In October 2021, a journey along the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Arizona with Gary Paul Nabhan illuminated the profound connection between this botanist, activist, and author and the land he has studied, inhabited, and advocated for over five decades. The Borderlands, a region he calls home, merely 22 miles from the Nogales port of entry, represent not just his research site and laboratory, but also the very heart of his life’s work. It is a landscape that has also captivated the author, who has learned from Nabhan that the border is far more than an arbitrary line etched into the desert.

Nabhan has been traversing, living in, and studying the border region since the early 1970s, a path the author has followed since 1984, witnessing firsthand the complex human and ecological dramas unfolding along this frontier. On this particular day, Nabhan embodies his characteristic field persona: a faded khaki baseball cap, a T-shirt emblazoned with a Spanish slogan urging peasants to "rise up," and a simple wooden cross adorning his neck. His presence is that of a seasoned farmer, with a flowing gray beard, a comfortable belly, and worn jeans, but it is his eyes—deep, shimmering pools of gray-blue—that truly captivate as he speaks with a gentle rasp. "It’s OK to have boundaries in our lives," Nabhan once shared, reflecting on the line that holds such significance for both of them. "But if we were to glue all the pores on our skin shut, or all the stoma on a plant leaf shut, we would die. So we really need porous borders, because it’s a time-tried way to enrich life rather than strangle it."

Our drive took us along the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide federal easement established in 1907 for security purposes by Theodore Roosevelt. This stretch, on the U.S. side within the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, is a vibrant ecotone where desert scrub meets grasslands in the Chihuahuan Desert. The landscape, however, has transformed into what can only be described as a militarized cyborg desert. Custom and Border Protection (CBP) agents patrol relentlessly in trucks, on ATVs, and horseback, operating an extensive network of surveillance towers and drones, their presence starkly illuminated by powerful night lighting. The physical manifestation of this border security is the wall itself: 30-foot-high, rust-colored bollards that stand in stark contrast against the impossibly cerulean blue of the early autumn desert sky. We navigated through muddy pools left by late-season monsoon thunderstorms, the author’s gaze drawn to the north, to the refuge’s beautiful ecological paradox: the riparian desert. Here, sacaton grass swayed in the breeze, stoic creosote bushes displayed their yellow blossoms, and thick-trunked cottonwoods shimmered with light on their fluttering leaves.

Historically, springs, creeks, and ephemeral washes sustained wetlands in this area, creating a rich habitat for a diverse array 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 in the 20th century led to the depletion of these water sources, the designation of the refuge in 1982 initiated a significant process of ecological restoration. However, this refuge, like hundreds of miles along the border, became a target for the construction of what was termed President Donald Trump’s "big, beautiful wall." This endeavor saw dozens of environmental and cultural protection statutes waived. During the initial Trump administration, $408 million was allocated to the region, with crews excavating a well adjacent to the refuge to supply water for concrete mixing. This action caused damage to the fragile desert wetland biome. Upon completion, the wall effectively halted most cross-border mammal movement, though its impact on drug smuggling was likely minimal, as it is estimated that the majority of illicit drugs enter the country through official ports of entry.

As we continued eastward along the border, the passage of time allowed for reflection on the dramatic changes of the past few decades. The author recounted witnessing border fence construction west of their current location, near the Santa Cruz River. This fence was ingeniously designed with holes large enough to prevent desert windstorms from toppling it, yet small enough to prevent any human from gaining a grip to scale it. During a visit, a swarm of grasshoppers easily navigated through these openings, an apt metaphor for undocumented "more-than-human" beings circumventing human-made barriers. Nabhan then brought up the San Miguel Gate on the Tohono O’odham Nation, a vast territory straddling many miles of the border. This had been an informal crossing point where the fence simply ended, a symbolic "gate" historically respected by Border Patrol due to O’odham ceremonial routes and binational Indigenous families. While closed to vehicular traffic for years, this closure was not initiated by CBP. In a poignant irony, an actual gate was erected and welded shut by a Mexican landowner on the other side.

