In October 2021, the stark beauty of southern Arizona’s U.S.-Mexico border region served as the natural backdrop for a journey with Gary Paul Nabhan, a renowned botanist, activist, and author whose life has been inextricably linked to this unique landscape for half a century. For Nabhan, the Borderlands are more than just a research site; they are his laboratory, his artistic muse, his home, and the very core of his being, residing a mere 22 miles from the Nogales port of entry. This same region has captivated me for much of my life, and it was Gary who first illuminated the profound truth that the border is far more than a simple demarcation in the desert sand.

Nabhan’s deep connection to the border began in the early 1970s, through visits, residence, and constant crossings. I, too, have followed in his footsteps, bearing witness to the intricate human and ecological dramas unfolding along this line since 1984. On this particular day, Nabhan was clad in his characteristic field attire: a well-worn khaki baseball cap, a faded t-shirt bearing a Spanish slogan urging peasants to "rise up," and a small, simple wooden cross resting against his chest. His face was framed by a flowing mane of gray whiskers, and a contented belly settled gently over his loose-fitting jeans, giving him the unmistakable air of a farmer. His deep gray-blue eyes, however, held a captivating shimmer as he spoke in a gentle rasp, his words painting vivid pictures of the land he cherishes.

"It’s okay to have boundaries in our lives," Gary once shared with me, reflecting on the line that so fascinates us both. "But if we were to seal all the pores on our skin, or all the stomata on a plant leaf, we would die. So, we truly need porous borders, because it’s a time-tested way to enrich life rather than strangle it." This philosophy, he suggests, applies not only to biological systems but also to the complex tapestry of human societies and the natural world they inhabit.

Our journey took us along the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide strip established by Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 for security purposes, stretching across 632 miles of the border. We traversed the U.S. side, within the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, a vibrant ecotone where desert scrub meets grasslands in the Chihuahuan Desert. It is a far cry from what Roosevelt could have possibly envisioned: a militarized desert, a "cyborg desert" as it has become, teeming with Customs and Border Protection agents on trucks, ATVs, and horseback. This landscape is punctuated by a vast network of surveillance towers, drones, and powerful, glaring lights that transform the night into a spectacle of carceral vigilance.

Before us, the border wall loomed, a 30-foot-high barrier of rust-hued bollards set against the impossibly cerulean blue of an early autumn desert sky. We navigated through muddy pools left by late-season monsoon thunderstorms, a stark contrast to the delicate ecological symphony unfolding to our north. Here, the refuge presented a beautiful contradiction: a riparian desert in an arid land. Sprays of sacaton grass swayed in the breeze, stands of stoic creosote offered their yellow blossoms, and nearby, thick-trunked cottonwoods shimmered with light on their fluttering leaves. Historically, springs, creeks, and ephemeral draws sustained wetlands here, a vibrant haven for hundreds of bird species, dozens of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, including the endangered Yaqui chub and Yaqui topminnow, and the threatened Yaqui catfish. While human development had depleted these waters throughout the 20th century, the designation of the refuge in 1982 marked a significant turning point, initiating a dedicated process of restoration.

However, this vital refuge also found itself in the path of President Donald Trump’s ambitious "big, beautiful wall" project. Dozens of environmental and cultural protection statutes were waived to facilitate its construction. During the first Trump administration, $408 million was allocated for the area, and a well was dug adjacent to the refuge to supply water for concrete mixing. This action, unfortunately, damaged the fragile desert wetland biome. Once completed, the wall effectively halted most cross-border mammal movement, though its impact on drug smuggling is questionable, as it’s estimated that a significant portion of illicit drugs flows through official ports of entry.

As we continued eastward along the border, the vastness of the landscape invited reflection on the profound changes of the past few decades. I recalled observing crews constructing a border fence west of our current location, near the Santa Cruz River. This fence, designed with holes large enough to prevent windstorms from toppling it yet small enough to offer no handholds for scaling, seemed an almost absurd human endeavor. On one visit, a swarm of grasshoppers effortlessly flitted through the openings, a vivid illustration of undocumented "more-than-human" inhabitants circumventing the human-made barrier.

