In October 2021, while traversing the stark beauty of the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Arizona, the profound connection of botanist, activist, and author Gary Paul Nabhan to this region became strikingly clear. For half a century, the Borderlands have served as his living laboratory, his academic and artistic canvas, and his home, situated a mere twenty-two miles from the Nogales port of entry. This is a landscape that has also deeply resonated with my own life, and it is through Gary’s teachings that I’ve come to understand the border as far more than an arbitrary line etched into the desert sand.

Gary’s intimate engagement with the border began in the early 1970s, a journey of visitation, habitation, and passage that I have since followed, bearing witness to the complex human and ecological dramas unfolding along this frontier since 1984. On this particular day, he wore his characteristic field attire: a worn khaki baseball cap, a faded t-shirt bearing a Spanish slogan urging peasants to "rise up," and a simple wooden cross around his neck. His full gray whiskers framed a face etched with wisdom, and a gentle belly rested comfortably over loose-fitting jeans. He possessed the unmistakable air of a farmer, complemented by deep, gray-blue eyes that sparkled with an inner light as he spoke in a soft, raspy tone.

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

Our journey led us along the Roosevelt Reservation, a sixty-foot-wide easement stretching for 632 miles along the border, established by Theodore Roosevelt in 1907 for security purposes. We were on the U.S. side, within the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, a dynamic ecotone where desert scrub seamlessly transitions into grasslands within the Chihuahuan Desert ecosystem. It is a landscape that Roosevelt could scarcely have envisioned in its current state: a militarized, almost cyborg-like desert, patrolled by Customs and Border Protection agents in vehicles, on ATVs, and on horseback, all supported by an extensive network of surveillance towers and drones, illuminated at night by harsh, carceral lighting.

Before us stood the wall: thirty-foot-high, rust-hued bollards starkly contrasting with the impossibly cerulean blue of the early autumn desert sky. We navigated through puddles of muddy water left by late-season monsoon thunderstorms. My gaze was drawn to the left, northward, towards the refuge’s beautiful ecological paradox: the riparian desert. Here, stands of sacaton grass swayed in the breeze, stoic creosote bushes offered their yellow blossoms, and thick-trunked cottonwoods reached skyward, their leaves shimmering in the sunlight.

Historically, springs, creeks, and ephemeral washes sustained wetlands in this area, supporting a vibrant 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 depleted these water sources throughout the 20th century, the designation of the refuge in 1982 marked the beginning of a significant restoration effort.

However, this refuge was also among the hundreds of miles targeted for the construction of President Donald Trump’s "big, beautiful wall." Numerous environmental and cultural protection statutes were waived to expedite the process. During the initial Trump administration, $408 million was allocated to the region, and crews even dug a well adjacent to the refuge to supply water for concrete, a move that severely damaged the fragile desert wetland biome. Once completed, the wall effectively halted most cross-border mammal movement, though its impact on drug smuggling was likely negligible, as estimates suggest that the majority of illicit substances enter the country through official ports of entry.

As we rattled eastward along the border, the vastness of time seemed to stretch before us, offering ample opportunity to reflect on how much had transformed in just a few decades. I recounted to Gary an instance where I witnessed crews constructing a border fence west of our current location, near the Santa Cruz River. This fence was ingeniously designed with holes large enough to prevent desert windstorms from toppling it but small enough to prevent anyone from gaining a handhold to scale it. During my visit, a swarm of grasshoppers nimbly hopped through these openings, an example of undocumented, more-than-human life circumventing a human-made barrier.

Gary then brought up the San Miguel Gate on the Tohono O’odham Nation, a vast territory that spans dozens of border miles. This had been an informal crossing where the fence simply ended, the "gate" being largely symbolic. Historically, it was respected by Border Patrol due to O’odham ceremonial routes and binational Indigenous families. While it had been closed to vehicular traffic for years, the closure was not initiated by CBP. In a twist of cruel irony, an actual gate was installed and welded shut by a Mexican landowner on the other side.

We both fondly recalled another informal crossing, the one at Boquillas in Big Bend National Park, on the banks of the Río 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, without any Border Patrol presence. This idyllic scene, perhaps familiar to denizens of West Texas and fans of Americana, was immortalized in a song by singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen.

The nostalgia for such simpler times made the sight of today’s imposing fence even more poignant. Thirty feet high, it stretched across the desert plain for dozens of miles, an alien object in the landscape, as out of place as the black monolith that incites violence in early hominids in Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey." Its shape and color were utterly foreign to the desert, a stark, irremediable alteration of the land.

And then, it was gone.

We stopped the truck and stepped out. The most recent monsoon storm had flooded the wash straddled by the fence, 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, they 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 every minute – surged north to south, smashing into the wall with a force that may have reached twenty-five feet in height.

