In October 2021, while driving with Gary Paul Nabhan along the rugged terrain of the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Arizona, it was evident that this stark landscape was his natural element. For five decades, the Borderlands have served as Nabhan’s research site, laboratory, sanctuary, and intellectual home, a region he has explored, inhabited, and deeply loved, living less than 25 miles from the Nogales port of entry. This same expanse has captivated my own life, and it is Gary who has profoundly shaped my understanding, revealing the border as far more than a mere line etched into the desert sand.

Nabhan has been a consistent presence in, and traveler across, this border region since the early 1970s, and I have followed in his footsteps, witnessing the intricate dramas of both human and non-human life unfolding along this frontier since 1984. On this particular day, he wore his familiar field attire: a well-worn khaki baseball cap, a faded T-shirt emblazoned with a Spanish slogan urging peasants to "rise up," and a simple wooden cross around his neck. His face, framed by flowing gray whiskers and a gentle smile, exuded the wisdom of a seasoned farmer—a profession he embodies—while his deep gray-blue eyes, shimmering with intellect and kindness, drew me into conversation.

"It’s perfectly acceptable to establish boundaries in our lives," Gary once shared with me, reflecting on the line that holds such fascination for us both. "But if we were to seal every pore on our skin, or every stoma on a plant leaf, we would perish. Therefore, we truly require porous borders, for this is a time-tested method of enriching life rather than stifling it."

Our journey took us along the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide corridor established in 1907 by President Theodore Roosevelt for security purposes, stretching for 632 miles along the border. We traversed the U.S. side, within the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, a vibrant ecotone where desert scrublands transition into grasslands within the Chihuahuan Desert ecosystem. It is a stark contrast to what Roosevelt might have envisioned; today, the landscape is a militarized testament to human intervention, a "cyborg desert" patrolled by Customs and Border Protection agents in vehicles, on ATVs, and horseback, supported by an extensive network of surveillance towers and drones, and illuminated at night by stark, carceral lighting.

The imposing border wall stands here, 30-foot-high rust-colored bollards set against the impossibly cerulean blue of an early autumn desert sky. We navigated through pools of muddy water left by late-season monsoon thunderstorms. My gaze was drawn to the north, to the refuge’s stunning ecological paradox: the riparian desert. Stands of sacaton grass swayed in the breeze, while the stoic creosote bushes offered patches of yellow bloom, and nearby, thick-trunked cottonwoods shimmered with light dancing on their leaves.

Historically, springs, creeks, and ephemeral washes sustained wetlands here, fostering a rich biodiversity that included 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. Human development depleted these water sources throughout the 20th century, and the designation of the refuge in 1982 marked the beginning of a significant restoration effort.

However, this refuge was also among the numerous areas 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 construction crews excavated a well adjacent to the refuge to supply water for concrete mixing, a move that inflicted damage on the fragile desert wetland biome. Once completed, the wall significantly disrupted cross-border mammal migration, though its impact on drug smuggling is debatable, as estimates suggest that a substantial portion of illicit substances enters the country through official ports of entry.

As we drove eastward along the border, the miles offered ample time for reminiscence and reflection on the dramatic changes of the past few decades. I recounted to Gary an instance where I witnessed crews constructing a border fence west of our current location, near the Santa Cruz River. This fence was designed with openings large enough to prevent desert windstorms from toppling it, yet small enough to make scaling it impossible for human hands. During my visit, a swarm of grasshoppers effortlessly navigated through these openings – undocumented, more-than-human beings 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 was an informal crossing where the fence abruptly ended, the "gate" itself being largely symbolic. For years, it was respected by Border Patrol due to O’odham ceremonial routes and binational Indigenous families. The crossing has since been closed to vehicular traffic, not by U.S. authorities, but by a Mexican landowner on the other side who, in a cruel twist of irony, installed and welded shut an actual gate.

We both fondly recalled another informal crossing, the one at Boquillas on the Rio Grande within Big Bend National Park. There, an elderly gentleman would ferry visitors across the river when water levels were low, allowing access to a cold beverage on the Mexican side, with no Border Patrol presence in sight. This nostalgic memory—perhaps familiar to fans of Americana and those from West Texas, who might recall the song about it by singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen—made the sight of today’s imposing fence all the more poignant.

The 30-foot-high barrier stretched across the desert plain for miles, appearing as incongruous and alien as the black slab that incites violence among early hominids in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Its sheer shape and color were unlike anything in the natural desert landscape, a foreign object violently inserted into the land, irrevocably altering it.

And then, it was gone.

We stopped the truck and stepped out. The most recent monsoon storm had inundated the wash the fence traversed, tearing a series of bollard gates from their hinges, effectively breaching the wall. While the Army Corps of Engineers designed these gates to withstand such flooding, they were intended for manual operation before the monsoon season. During the storm, a surge of water, estimated at 290 cubic feet per second—approximately 112,200 gallons per minute—rushed north to south, striking the wall with a force that may have reached 25 feet in height.

