In October 2021, I journeyed with Gary Paul Nabhan along the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Arizona, a landscape that serves as the natural habitat for this renowned botanist, activist, and author. For half a century, the Borderlands have been his research site, laboratory, scholarly pursuit, artistic inspiration, and, most profoundly, his home, residing a mere 22 miles from the Nogales port of entry. This is the very region that has captivated me throughout my life, and it is Gary who has illuminated for me that the border is far more than an arbitrary line etched into the desert sand.

Gary has been a consistent visitor, resident, and traverser of this border since the early 1970s, and I have followed in his footsteps, bearing witness to the intricate human and ecological drama unfolding along this frontier since 1984. On this particular day, he wore his signature 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 suspended from his neck. A distinguished gray beard flowed from his chin, and a gentle paunch settled comfortably over his loose-fitting jeans. He possessed the unmistakable air of a farmer, and his deep, gray-blue eyes, pools of shimmering contemplation, sparkled as he spoke in a soft, raspy voice.

"It’s perfectly acceptable to establish boundaries in our lives," Gary once shared with me, reflecting on the very line that fascinates 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 genuinely require permeable borders, for it is a time-tested method for enriching life rather than suffocating it."

Our drive took us along the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide easement established by Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 for security purposes, stretching for 632 miles along the border. We were on the U.S. side, traversing the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, a vibrant ecotone where desert scrubland seamlessly merges with grasslands in the heart of the Chihuahuan Desert. It is a landscape that Theodore Roosevelt could scarcely have envisioned in its current state: a militarized, almost cyborg-like desert, teeming with Customs and Border Protection agents navigating in trucks, ATVs, and on horseback, operating an extensive network of surveillance towers and drones, and illuminated at night by stark, carceral lighting.

The border wall loomed before us: 30-foot-high bollards of rust-hued steel, starkly contrasted 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 north, to the refuge’s breathtaking ecological paradox: the riparian desert. Stands of sacaton grass swayed gently in the breeze, while creosote bushes, perhaps the most stoic of desert species, displayed splashes of yellow blossoms; nearby, thick-trunked cottonwoods stood tall, their leaves shimmering in the dappled sunlight.

Historically, springs, creeks, and ephemeral washes sustained wetlands here, creating a vibrant ecosystem that hosted a spectacular array of flora and fauna, including hundreds of bird species and dozens of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, among them the endangered Yaqui chub and Yaqui topminnow, and the threatened Yaqui catfish. Human development in the 20th century led to the depletion of these water sources, and the designation of the refuge in 1982 marked the beginning of a significant restoration effort.

However, this refuge also found itself among the hundreds of miles targeted for the construction of President Donald Trump’s much-touted "big, beautiful wall." Numerous environmental and cultural protection statutes were bypassed during this process. The first Trump administration allocated $408 million for the region, and construction crews dug a well adjacent to the refuge to supply water for mixing concrete, a move that inflicted damage on the fragile desert wetland biome. Upon completion, the wall effectively halted most cross-border mammal migration, though its impact on drug smuggling was likely negligible, as it is estimated that a significant portion of illicit drugs enter the country through official ports of entry.

As we drove eastward along the border, the expansive landscape offered ample time for reminiscence and reflection on the profound changes that have occurred in just a few decades. I recounted to Gary an instance where 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 a handhold for scaling. During my visit, a swarm of grasshoppers nimbly hopped through these very openings, a testament to 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 many miles of the border. This was an informal crossing where the fence once simply ended, the "gate" being largely symbolic. It had been historically respected by Border Patrol due to O’odham ceremonial routes and binational Indigenous families. Although closed to vehicular traffic for years, the closure was not initiated by CBP. In a poignant and ironic turn of events, an actual gate was installed and subsequently welded shut by a Mexican landowner on the other side.

We both fondly recalled another informal crossing, the one at Boquillas on the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park. There, an elderly gentleman would ferry visitors across when the river was low, allowing them to enjoy a cold drink on the Mexican side, with no Border Patrol in sight. Those familiar with West Texas and lovers of Americana might remember the song dedicated to this spot by singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen.

The wistful nostalgia for these bygone days made the sight of today’s imposing fence even more painful. Stretching for dozens of miles across the desert plain, the 30-foot-high structure appeared as incongruous as the black monolith that incites violence in early hominids in Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey." This alien object, starkly out of place in its shape and color against the desert backdrop, had been violently inserted into the land, irrevocably altering its essence.

And then, as abruptly as it appeared, it vanished.