Gary then recounted the story of the San Miguel Gate on the Tohono O’odham Nation, a vast territory straddling dozens of border miles. This informal crossing, where the fence historically ended, had been respected by Border Patrol due to O’odham ceremonial routes and binational Indigenous families. While it had been closed to vehicular traffic for years, not by CBP, but by a cruel irony: an actual gate was erected and welded shut by a Mexican landowner on the other side.

A shared nostalgia surfaced as we remembered another informal crossing, the one in Big Bend National Park at Boquillas on the Rio Grande. There, an elderly man would ferry visitors across the river when it was low, allowing them to enjoy a cold drink on the Mexican side, with no Border Patrol in sight. This bygone era, immortalized in a song by singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen, now felt painfully distant.

The current 30-foot-high wall, stretching across the desert plain for miles, felt jarringly out of place, akin to the black slab that incites violence in early hominids in Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey." Its unnatural shape and color, a foreign object violently inserted into the land, irrevocably altered the landscape.

Then, unexpectedly, the imposing structure vanished.

We stopped the truck and stepped out. The most recent monsoon storm had unleashed its fury, flooding the wash where the fence stood, tearing a series of bollard gates off their hinges and leaving the wall dramatically breached. Although the Army Corps of Engineers had designed these gates for such flooding, they were intended for manual opening before the monsoon season. During the storm, an astonishing 290 cubic feet of water per second—approximately 112,200 gallons every minute—surged north to south, impacting the wall with a force that may have reached 25 feet in height. To convey the scale of the destruction, I asked Gary to stand near the ruined section of the wall, his body mere inches from the Mexican side. The debris line towered several feet above his head, a stark testament to nature’s power against human construction. A Border Patrol surveillance tower stood a short distance away.

"The Border Patrol’s gotta show up any minute," I remarked to Gary. Yet, they never appeared. In those fleeting moments, Gary and I shared a glimpse of the past, a time before the wall, and a hopeful vision of a future where all such barriers are swept away by the passage of time.

The "Garys" are many. There is the MacArthur "genius grant"-winning ethnobotanist who revolutionized his field by merging rigorous science with compassionate social witness and accompaniment, a practice inspired by Catholic social teaching that emphasizes simply showing up and offering service where needed, particularly within Indigenous communities. He is the scholar and activist deeply rooted in the Arizona and Sonora Borderlands, where he has dedicated half a century to study and life. Gary is also a co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, a pioneering arid lands seed bank, preserving invaluable genetic diversity. He is the spirit-quest Gary, a member of the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans, deeply moved by St. Francis of Assisi’s reverence for both human and more-than-human sanctity and vulnerability. And then there is Gary the prolific writer, transcending genre boundaries with his 36 books, ranging from scientific articles and narrative nonfiction to poetry. His works freely traverse forms, places, peoples, and the intricate web of more-than-human life, exploring the biological, cultural, and spiritual essence of mesquite trees, the art of distilling agave hearts, and offering vignettes of American activists and visionaries. This past summer, he published "Water in the Desert," his first true autobiography, a book that reads like an ambitious attempt to weave together these multifaceted threads into a unified theory of matter, history, and spirit.

From his earliest days as a college student studying and observing the Borderlands, Nabhan has meticulously documented the losses: the erosion of habitats and species, the diminishment of civil rights, and the scarring of desert vistas by the imposition of walls. His seminal work, "The Desert Smells Like Rain," chronicled the precarious future of the Tohono O’odham people’s ancient dryland-farming traditions. More than four decades later, "Water in the Desert" bears witness to the severe degradation of the border biome near his home in Patagonia, Arizona. Throughout his career, Nabhan has maintained a consistent voice, a tone of Old Testament-like lament tempered by a dry wit and a masterful command of puns. He writes about the interconnectedness of mesquite trees, transforming "ménage à trois" into "ménage à tree," ultimately cycling through grief to arrive, always, at hard-won seeds of renewal and recovery.