Both recalled another informal crossing, the one at Boquillas in Big Bend National Park, on the Rio Grande. There, an elderly man 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. This nostalgic memory made the present-day fence, stretching across the desert plain for dozens of miles, even more painful to behold. Standing at 30 feet high, it appeared as alien and out of place as the black slab that incited violence in early hominids in Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey"—a foreign object violently inserted into the land, irrevocably altering it. Then, as suddenly as it appeared, the wall vanished from view.

We stopped the truck and disembarked. The most recent monsoon storm had inundated the wash where the fence was situated, tearing a series of bollard gates from their hinges and effectively blowing the wall open. Although designed by the Army Corps of Engineers for such flooding, these gates were intended to be opened manually before the monsoon season. During the storm, an estimated 290 cubic feet of water per second—approximately 112,200 gallons per minute—surged north to south, striking the wall with a force that may have reached heights of 25 feet. For a sense of scale, the author asked Nabhan to stand near the damaged sections of the wall, his body mere inches from the Mexican side. The debris line towered several feet above his head, with a Border Patrol surveillance tower visible just yards away. "The Border Patrol’s gotta show up any minute," the author remarked to Nabhan. Yet, they never appeared. For those fleeting moments, Nabhan and the author shared a glimpse of the past, before the wall, and perhaps a vision of the future, when all such human barriers might be swept away by the forces of time.

The figure of Gary Paul Nabhan encompasses many facets: he is the MacArthur "genius grant"-winning ethnobotanist who revolutionized his field by merging rigorous science with social witness and accompaniment—a practice, inspired by Catholic social teaching, of simply being present and offering service when and where needed in Indigenous communities. He is the dedicated scholar and activist of the Arizona and Sonora Borderlands, where he has lived and worked for half a century. As a co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, he established a pioneering arid lands seedbank. He is also a "spirit-quest" Gary, a member of the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans, drawing inspiration from St. Francis of Assisi’s profound reverence for the holiness and vulnerability of all beings, human and non-human. Furthermore, he is a prolific writer who crosses numerous genres—scientific articles, narrative nonfiction, poetry—with 36 books to his name, nearly all of them monographs. In these works, he journeys freely 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, the origins of distilled agave spirits, and curating collections of vignettes featuring American and "more-than-American" activists, artists, and visionaries. His literary output even includes 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 diverse threads into a unified field theory, braiding together matter, history, and spirit.

From the very inception of his engagement with the Borderlands as a college student, Nabhan has meticulously documented the profound losses occurring there—the degradation of habitats and species, the erosion of civil rights, and the encroachment of walls upon desert vistas. 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 career, Nabhan has maintained a consistent tone, reminiscent of Old Testament lamentations, yet leavened with a wry sense of humor and an effortless command of puns. He writes about the interconnected, rhizomatic relationships of mesquite trees in the desert Southwest, playfully transforming "ménage à trois" into "ménage à tree." Ultimately, his work cycles through grief, but invariably arrives at hard-won seeds of renewal and recovery.

The author initially intended to write this story in 2021 but found themselves unable to write at all, experiencing a period of profound loss that lasted five years. It was only recently, after navigating this personal cycle of grief, that the author began writing again. Nabhan, a decade older, was a significant catalyst for this renewed creative engagement. Now entering an age where one is often seen as an elder, the author recognizes that being an elder does not preclude the need for guidance from those older, who can help illuminate the path ahead, even as one increasingly assumes that role for younger generations. Therefore, this narrative is written from the perspective of an elder’s tribute. However, Nabhan is also, particularly within the desert West, "our" elder—a guiding presence for all who care for the land and its inhabitants.

