles to the west, Mellado regaled us with the Comcáac origin story. In his essay "Heeno," which Gary published in the anthology The Nature of Desert Nature, Mellado personifies the desert, which becomes the "skin" of creation: "… for I have grown a skin of sand and stone, of plants with spines and thorns, of leaflets small but fragrant, of miniscule pools of water that sparkle like gems in the sun."

The story of the Comcáac is so intrinsically intertwined with the story of the land that Mellado’s desert "skin" cannot conceive of its own survival without the Indigenous presence: "I knew that as long as they continued to live, I too would exist." This positions the Comcáac as guardians of that skin and calls upon the rest of us to emulate their example – a summons that reached me from Mellado through Gary. This represents one of Gary’s essential roles: an interlocutor, facilitating the transmission of knowledge and continuing the dialogue between those who were here first and remain, and those of us who, relative to the human history of the area, arrived only yesterday.

In March 2026, I found myself hiking with Gary in the Mojave. My elder maintains a steady, sure-footed pace. This morning, he was up at 6 a.m. for a 20-minute run.

We are staying at the 29 Palms Inn, one of the last vestiges of old-school, pre-Airbnb accommodations remaining in California’s high desert, featuring adobe cabins dating back to the 1920s. Joshua Tree National Park will be swarming with spring break crowds today, so I suggest the less-visited Covington Flats area, which boasts fewer granite boulders, a more expansive vista, and a nearly 30-year-old burn area that provides a research window into a critical climate impact in arid lands: the desert on fire.

It has been an unusual water year in the Mojave. Soaking rains arrived in November and December, followed by an unseasonably warm and dry January; modest rains finally returned in February, all of which caused the flora to exhibit a disrupted rhythm. When I visited in early January, there had already been sufficient rain and sun for the Joshua trees to prematurely sprout their large, creamy blossoms; in the dense stand of trees along the road to Covington, it appeared as though popcorn kernels had burst within the spiky green bowl of a gentle draw.

We park several miles in, with no other vehicles in sight.

A sweeping panorama unfolds – the land descends steeply southward before rising again; a rock-walled canyon opens to the east, while modest, gently formed peaks emerge to the west.

Back in 1999, the Juniper Complex Fire consumed nearly 14,000 acres, a finger of it reaching within a few hundred yards of the community where I lived at the time. I visited Covington Flats in the immediate aftermath of the fire and, with absolutely no scientific authority, felt that the desert I knew and cherished was irrevocably lost.

Humans process loss through established rituals of grief, a journey that is both intimate and communal. The more-than-human world also experiences loss, and its corollary to grief is adaptation, which is both species-specific and "communal" – no species exists in isolation. On our walks, Gary consistently points to cooperation rather than competition among organic life, noting a mature piñon pine "nursing" a Joshua tree seedling with its shade.

The fire did not obliterate the desert.

On my iPhone recordings, you can hear the crunch of our footsteps on the pebbly earth, the wonder in our voices. The Joshua blossoms, the carpet of brittlebush shoots with their yellow daisy-like flowers across the loamy plain, desert bluebells nodding their otherworldly cobalt hue, evening primrose thriving on the road berms, its flowers beginning to turn inward mid-morning for protection as the early spring sun silvers the land.

The devastation from decades ago is most evident in the charred skeletons of old junipers. The Joshua trees that burned are long gone; fire consumes their fibrous internal structure more rapidly and completely. However, what was lost to the fire has mulched the soil with potash, which is now nurturing the emergence of baby yuccas, junipers, and piñons. In any event, the damage was not uniform. Here, a nearly barren hillside; there, a stand of centuries-old piñon in a gully that the fire leapt over.

I notice a silky-silvery cloud within a wolfberry bush, which my untrained eyes initially mistake for a cat’s claw. A spider web, I wonder?

No, Gary corrects me, it is a caterpillar tent. It hangs like cotton candy, intricately woven around the bush’s branching structure. I now realize there are at least a dozen tents glowing within the wolfberry patch. Upon closer inspection, I observe hundreds of wriggling caterpillars inside each cloud. Within days, Gary explains, they will transform into buff-colored moths, fluttering amidst the green of spring. Once emerged from their chrysalises, they will feed, mate, and perish within a week, spurring the next generation by laying eggs on the very same twigs where they were born.

The caterpillars bring a memory to mind.

I tell Gary about an essay titled "The Desert" by Aldous Huxley, which I read years ago. (Gary immediately recalls it; I suspect he has read every essay ever written about the desert.)

The most arresting passage in the piece describes Huxley walking into the Mojave, where he lived during the 1940s, and encountering a carpet of caterpillars, the very same species we are observing now. Huxley juxtaposes their wild persistence with a visit to a nearby military research facility, where he muses on the atomic bomb and its herald of annihilation at the dawn of the Cold War.

Huxley advises us to disregard human "common sense." We have spent tens of thousands of years developing language and its symbols, and look where it has led us. He urges us to look to the caterpillars: "To intelligence that operates on the organic level." There is something more: "And beyond survival," he writes, "is transfiguration; beyond and including animal grace is the grace of that other not-self, of which the desert silence and the desert emptiness are the most expressive symbols."

Perhaps when we achieve our "not-selves," like the caterpillars, we will find a pathway out of the climate crisis we face today, a crisis as perilous as the nuclear shadow under which Huxley lived.

As Gary and I stand amidst the wriggling mini-accordions within the glowing silk of their tents, I recall the grasshoppers that popped through the fence years ago and think of the jaguar captured on wildlife cameras crossing the border not far from Gary’s home. I also contemplate the human migrants within both his and my family lineages, and the migrants who even today arrive at the wall, dreaming of ways to cross it.

Intertwining the ideas of both Gary and Comcáac chronicler Alberto Mellado Moreno, we find the skin of our bodies and the "skin" of the land, and the necessarily porous boundary between them. The same could be said for the porousness between the skins of distinct cultures and, indeed, in the intermingling of academic disciplines and literary genres: growth occurs when difference is permitted to roam freely. At a time when borders inflict such profound harm upon the human and more-than-human realms, Gary Paul Nabhan stands steadfastly at the line, beckoning us to cross it.