The desire to write this story emerged in 2021, though a period of personal loss rendered me unable to write at all. Five years passed before I could begin again, having navigated my own cycles of grief. Gary, a decade my senior, was a significant catalyst in my return to writing. Now entering an age where one begins to receive AARP mailers, I’ve found that being an elder doesn’t mean you no longer need older mentors to illuminate the path ahead; rather, it means increasingly becoming that guiding presence for those younger than yourself.

Therefore, I write of my elder. But Gary is also, especially in the desert West, our elder—a beacon for all who care for the land and the myriad life it sustains. My pursuit of this story led me to his home and onto the road, evolving from a journalistic project into a deepening mentorship and friendship. Even when the prospect of writing seemed insurmountable, our conversations continued, or rather, he consistently reached out to me. During my own periods of darkness, hiking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park amidst the fog and Monterey cypress, he would call simply to discuss a new book, folk music, or a dramatic desert thunderstorm. I believe he was intentionally accompanying me through my despondency.

His voice and his messages have been a constant presence for years. The pile of books on my desk, lectures on YouTube, our conversations in his Prius (adorned with a peeling "No Border Wall" sticker in cholo-style Old English script along the driver’s side door) as we traversed the roads of southern Arizona, countless iPhone photos and videos, and detailed notes in my laptop journals and reporter’s notebooks—all are testaments to this enduring connection. To journey alongside Gary is to engage in a profound dialogue with the world, to witness it intimately through its landscapes, species, policies, and poetry.

Listening to a recording from a 2021 visit to Quitobaquito, a sacred natural spring mere yards from the border and a site of immense significance to the Hia-C’ed O’odham and Tohono O’odham peoples, brings back vivid memories. Like the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, Quitobaquito is a crucial crossroads, maintained for the historical migratory and ceremonial routes of Indigenous peoples, as well as for the region’s unique flora and fauna. Bulrushes fringed the pond like a reedy fence, and a few ancient cottonwoods stood sentinel, taller than anything else in sight, save for the imposing Border Patrol surveillance towers. While I had heard of the wall’s presence here, the juxtaposition of this miraculous spring—the largest water source for miles—and the imposing 30-foot-high bollard wall, over 200 miles east as the crow flies, was arresting.

Aside from the distant hum of traffic on Mexican Highway 2, the area was quiet. With Joe Biden in the White House, the immediate 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. "We must reimagine the landscapes we share with Mexico," they wrote. "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 reprieve. The modest reclamation efforts under Biden would not only be reversed in a potential second Trump term but would be accompanied by a new wave of violence—preparations for a second wall parallel to the first, a graver wound than even before. At the time, we naively envisioned an era of open-ended recovery.

A solitary coot, its long pale beak a striking contrast to its jet-black feathers, glided across the main pond, seemingly indifferent to its human visitors. Rivulets feeding the pond created small pools where the endemic and endangered Quitobaquito pupfish, one of the desert’s most resilient inhabitants, had adapted to high salinity and temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It had, remarkably, survived the border wall construction and the rumble of Border Patrol vehicles along the Roosevelt Reservation. I noticed a distinct, uniform color change on the bulrushes, shifting from lime-green 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 for 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. Coupled with record-breaking heat, the water level had reached its second-lowest point in recorded history. Listening to the recording from that visit, my own audible sighs and exclamations of "God!" convey the depth of my distress.