This writing endeavor led the author to Nabhan’s home and onto the road, evolving from a journalistic project into a deepening mentorship and friendship. Even when the author believed they would never complete this story, their conversations continued; in fact, it was Nabhan who consistently maintained contact. While the author was hiking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, surrounded by the fog and Monterey cypress, Nabhan would call simply to discuss a new book he had read about the Sanctuary movement, or about folk music, or the dramatic thunderstorm that had just swept across the desert. It felt as though he was intentionally accompanying the author through a period of darkness. His voice and texts have provided companionship for years, a presence felt through the stacks of books on the author’s desk, lectures on YouTube, and conversations with Nabhan in his Prius (distinguished by its peeling "No Border Wall" sticker in cholo-style Old English script) as they traversed the southern Arizona roads. Dozens of iPhone photos and videos, as well as entries in the author’s laptop journals and indecipherable reporter’s notebooks, document these encounters. To journey alongside Gary Nabhan is to engage in a profound dialogue with the world, experiencing it intimately through landscape, species, policy, and poetry.

Listening to a recording from a 2021 visit to Quitobaquito, a natural spring situated just yards from the border, brought back vivid memories of this deeply sacred site for the Hia-C’ed O’odham and Tohono O’odham peoples. Like the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, Quitobaquito is a vital crossroads, historically maintained for Indigenous migratory and ceremonial routes, as well as for the region’s desert flora and fauna. Bulrushes encircled the pond like a reedy fence, and a couple of old cottonwoods nearby stood taller than anything else in the vicinity, save for the imposing Border Patrol surveillance towers. While the author had heard about the wall’s presence here, nothing could have prepared them for the jarring juxtaposition of the miraculous spring—the largest water source for dozens of miles—and the 30-foot-high bollard wall, remarkably similar to the one seen over 200 miles east. Apart from the distant traffic on Mexican Highway 2, the area was tranquil. Joe Biden was in the White House, and the construction of the wall had temporarily ceased. Nabhan and Austin Nuñez, a longtime friend and Tohono O’odham leader, had recently published a manifesto in the New York Times calling for healing the wounds inflicted upon the Borderlands during Trump’s first term, stating: "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, this moment of hope felt like a genuine opportunity for recovery, but the author and Nabhan could not have foreseen that this respite would be temporary, with further violence and the prospect of a second, parallel wall looming.

A lone coot, its pale beak stark against its black feathers, glided across the center of the main pond, seemingly indifferent to its human visitors. Small rivulets feeding the pond created shallow pools where the endemic and endangered Quitobaquito pupfish thrived. These resilient desert natives had adapted to high salinity and water temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit. They had, remarkably, survived the border wall construction and the rumble of Border Patrol vehicles along the Roosevelt Reservation. The author noticed a distinct, uniform discoloration on the bulrushes, transitioning from lime-green to an oatmeal hue about three feet above the waterline. Inquiring about groundwater depletion, Nabhan explained, "They pumped 800,000 gallons per mile of border wall to do the concrete footing, and this is a fragile aquifer." The spring’s flow into the pond had been declining even before the wall’s construction, due to agricultural practices on the Sonoran side. Coupled with record-breaking heat, the water level had reached its second-lowest point in recorded history. On the audio recording from that day, the author’s sighs and exclamations of "God!" punctuated the poignant scene.

The impact on the pond correlated with a steady decline in bird populations. According to Nabhan’s research, published in the Journal of Arid Environments, 45 bird species had promptly disappeared, though there was a temporary increase of 15 other species, primarily accidentals like sandpipers and dowitchers migrating from the Gulf of California, who were adapted to lower water levels and mudflats. Nabhan had been visiting this site since the 1970s, and the pause in wall construction did not undo the decades of damage already inflicted. "See those two cottonwoods there?" Nabhan pointed, his eyes following the shimmering green leaves in the breeze. "There used to be 15, 20 of them. I lowered my son down to the water to have him baptized with 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 did my dissertation here in 1982."