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

"The Border Patrol’s going to show up any minute," I remarked to Gary.

They never did.

For those brief moments, Gary and I shared a glimpse into the past, before the wall, and perhaps a premonition of the future, when all human barriers might be swept away by the passage of time.

There are, in essence, many Gary Nabhan’s. He is the MacArthur "genius grant" award-winning ethnobotanist who revolutionized his field by merging rigorous scientific inquiry with social witness and accompaniment—a practice inspired by Catholic social teaching, focused on simply being present and offering service where and when needed within Indigenous communities. He is the scholar and activist of the Arizona and Sonora Borderlands, a region he has dedicated half a century to studying and inhabiting. Gary is also the co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, a pioneering arid lands seed bank. He is the spirit-questing Gary, a member of the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans, deeply influenced by St. Francis of Assisi’s profound respect for the holiness and vulnerability of both human and non-human life. Furthermore, he is the prolific writer whose work transcends numerous genres—from scientific articles and narrative nonfiction to poetry—culminating in 36 books, almost all of them monographs. In these works, he seamlessly navigates not only different forms but also diverse places, peoples, and the natural world: exploring the biological, cultural, and spiritual significance of mesquite trees; delving into the reasons behind our consumption of distilled agaves; compiling vignettes of American and international activists, artists, and visionaries; and offering a Christian 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 multifaceted threads into a unified field theory, braiding matter, history, and spirit.

From the outset of his scholarly pursuits and observations in the Borderlands as a college student, Nabhan has meticulously documented the losses—of habitat and species, of civil rights, of desert vistas unmarred by walls. His very first book, The Desert Smells Like Rain, chronicled the precarious future of the Tohono O’odham people’s millennia-old dryland-farming traditions. More than four decades later, Water in the Desert details the radical 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 intricate, interconnected existence of mesquite trees in the desert Southwest, transforming "ménage à trois" into "ménage à tree," ultimately cycling through profound grief to consistently arrive 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 have passed, and only recently have I begun to write again, having navigated my own periods of loss. Gary, who is a little over a decade my senior, was a significant catalyst in my return to writing. I have reached an age where I receive AARP mailings, and a profound revelation of this season of life is that being an elder does not preclude the need for elders older than oneself to help illuminate the path ahead, even as one increasingly serves as a guide for those younger.

Therefore, I write as a tribute to my elder. Yet, Gary is also, particularly in the desert West, our elder—a guiding presence for all who care for the land and its inhabitants.

This writing journey led me to his home and onto the open road, evolving from a journalistic project into a deepening mentorship and friendship. Even during the times I believed I would never complete this story, our conversations continued. More accurately, he consistently maintained contact with me. I would find myself hiking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the foggy breeze whispering through Monterey cypress boughs, mirroring the despondency in my own mind, and he would call simply to discuss a new book he’d read about the Sanctuary movement, or about folk music, or the impressive 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 presence for years. The stacks of books on my desk, lectures available on YouTube, and our conversations in his Prius (adorned with a peeling "No Border Wall" sticker in Old English script along the driver’s side door) as we navigated the southern Arizona roads, all contribute to this narrative. Dozens of iPhone photos and videos are saved on my phone, and Gary’s presence fills my laptop journals and 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 poetry.

I am listening to a recording from a 2021 visit to Quitobaquito, a natural spring just 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 is a vital crossroads, revered by Indigenous peoples for historical migratory and ceremonial routes, and cherished for its unique desert flora and fauna.

Bulrushes encircled the pond, forming a reedy perimeter, while a couple of ancient cottonwoods nearby stood sentinel, taller than anything else in the vicinity, save for the Border Patrol surveillance towers. I had heard about Trump’s wall impacting this area, but nothing could have prepared me for the stark juxtaposition of the miraculous spring—the largest water source for miles—and the imposing wall, its 30-foot-high bollards identical to those at San Bernardino, over 200 miles to the east as the crow flies.

Apart from the distant hum of traffic on Mexican Highway 2 across the line, the area was remarkably quiet. Joe Biden was in the White House, and the construction of the wall had ceased. Gary, along with longtime friend and Tohono O’odham leader Austin Nuñez, had recently published a manifesto in the New York Times calling for the healing of the wounds inflicted upon the Borderlands during Trump’s first term. They wrote: "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."

Little did we know then that this moment of hope was merely a temporary respite. The modest reclamation efforts under Biden would not only be reversed in a potential second Trump term, but a new wave of violence was anticipated—preparations for a second wall parallel to the first, signifying an even graver wound than that inflicted under Trump I. At the time, we naively envisioned an era of open-ended recovery.