The impacts on the pond correlated with a steady decline in bird populations. Gary’s research for a study published in the Journal of Arid Environments indicated the prompt disappearance of 45 bird species, though there was a temporary influx of 15 others—primarily accidentals like sandpipers and dowitchers migrating from the Gulf of California, adapted to lower water levels and mudflats. Gary has been visiting Quitobaquito since the 1970s, and the pause in wall construction did little to reverse the decades of damage already inflicted. "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 with 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 the pupfish one last time. My eyesight is poor, and I had missed them on our initial walk through the shallow pools, filtered by the mesquite thicket. This time, I knelt and caught glimpses of iridescence—flashes of blue and silver, the males and females. The guppy-like fish, critically endangered even before wall construction began, faced such a high probability of extinction that Biosphere 2 had collected a few dozen to introduce to a stream environment within its "desert biome," creating a sanctuary to perpetuate the species should it vanish from Quitobaquito. Gary, carrying a treasured 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 writing a letter to Zepeda on the blank pages at the end of the book, wishing to "speak" to her from this sacred place, devoid of cell reception. He had heard her speak of her childhood visits to Quitobaquito and expressed his gratitude for her mentorship in 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 resonates deeply with how desert dwellers, human and more-than-human, survive: moisture is both material and spiritual. It emerged into the world with the life-giving breath of the creator-god I’itoi from a cave high on 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 prolonged soaking rains of winter. I once visited, becoming lost on the mountain—a clear indication that 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"), had hiked to I’itoi’s cave with young O’odham pilgrims. In The Desert Smells Like Rain, he described the offerings within this sacred emergence place: rosaries, gum, cigarettes, and countless other tokens 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 profound contact involves holding onto the spirit of what came before, the remnants of what is still being lost, and the promise of what is yet to come—perhaps even what will be reborn from drought, fire, or flood, from the relentless steel slashing through the desert. The path to healing must encompass both science and art, policy and prayer, a poem. This is the essence of sacred activism.

The initial whisper of my dialogue with Gary began long before our meeting, in the 1990s, when I first encountered The Desert Smells Like Rain. This seminal work, a classic in arid and Borderlands ethnography and botany, opens with the blessing of a summer monsoon shower on the Tohono O’odham Nation. A young Native boy’s poetic observation gave the book its title, a poignant reference to the fragrance released when raindrops activate the resins on creosote leaves. The nation’s traditional lands extend across 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.

Like many chroniclers of the borderlands, Gary is not indigenous to the region. Drawn west, as are so many artists and thinkers, he sought to understand himself within a world of overlapping cultures, marked by both tension and synthesis. The Borderlands, geopolitically configured, are themselves a waystation, migratory in their very essence—both human and more-than-human—a place of deep historical transitions.

Gary grew up on the Indiana Dunes, an unexpected arid oasis 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 back to the dunes of his youth and to his relatives’ ancestral ties to the arid lands between Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. I, too, hail from a borderland heritage, born in Southern California to an immigrant mother from El Salvador and a Mexican American father whose parents had roots in the arid North of Mexico—a riparian desert born of their union. Gary and I share this common ground: borders, and a ceaseless desire to traverse them, to be pushed back by them, to laugh at their absurdity, to shout against them until our voices are hoarse, to despair at them, to contemplate them, to kneel in prayer before them, and to mourn their terrible cost—the border dead, both human, numbering 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 March 2026, I found myself hiking with Gary in the Mojave. My elder, possessing a steady and sure-footed gait, had risen at 6 a.m. for a 20-minute run. We were staying at the 29 Palms Inn, a rare example of pre-Airbnb accommodations remaining in California’s high desert, with adobe cabins dating back to the 1920s. Recognizing that Joshua Tree National Park would be inundated with spring break crowds, I suggested the less-visited Covington Flats area. This locale, with its fewer granite boulders and wider vistas, offered a nearly 30-year-old burn scar, providing a crucial window into a significant climate impact in arid lands: the desert on fire.