Returning to the pupfish, the author, with their less acute eyesight, had not clearly perceived them on their initial walk through the shallow pools shaded by mesquite thickets. This time, kneeling down, they caught flashes of iridescence—blues and silvers from the males and females. The guppy-like fish, critically endangered even before the wall’s construction, faced such a high probability of extinction that Biosphere 2 had collected a few dozen to introduce into a stream environment within its "desert biome" research center, serving as a sanctuary to perpetuate the species should it vanish from Quitobaquito. Nabhan, carrying a cherished volume of desert verse by his friend, Tohono O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda, titled "Ocean Power," sat at a peeling, splintered picnic table. He began to write a letter to Zepeda on the blank pages at the book’s end, wishing to "speak" to her from this sacred place, which lacked any cell reception. He recalled her sharing stories of her childhood visits to Quitobaquito and expressed his gratitude for her mentorship in O’odham dialects. Zepeda’s poems are characterized by their neatness, clarity, and spare desert imagery. Her poem "Morning Air" beautifully captures the essence of sustenance in the desert: "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 sentiment reflects how desert dwellers, human and non-human, survive: the moisture is both material and spiritual. It is deeply rooted in the cosmology of the Tohono O’odham, emerging with the wet breath of the creator-god I’itoi from a cave high on Baboquivari Peak—a magnificent, ruddy, heart-shaped sky island that dominates the nation’s landscape and spiritual beliefs. This is a place where arroyos and tinajas fill during the sudden deluges of summer and the long, soaking rains of winter. The author once visited the mountain alone and became lost, clearly unprepared and unwelcome. Decades ago, Nabhan, already deeply engaged in his work with the "people of the desert" (the literal translation of "Tohono O’odham"), had hiked to I’itoi’s cave with young O’odham pilgrims. In "The Desert Smells Like Rain," he described the offerings in this sacred emergence place: rosaries, gum, cigarettes, and a multitude of other items hanging in the dimness. This profound 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 act of making contact signifies holding onto the spirit of what came before, acknowledging what remains of what is currently being lost, and envisioning what is yet to come—perhaps even what will be reborn from drought, fire, or flood, from the harsh reality of steel slashing through the desert. The path to healing must encompass both science and art, policy and prayer, poetry, and what can only be described as sacred activism.

The initial resonance of the author’s dialogue with Nabhan occurred long before their meeting, sometime in the 1990s, upon reading "The Desert Smells Like Rain," a seminal work in arid and Borderlands ethnography and botany. The book opens with the blessing of a summer monsoon shower on the Tohono O’odham Nation, where a young Native boy uttered the poetic phrase that became the title, a reference to the distinct fragrance released when raindrops activate the resins on creosote leaves. The nation’s traditional lands extend across a border established in 1853; thus, this frontier, at 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. Like many scholars who have written about border regions, Nabhan is not indigenous to the area. Similar to numerous other artists and thinkers, he was drawn to the American West in search of self-discovery within a complex tapestry 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 essence for both humans and non-human life, a place of profound transitions stretching back into deep time.

Nabhan grew up on the Indiana Dunes, an unusual pocket of aridity on the shores of Lake Michigan. His family background includes an Irish Catholic mother and a Lebanese American father, with extended paternal relatives rooted in the arid lands between Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. His deep connection to the deserts of the American Southwest can be traced to the dunes of his youth and his family’s ancestral ties to arid regions. The author, 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, experienced a "riparian desert" through their parents’ heritage. What Nabhan and the author share are borders—and a persistent desire to cross them, to be pushed back by them, to laugh at their absurdity, to shout at them until their voices are hoarse, to despair over them, to contemplate them, to kneel in prayer before them, and to mourn their terrible cost: the border dead, encompassing at least 10,000 human lives lost since 1994 on what the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration terms the "deadliest land crossing in the world," as well as countless non-human lives.