We stopped the truck and disembarked. The most recent monsoon storm had flooded the wash where the fence stood, tearing a series of bollard gates from their hinges and effectively blowing the wall wide open. While the Army Corps of Engineers had designed these gates to withstand such flooding, their manual operation was intended to occur before the monsoon season. During the storm, an astonishing 290 cubic feet of water per second—approximately 112,200 gallons every minute—surged northward to southward, slamming into the wall with a force that may have reached heights of 25 feet.

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

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

Yet, they never did.

For those brief moments, Gary and I shared a fleeting glimpse into the past, before the wall’s imposition. And perhaps, a preview of a future when all human-made barriers are eventually swept away by the relentless march of time.

There exist many facets to Gary. He is the MacArthur "genius grant" recipient, an ethnobotanist who revolutionized his field by merging empirical science with social witness and accompaniment—a practice, inspired by Catholic social teaching, of simply being present and offering service when and where needed, particularly within Indigenous communities. He is the dedicated scholar and activist of the Arizona and Sonora Borderlands, where he has lived and worked for over fifty years. Gary is also a co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, a pioneering arid lands seed bank. He embodies a spirit-questing nature as a member of the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans, deeply influenced by St. Francis of Assisi’s profound respect for the holiness and vulnerability of all beings, human and non-human. Furthermore, Gary is a prolific writer whose work transcends numerous genres—from scientific articles and narrative nonfiction to poetry—with an impressive bibliography of 36 books, nearly all of them monographs. In these works, he fluidly navigates not only across forms but also among places, peoples, and the more-than-human world: exploring the biological, cultural, and spiritual significance of mesquite trees; delving into the origins and allure of distilled agave spirits; 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 all these threads, presenting a unified field theory that braids together matter, history, and spirit.

From the very inception of his studies and observations in the Borderlands as a college student, Gary has meticulously documented loss—of habitat and species, of civil rights, of desert vistas unmarred by walls. His inaugural book, "The Desert Smells Like Rain," poignantly 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 severe degradation of the border biome near his home in Patagonia, Arizona. Throughout his distinguished career, he has maintained a consistent tone, characterized by an Old Testament-like lament, skillfully leavened with wry humor and an effortless command of puns. He writes about the intricate, interconnected relationships 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 periods of profound loss. Gary, who is a little over a decade my senior, played a significant role in inspiring my return to writing. I have now reached an age where I receive AARP mailers, and one of the revelations that accompanies this stage of life is the understanding that being an elder does not negate the need for elders who are older than you to help illuminate the path ahead, even as you increasingly serve as a guide for those younger than yourself.

Therefore, I write this account as a tribute to my elder. Yet, Gary is also, especially within the desert West, our elder—a guiding figure for all who hold a deep care for the land and its myriad inhabitants.

This writing journey led me to his home and onto the open road, transforming what began as a journalistic project into a deepening mentorship and friendship. Even during periods when I believed I would never complete this story, our conversations continued. More accurately, he maintained contact with me. I recall hiking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, where I lived for several years, the foggy breeze rustling through Monterey cypress boughs, mirroring the fog in my own melancholic mind. Gary would call, simply to discuss a new book he had read about the Sanctuary movement, or about folk music, or about a spectacular thunderstorm that had just swept across the desert. I believe he was quite deliberately accompanying me through my darkness.

His voice and his text messages have been a constant source of companionship for years. The stack of books on my desk, lectures available on YouTube, and our conversations in his Prius—adorned with a peeling "No Border Wall" sticker in cholo-style Old English script along the upper edge of the driver’s side door—as we traversed the roads of southern Arizona. My phone is filled with dozens of photographs and videos, and my laptop journals and indecipherable reporter’s notebooks are replete with our shared experiences.

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 currently listening to a recording from a visit we made in 2021 to Quitobaquito, a natural spring located just a few dozen 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, still revered today for Indigenous peoples’ historical migratory and ceremonial routes, as well as for the sustenance it provides to desert flora and fauna.

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

Apart from the distant traffic on Mexican Highway 2 just across the line, the area was remarkably quiet. Joe Biden occupied the White House, and the construction of the border wall had temporarily ceased. 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."

Little did we know, of course, 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 destruction was imminent—preparations for a second wall, running parallel to the first, promising an even graver violation than that experienced under Trump I. At the time, we innocently envisioned an open-ended period of recovery.

A lone coot, its long pale beak a stark contrast to its flat-black feathers, glided across the center of the main pond, utterly 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, remarkably, survived the border wall construction and the rumbling passage of Border Patrol vehicles along the Roosevelt Reservation.