A lone coot, its long pale beak a sharp contrast against its flat-black feathers, glided across the center of the main pond, seemingly indifferent to its human visitors. Rivulets of water 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 miraculously 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—lime green transitioning to an oatmeal hue about 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 declining even before the wall’s construction, largely due to agricultural practices on the Sonoran side. Amidst record-breaking heat, it reached its second-lowest level in recorded history.

On the recording, my recurring exclamations of "God!" punctuated the somber observation.

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 influx of 15 other species—primarily accidentals like sandpipers and dowitchers migrating from the Gulf of California, adapted to lower water levels and mudflats.

Gary has been visiting this site since the 1970s, and the pause in wall construction did little to 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 not keen, 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 and caught glimpses of iridescence—flashes of blue and silver from males and females. The guppy-like fish was critically endangered even before wall construction began, its probability of extinction so high that Biosphere 2 had collected a few dozen individuals and introduced them to a stream environment within its "desert biome" research center, serving as a sanctuary to perpetuate the species should it vanish from Quitobaquito.

Gary was holding a cherished volume of desert verse, the work of his friend, Tohono O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda, titled Ocean Power. He sat at a peeling, splintered picnic table and began writing a letter to her on the blank pages at the end of the book, explaining that he wanted to "speak" to Zepeda from this sacred place, where cell reception was nonexistent. He recalled her childhood visits to Quitobaquito and expressed gratitude for her mentorship on O’odham dialects.

Zepeda’s poems are characterized by their precision, clarity, and spare desert imagery. 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 non-human, sustain themselves: the moisture is both material and spiritual. It emerged into the world with the wet breath of the creator-god I’itoi from a cave high on Baboquivari Peak, the 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 once visited this mountain alone and became lost—clearly, I was neither prepared nor welcome. Decades ago, Gary, already deeply involved 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 emergence place: rosaries, gum, cigarettes, and a multitude of other items hanging in the dimness. This experience prompted his 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 contact involves holding onto the spirit of what came before, what remains of what is even now being lost, and what will be—perhaps even what will be again, reborn from drought, fire, or flood, from the harsh reality of steel slashing through the desert.

Healing must be a fusion of science and art, policy and prayer, a poem. It is sacred activism.

The initial whisper of my dialogue with Gary began long before we met, sometime in the 1990s when I first read The Desert Smells Like Rain, a work considered 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 remark gave the title its resonance, referring to the fragrance released when raindrops activate the resins on creosote leaves. The nation’s traditional lands stretch along 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 common with many border chroniclers, Gary is not a native of the region. Like countless other artists and thinkers, he journeyed West seeking self-discovery in a world of overlapping cultures, marked by both tension and synthesis. The Borderlands, a geopolitically constructed territory, are themselves a waystation, inherently migratory in both human and non-human terms—a place of transitions reaching back into deep time.

Gary grew up on the Indiana Dunes, an unusual oasis of aridity on the shores of Lake Michigan, with an Irish Catholic mother, a Lebanese American father, and an extensive 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; together, my parents embodied a riparian desert. This shared experience of borders, and a ceaseless desire to traverse them, alongside the frustration of being repelled by them, laughing at their absurdity, shouting at them until our voices are hoarse, despairing over 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 designates the "deadliest land crossing in the world"—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 profound 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. En route, we visited with his friend Wenceslao Monroy, a respected community leader who had hosted delegations of Zapatistas from Chiapas. Monroy 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 lingered perhaps too long conversing with students at the Universidad de Sonora herbarium in Hermosillo, a characteristic display of Gary’s engagement with those eager for knowledge and dialogue. It was nightfall on an unlit two-lane desert road that seemed to be traversed only by us, with no other vehicles in sight for miles. We safely reached the shore, where the following day, he gathered a bunch of glistening eelgrass as a documentary film crew’s high-definition cameras rolled, capturing his authoritative insights 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 remote 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 disregard for the welfare of contemporary Indigenous communities.

Here, in one of the communities Gary has visited for decades, the inevitable question regarding his positionality arose—a question I have grappled with myself since I first encountered the peripheries of Indigeneity as a young writer. Fifty years ago, anthropology was still a discipline tainted by a largely unconscious colonial gaze, the legacy of centuries of scribes documenting Native geographies and identities in service of military conquest, economic exploitation, and, from the Church’s perspective, spiritual salvation. Then, during Gary’s graduate studies, Palestinian scholar and Columbia professor Edward Said published his groundbreaking work Orientalism, exposing that gaze. The immediate aftermath brought a critique of representation 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 continues to this day.