In March 2023, the author embarked on another road trip with Nabhan, this time to the Sonoran coast on the Gulf of California, a region of profound significance for Nabhan. He first encountered these traditional lands as an undergraduate student at Prescott College, which has maintained a presence there since 1969. The journey was not without its challenges. En route, they visited Nabhan’s friend, Wenceslao Monroy, a respected community leader who had previously hosted delegations of Zapatistas from Chiapas. Monroy recounted a harrowing tale of a near-fatal encounter with cartel violence that forced him and his family to flee their ancestral ranch for weeks. Later, Nabhan spent an extended period conversing with students at the Universidad de Sonora herbarium in Hermosillo, a characteristic Nabhan moment, fully engaged with those eager for knowledge and dialogue. Nightfall descended upon an unlit two-lane desert road that seemed to be traversed only by them. Despite the challenging conditions, they arrived safely at the coast. The following day, as a documentary film crew’s high-definition cameras rolled, Nabhan gathered a handful of glistening eelgrass, demonstrating his authority on what celebrity chefs have lauded as the new superfood—"sea rice," the grain that sprouts from the grass. This attention was invaluable for the Comcáac, an Indigenous people so distant from centralized Mexican government authority that they have tenaciously cultivated their traditional identity. However, they remain vulnerable to Mexico’s paradoxical approach of romanticizing Indigenous history while neglecting the welfare of contemporary Indigenous communities.

In one of the communities Nabhan has visited for decades, the inevitable question regarding his positioning arose. This is a question the author has grappled with since first venturing into the borderlands of Indigeneity as a young writer. Fifty years ago, anthropology was still significantly influenced by a largely unconscious colonial gaze, an inheritance from centuries of scribes who documented Native geographies and identities in service of military conquest, economic exploitation, and, according to the Church, spiritual salvation. Then, during Nabhan’s graduate studies, Palestinian scholar and Columbia professor Edward Said published his groundbreaking work "Orientalism," exposing this very gaze. The immediate aftermath saw a critique of the ethics of representation 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 an ongoing dialogue.

If Nabhan 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 regarding the nature of his relationships with his research participants, previously termed "research subjects." Would his mixed heritage (he identifies as Arab American) be perceived as fostering a more "horizontal" relationship, potentially mitigating his colonial baggage? Nabhan himself states that today he would not feel comfortable in such positions—that is, as an outsider with the privilege to come and go as he pleases, holding the power to represent Indigenous "others" in writing.

Nabhan and the author stand at a generational crossroads, witnessing a significant shift in academic and cultural paradigms. Nabhan, slightly older, was educated within the academic ancien régime of predominantly white male researchers working in Indigenous communities. However, both were participants in the post-"Orientalism" conversation that celebrated the border as the Borderlands—a physical place and a cultural space, a site of both violence and suffering, but also of intentional blending and matching of languages and aesthetics. This was the theory and practice of forging a "third country," a distinct and transcendent region, as an act of creative and spiritual survival. Yet, that era too has passed, and in recent decades, there has been a more stringent delineation of cultural boundaries, particularly between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, in alignment with the ideal and practice of Native sovereignty.

None of these shifts diminish the reality of Nabhan’s relationships with the Tohono O’odham or the Comcáac, certainly not in the social sense, which the author has witnessed on numerous occasions, nor in his extensive 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, both North and South, have increasingly taken control of their own means of representation. This was clearly evident with the Comcáac. The author and Nabhan 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. Mellado is now an elected official within his community. The Comcáac, whose population had dwindled to about 130 at the turn of the 20th century, has now rebounded to over 1,000 individuals. One afternoon, on a sandy bluff overlooking the green, eelgrass-laden sea, with the serrated mass of Tiburón Island rising from the water just a few miles to the west, Mellado regaled them with the Comcáac origin story. In his essay "Heeno," which Nabhan published in the anthology "The Nature of Desert Nature," Mellado personifies the desert, portraying it as 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 envision 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 the author from Mellado, through Nabhan. This represents one of Nabhan’s essential roles: an interlocutor who conveys knowledge and sustains the dialogue between those who were here before and remain, and those of us who, relative to the human history of the region, arrived only yesterday.