I noticed a distinct, uniform change in the color of the bulrushes—a shift from lime-green to an oatmeal hue approximately three feet above the waterline.

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

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

The impacts on the pond were mirrored by 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, although there was a temporary increase in 15 others—primarily accidental visitors such as 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 been inflicted.

"See those two cottonwoods there?" Gary pointed them out, 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 towards the skeletal remains of a collapsed tree. "It died three or four years ago. So, there’s been a complete habitat decline since I conducted my dissertation research here in 1982."

We returned to observe the pupfish one last time. My eyesight is not sharp, 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 blue and silver, representing males and females. The guppy-like fish was critically endangered even before the wall construction began, with such a high probability of extinction that Biosphere 2 collected a few dozen individuals and introduced them to a stream environment within the facility’s "desert biome," a sanctuary intended to perpetuate the species should it vanish from Quitobaquito.

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

Zepeda’s poems are meticulously crafted, clear, and spare desert verse. 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 and spiritual necessity. It emerged into the world with the moist breath of the creator-god I’itoi from a cave high atop Baboquivari Peak, the majestic, 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 place alone and became lost on the mountain—clearly, I was neither prepared nor welcome. Decades ago, Gary, already well into 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 found in this emergence place: rosaries, gum, cigarettes, and a multitude of other items hanging in the dimness. This experience prompted a profound 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 that which is even now being lost, and what will be—perhaps even what will be again, reborn from drought, fire, or flood, from the steel that slices through the desert.

The healing process must be both a science and an art, a policy and a prayer, a poem.

This is the essence of 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 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 made the poetic observation that became the title, referring to the distinctive fragrance released when raindrops activate the resins on creosote leaves. The nation’s ancestral lands stretch across a border established in 1853, meaning that this frontier, 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 their home.

As is often the case with writers drawn to border regions, Gary is not a native of the area. Like many artists and thinkers before him, he came West in search of self-discovery within a world of overlapping cultures, marked by both tension and synthesis. The Borderlands, geopolitically defined, are situated on land that is inherently a waystation, migratory in its very essence, both for humans and the more-than-human world, a place of transitions stretching back into deep time.

Gary grew up on the Indiana Dunes, an unusual pocket of aridity on the shores of Lake Michigan. His mother was of Irish Catholic descent, his father was Lebanese American, and his paternal extended family had strong ties to the region. His profound attraction to the deserts of the American Southwest can be traced back 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, creating a personal landscape of riparian desert. This shared heritage of borders, and a persistent desire to cross them, coupled with experiences of being repelled by them, forms a common thread between Gary and me. We have both laughed at their absurdity, shouted at them until our voices grew hoarse, despaired over them, contemplated their implications, knelt in prayer before them, and mourned 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.

In 2023, I embarked on another road trip with Gary, this time venturing to the Sonoran coast on the Gulf of California, a significant origin point for him. He first arrived in these traditional lands as an undergraduate student at Prescott College, which has maintained a presence in the region since 1969. The journey was not without its challenges. On the way south, we visited with his friend Wenceslao Monroy, a respected community leader known for hosting delegations of Zapatistas from Chiapas. Monroy shared a harrowing account of a close encounter with cartel violence that forced him to flee his family’s ancestral ranch for weeks. Later, Gary lingered perhaps too long, 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. Night had fallen by the time we navigated a dark, unlit two-lane desert road, seemingly the only route occupied by foolish travelers. For miles, our vehicle was the sole presence. Nevertheless, 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 authoritative commentary. This aquatic plant has been hailed by celebrity chefs as a new superfood, referred to as "sea rice," a grain that sprouts from the grass.

This attention was particularly welcome for the Comcáac, an Indigenous people so geographically distant from centralized Mexican government authority that they have tenaciously maintained their traditional identity. However, they remain vulnerable to Mexico’s simultaneous romanticization of Indigenous history and its profound 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 myself since first venturing into the borders of Indigeneity as a young writer. Fifty years ago, anthropology was still a field tainted by a largely unconscious colonial gaze, an inheritance from centuries of scribes documenting Native geographies and identities to serve military conquest, economic exploitation, and, at least from the Church’s perspective, spiritual salvation. Then, while Gary was in graduate school, Palestinian scholar and Columbia professor Edward Said published his groundbreaking work, "Orientalism," exposing this very gaze. The immediate consequence was a critique of representational ethics and increased scrutiny of "objective" research for the implicit power imbalances between those conducting the observation and those being observed. This critique, however, did not originate with Said; it is as old as the resistance to colonialism itself and remains an ongoing discourse.