If Gary were a novice graduate student today seeking to research the Indigenous cultures of the Sonoran Desert, he would likely face questions—from 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, thereby 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, witnesses to a changing of the guard. Slightly older than me, he was educated under the academic ancien régime of predominantly white male researchers working within Indigenous communities. However, we both participated in the post-Orientalism conversation that celebrated the border as the Borderlands—both a physical place and a cultural space, a site of violence and suffering, but also of intentional intermingling and synthesis of languages and aesthetics—the theory and practice of forging a "third country," a distinct and transcendent region, as an act of creative and spiritual survival.

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

None of this diminishes 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 unwavering allyship on critical issues such as the border wall and the preservation of arid lands and seeds. What has transformed is that the Indigenous communities of the Americas, North and South, have steadily reclaimed the means of representation themselves.

This was profoundly evident 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 serves as an elected official within the community. With a population that had dwindled to approximately 130 at the turn of the 20th century, the Comcáac have rebounded to over 1,000 today.

One afternoon, perched on a sandy bluff overlooking the emerald, 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."

So intertwined is the story of the Comcáac 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 call that came to me from Mellado, conveyed through Gary. This represents one of Gary’s essential roles: an interlocutor, facilitating the transmission of knowledge and continuing the vital conversation between those who were here before 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 maintained a steady, sure-footed pace. This morning, he had risen at 6 a.m. for a 20-minute run.

We were staying at the 29 Palms Inn, one of the last vestiges of old-school, pre-Airbnb accommodations in California’s high desert, featuring adobe cabins dating back to the 1920s. Joshua Tree National Park was expected to be overrun by spring break crowds today, so I suggested the less-visited Covington Flats area. This locale, with its fewer granite boulders, offers a wider vista and a nearly 30-year-old burn area, providing a crucial research window into a significant climate impact in arid lands: the desert on fire.

It had 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, collectively causing the flora to deviate from its usual rhythm. During my visit in early January, there had already been sufficient rain and sunshine 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 parked several miles in, with no other vehicles in sight.

A sweeping panorama unfolded before us—the land descended steeply southward before rising again; a rock-walled canyon opened to the east, while modest, gently formed peaks emerged to the west.

In 1999, the Juniper Complex Fire had burned nearly 14,000 acres, with a portion extending to within a few hundred yards of the community where I resided at the time. I visited Covington Flats immediately after the fire and, with no scientific authority, harbored the conviction 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 non-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 out instances of cooperation rather than competition among organic life, noting a mature piñon pine "nursing" a Joshua tree seedling with its shade.

The fire did not extinguish the desert.

Our footsteps crunching on the pebbly earth are audible on my iPhone recordings, our voices filled with wonder. The Joshua blossoms, a carpet of brittlebush shoots with their yellow daisy-like flowers spread across the loamy plain, desert bluebells nodding their otherworldly cobalt hue, and evening primrose thriving on the road berms, their flowers beginning to turn inward mid-morning for protection as the early spring sun silvers the land.

The devastation from decades past is most apparent in the charred skeletons of ancient 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, aiding the emergence of young yuccas, junipers, and piñons. In any case, the damage was not uniform. Here, a nearly barren hillside; there, a stand of centuries-old piñons nestled in a gully that the fire had leapt over.

I notice a silky, silvery cloud within a wolfberry bush, which my untrained eyes initially mistake for catclaw. A spider web, I wonder? No, Gary corrects me, it is a caterpillar tent. It hangs like spun cotton candy, woven around the bush’s intricate branching. Now I realize there are at least a dozen tents glowing within the wolfberry patch. Upon closer inspection, I see hundreds of wriggling caterpillars inside each cloud. Within days, Gary explains, they will transform into buff-colored moths, floating amidst the green of spring. Once they emerge from their chrysalis, they will feed, mate, and die within a week, urging the next generation onward by laying eggs on the very twigs where they were born.

The caterpillars trigger a memory.

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

The most striking scene in the piece depicts Huxley walking into the Mojave, where he resided during the 1940s, and encountering a carpet of caterpillars—the same species we are observing now. Huxley juxtaposes their wild persistence with a visit to a nearby military research site, where he reflects on the atomic bomb and its herald of annihilation at the dawn of the Cold War.

Forget humans and their "common sense," Huxley advises. We have spent tens of thousands of years developing language and its symbols, and look where it has led us. Look to the caterpillars, Huxley urges: "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 embody our "not-selves," like the caterpillars, we will find a path out of the climate crisis we face today, a crisis as perilous as the nuclear shadow Huxley lived under.

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 recently captured on wildlife cameras crossing the border not far from Gary’s home. I also consider the human migrants in both his and my family lineages, and the migrants who even today arrive at the wall, dreaming of ways across 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 can be said for the porousness between distinct cultures and, for that matter, in the blending of academic disciplines and literary genres: Growth occurs when difference is allowed to roam freely. At a time when borders inflict so much harm on both the human and non-human realms, Gary Paul Nabhan stands steadfast at the line, beckoning us to cross it.