The water year in the Mojave had been peculiar. Soaking rains in November and December were followed by an unseasonably warm and dry January. Modest rains returned in February, prompting the flora to bloom out of its usual rhythm. During an early January visit, the combination of rain and sun had already coaxed the Joshua trees into prematurely sprouting their large, creamy blossoms. In the dense stands along the road to Covington, the landscape resembled popcorn kernels scattered across the spiky green bowl of a gentle draw. We parked several miles in, the only vehicle in sight.

A sweeping panorama unfolded: the land descended steeply southward before rising again, a rock-walled canyon opened to the east, and modest, gently formed peaks emerged to the west. In 1999, the Juniper Complex Fire had consumed nearly 14,000 acres, with a finger of the blaze reaching within a few hundred yards of my former community. My initial visit to Covington Flats in the immediate aftermath of the fire left me with a somber conviction: the desert I knew and loved was irrevocably lost.

Humans grapple with loss through established rituals of grief, an intimate and communal journey. The more-than-human world, too, experiences loss, and its parallel to grief is adaptation—a process that is both species-specific and "communal," as no species exists in isolation. On our walks, Gary consistently draws attention to cooperation rather than competition among organic life, noting a mature piñon pine "nursing" a Joshua tree seedling with its shade. The fire, it turned out, did not kill the desert.

Our footsteps crunched on the pebbly earth, captured on my iPhone recordings, our voices filled with wonder. Joshua blossoms adorned the landscape, a carpet of brittlebush shoots with their cheerful yellow daisy-like flowers spread across the loamy plain. Desert bluebells nodded their otherworldly cobalt hue, while evening primrose thrived on the road berms, its flowers beginning to turn inward by mid-morning for protection as the early spring sun silvered the land.

The devastation from decades past was most apparent in the charred skeletons of ancient junipers. The Joshua trees that burned were long gone; fire consumed their fibrous internal structure more rapidly and completely. However, what was lost to the fire had, in turn, mulched the soil with potash, fostering the emergence of baby yuccas, junipers, and piñons. The damage was not uniform; one hillside appeared nearly barren, while nearby, a stand of centuries-old piñons in a gully had been spared as the fire leaped over it. I noticed a silky-silvery cloud within a wolfberry bush, which my untrained eyes initially mistook for catclaw. A spider web, perhaps?

No, Gary corrected me, it was a caterpillar tent, hanging like cotton candy, intricately woven around the bush’s branching structure. Now I realized there were at least a dozen such tents, glowing within the wolfberry patch. Upon closer inspection, I observed hundreds of wriggling caterpillars inside each silken cloud. Within days, Gary explained, they would transform into buff-colored moths, fluttering amid the green of spring. Upon emerging from their chrysalises, they would feed, mate, and die within a week, ensuring the continuation of the next generation by laying eggs on the very same twigs where they were born.

These caterpillars stirred a memory. I recounted an essay titled "The Desert" by Aldous Huxley, which I had read years ago. Gary immediately recalled it, suggesting he’d read every essay ever written about the desert. The most striking passage in Huxley’s piece describes his walk into the Mojave, where he lived during the 1940s, and his encounter with a carpet of caterpillars—the same species we were now observing. Huxley juxtaposed their wild persistence with a visit to a nearby military research site, leading him to ruminate on the atomic bomb and its herald 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 brought 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 embody our "not-selves," much like the caterpillars, we will discover a path out of the climate crisis we face today, a threat as perilous as the nuclear shadow that loomed over Huxley’s life. As Gary and I stood amidst the wriggling mini-accordions within 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 considered the human migrants within both his and my family lineages, and the migrants who continue to arrive at the wall today, dreaming of ways to cross it.

Intertwining the ideas of Gary and Comcáac chronicler Alberto Mellado Moreno, we find the skin of our bodies and the "skin" of the land, and the necessarily porous border 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 flourishes when difference is allowed to roam freely. At a time when borders inflict such profound harm on both the human and more-than-human realms, Gary Paul Nabhan stands steadfast at the line, beckoning us to cross it.