If Gary were a greenhorn graduate student today seeking to research the Indigenous cultures of the Sonoran Desert, he would most likely face questioning—from academic advisors and Indigenous leaders alike—about the nature of his relationships with his research participants (previously termed "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 that he would no longer feel comfortable in such positions—that is, as an outsider with the privilege to come and go as they please, possessing the power to represent Indigenous "others" in writing.

Gary and I stand at a generational crossroads, witnessing a significant shift. Slightly older than I, 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 not just as a physical space but as the Borderlands—a cultural realm, a site of both profound violence and suffering, but also of intentional cultural fusion and aesthetic blending—embodying the theory and practice of constructing a "third country," a distinct and transcendent region, as an act of creative and spiritual survival.

Yet, that moment has also 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 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 extensive body of research, nor in his unwavering allyship on urgent issues such as the border wall and the preservation of arid lands and seeds. What has fundamentally changed is that the Indigenous communities of the Americas, both North and South, have steadily taken control of their own means of representation.

This shift was clearly 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 is now 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 experienced a remarkable rebound, now numbering over 1,000.

One afternoon, standing on a sandy bluff overlooking the verdant, eelgrass-laden sea, with the serrated mass of Tiburón Island rising 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 intricately entwined 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 follow their example—a summons that reached me from Mellado, through Gary. This represents one of Gary’s essential roles: an interlocutor who facilitates the transfer of knowledge, continuing the vital conversation between those who were here before and remain present, and those of us who, relative to the human history of the region, arrived only yesterday.

In March 2026, I found myself hiking with Gary in the Mojave Desert. 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 remaining in California’s high desert, featuring adobe cabins dating back to the 1920s. Joshua Tree National Park was expected to be overrun with spring break crowds today, so I suggested the less-visited Covington Flats area. This location, with its fewer granite boulders, offers a wider vista and a nearly 30-year-old burn area, providing a valuable research window into a critical 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 bloom out of its usual rhythm. During my visit in early January, there had already been enough 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 view 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.

Back in 1999, the Juniper Complex Fire had burned nearly 14,000 acres, with a finger of the blaze coming within a few hundred yards of the community where I lived at the time. I had visited Covington Flats immediately after the fire and, with absolutely no scientific authority, harbored the conviction that the desert I knew and loved was irrevocably lost.

Humans process loss through developed 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, a process that is both species-specific and "communal"—no species exists in isolation. During our walks, Gary consistently drew attention to cooperation rather than competition among organic life, noting how a mature piñon pine "nursed" a Joshua tree seedling with its shade.

The fire did not, in fact, destroy the desert.

On my iPhone recordings, one can hear the crunch of our footsteps on the pebbly earth, and 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, and evening primrose thriving on the road’s berms, their flowers beginning to turn inward mid-morning for protection as the early spring sun cast a silvery sheen across the land.

The devastation from decades ago 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 effectively mulched the soil with potash, which is now aiding the emergence of young yuccas, junipers, and piñons. In any event, the damage was not uniform; in some areas, a nearly barren hillside, and in others, a stand of centuries-old piñon trees in a gully that the fire had miraculously leaped over.

I noticed a silky-silvery cloud within a wolfberry bush, which my untrained eyes initially mistook for catclaw. A spiderweb, I wondered?

No, Gary corrected me, it was a caterpillar tent. It hung like cotton candy, meticulously woven around the bush’s intricate branching. Now I realized that there were at least a dozen such tents aglow in the wolfberry patch. Upon closer inspection, I observed hundreds of wriggling caterpillars within each cloud. Within days, Gary explained, they would transform into buff-colored moths, floating amidst the green of spring. Once emerged from their chrysalises, they would feed, mate, and perish within a week, urging the next generation onward by laying eggs on the very same twigs where they were born.

The caterpillars triggered a memory.

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

The most striking 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 were observing now. Huxley juxtaposed their wild persistence with a visit to a nearby military research site, where he contemplated the atomic bomb and its harbinger of annihilation at the dawn of the Cold War.

"Forget humans and their ‘common sense,’" Huxley advised. 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 urged: "To intelligence that operates on the organic level." There is something more: "And beyond survival," he wrote, "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 are our "not-selves," like the caterpillars, we will discover a path out of the climate crisis we confront today, a danger every bit as profound as the nuclear shadow under which Huxley lived.

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

Intertwining the ideas of both Gary and the 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 blending of academic disciplines and literary genres: growth flourishes when difference is allowed to roam freely. At a time when borders inflict such profound harm upon both the human and more-than-human realms, Gary Paul Nabhan stands steadfast at the line, beckoning us to cross it.