In March 2026, the author found themselves hiking with Nabhan in the Mojave Desert. Nabhan, their elder, maintained a steady, sure-footed pace. Earlier that morning, he had risen at 6 a.m. for a 20-minute run. They were staying at the 29 Palms Inn, a rare example of old-school, pre-Airbnb accommodations still found in California’s high desert, featuring adobe cabins dating back to the 1920s. Given that Joshua Tree National Park was expected to be overrun by spring break crowds, the author suggested the less-visited Covington Flats area. This location offers fewer granite boulders, a broader vista, and a nearly 30-year-old burn area that provides a crucial window into a key 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, causing the flora to bloom out of its typical rhythm. During an early January visit, sufficient rain and sun had already prompted 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: 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 consumed nearly 14,000 acres, with a portion reaching within a few hundred yards of the community where the author lived at the time. Having visited Covington Flats in the immediate aftermath of the fire, the author, with no scientific authority, felt that the desert they knew and loved was irrevocably lost. Humans navigate loss through established rituals, a journey 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. On their walks, Nabhan consistently highlights cooperation over competition among organic life, noting how a mature piñon pine "nurses" a Joshua tree seedling with its shade. The fire did not, however, destroy the desert. The author’s iPhone recordings captured the crunch of their footsteps on the pebbly earth and the wonder in their voices. The Joshua blossoms, a 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 along the road berms, their flowers beginning to turn inward mid-morning for protection as the early spring sun silvered the land. The devastation from decades ago is most apparent 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 provided a nutrient-rich mulch of potash that is aiding the emergence of young yuccas, junipers, and piñons. In any event, the damage was not uniform: one hillside was nearly barren, while a stand of centuries-old piñon trees in a gully had been spared as the fire leapt over it. The author noticed a silky-silvery cloud within a wolfberry bush, which their untrained eye initially mistook for catclaw. "A spider web?" they wondered.

"No," Nabhan corrected, "it’s a caterpillar tent." It hung like cotton candy, intricately woven around the bush’s branching structure. The author then realized there were at least a dozen tents glowing within the wolfberry patch. Upon closer inspection, hundreds of wriggling caterpillars were visible inside each silken cloud. Within days, Nabhan explained, they would transform into buff-colored moths, fluttering amidst the green of spring. Once emerged from their chrysalis, they would feed, mate, and die within a week, instinctively ensuring the continuation of the next generation by laying eggs on the very same twigs where they were born. The caterpillars brought to mind an essay titled "The Desert" by Aldous Huxley, which the author had read years ago. Nabhan immediately recalled it, likely having read every essay ever written about the desert. The most striking scene in Huxley’s piece depicts him walking into the Mojave, where he lived during the 1940s, and encountering a carpet of caterpillars, the very same species they were observing. Huxley juxtaposed their persistent, wild existence with a visit to a nearby military research site, where he contemplated the atomic bomb and its herald of annihilation at the dawn of the Cold War. Huxley advised disregarding human "common sense," suggesting that after tens of thousands of years of developing language and its symbols, humanity had arrived at a precarious point. He urged readers to look to the caterpillars for "intelligence that operates on the organic level." There was something more, he wrote: "And beyond survival, 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 humans achieve their "not-selves," much like the caterpillars, they will find a path out of the climate crisis, a threat as formidable as the nuclear shadow Huxley lived under. As Nabhan and the author stood amidst the wriggling mini-accordions within the glowing silk of their tents, the author 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 Nabhan’s home. They also considered the human migrants from both Nabhan’s and the author’s family lineages, and the migrants who even today arrive at the wall, dreaming of ways to cross it. Merging the insights of both Nabhan and the Comcáac chronicler Alberto Mellado Moreno, one arrives at the concept of 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 indeed, in the blending of academic disciplines and literary genres: growth occurs 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 steadfastly at the line, beckoning us to cross it.