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

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

They never arrived.

For those brief moments, Gary and I shared a glimpse into the past, before the wall’s imposition, and a vision of the future, when all hominid barriers might eventually be swept away by the currents of time.

There are many Garys. He is the MacArthur "genius grant"-winning ethnobotanist who revolutionized his field by merging rigorous scientific inquiry with "social witness and accompaniment"—a practice, inspired by Catholic social teaching, of simply showing up and offering service when and where needed, particularly within Indigenous communities. He is the scholar and activist deeply rooted in the Arizona and Sonora Borderlands, having dedicated half a century to their study and habitation. Gary is also the co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, a pioneering arid lands seed bank. He is the spirit-questing Gary, a member of the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans, inspired by St. Francis of Assisi’s profound reverence for the sanctity and vulnerability of both human and non-human life. Furthermore, he is the prolific writer, traversing numerous genres—from scientific articles and narrative nonfiction to poetry—with thirty-six books to his name, nearly all of them monographs. In these works, he freely roams across forms and between places, peoples, and the non-human world: exploring the biological-cultural-spiritual presence of mesquite trees, delving into the reasons behind our consumption of distilled agave hearts, compiling vignettes of American and international activists, artists, and visionaries, and offering a Christian Gospel-oriented guide for farmers and fishers. This past summer, he published Water in the Desert, his first true autobiography, a book that reads as an ambitious attempt to weave together these diverse threads into a unified field theory, braiding together matter, history, and spirit.

From the earliest days of his academic pursuits in the Borderlands, Gary has meticulously documented loss—of habitat and species, of civil rights, and of desert vistas unmarred by walls. His very first book, The Desert Smells Like Rain, chronicled the precarious future of the Tohono O’odham people’s millennia-old dryland-farming traditions. More than four decades later, Water in the Desert bears witness to the radical degradation of the border biome near his home in Patagonia, Arizona. Throughout his career, he has maintained a consistent tone, often characterized by an Old Testament-like lament, tempered by a wry sense of humor and an effortless command of puns. He writes of the rhizomatic interconnectedness of mesquite trees in the desert Southwest, playfully transforming "ménage à trois" into "ménage à tree." Ultimately, his work cycles through grief, only to consistently arrive at hard-won seeds of renewal and recovery.

My intention was to write this story in 2021, but at that time, I found myself unable to write at all. Five years passed, and only recently have I begun writing again, having navigated my own personal losses. Gary, who is just over a decade my senior, was a significant catalyst in my return to writing. I have reached an age where I receive AARP mailers, and one of the revelations of this season of life is the understanding that being an elder does not mean one no longer needs older elders to illuminate the path ahead, even as one increasingly assumes that elder role for those younger.

Therefore, I am writing as a tribute to my elder. Yet, Gary is also, particularly in the desert West, our elder, for all who care for the land and the myriad forms of life it sustains.

This writing endeavor led me to his home and out onto the road, transforming what began as a journalistic project into a deepening mentorship and friendship. Even during periods when I doubted I would ever complete this story, we continued to converse. 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 mind, and Gary would call just to discuss a new book he had read about the Sanctuary movement, or about folk music, or about a remarkable thunderstorm that had just swept across the desert. I believe he was intentionally accompanying me through my period of darkness.

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

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

I am listening to a recording from a 2021 visit to Quitobaquito, a natural spring just 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 crucial crossroads, historically and presently maintained for Indigenous peoples’ migratory and ceremonial routes, as well as for the region’s desert flora and fauna.

Bulrushes encircled the pond like a reedy picket fence, and a pair of old cottonwoods nearby stood taller than anything else in the vicinity, save for the Border Patrol surveillance towers. I had heard about Trump’s wall in this area, but nothing could have prepared me for the jarring juxtaposition of this miraculous spring—the largest water source for dozens of miles—and the wall, its thirty-foot-high bollards identical to those at San Bernardino, over 200 miles east as the crow flies. Aside from the distant traffic on Mexican Highway 2 across the line, the atmosphere was tranquil. Joe Biden was in the White House, and the construction of the wall had ceased. Gary, along with his 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,” their manifesto declared. “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 that occurred under Biden would not only be undone in Trump’s subsequent term but would be accompanied by a new wave of violence—preparations for a second wall parallel to the first, an even graver wounding than that inflicted under Trump I. At the time, we naively envisioned an era of open-ended recovery.

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

I noticed a distinct, uniform change in the color of the bulrushes—a transition 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 for the concrete footings," 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, largely due to agricultural practices on the Sonoran side. With record-breaking heat, it reached its second-lowest level in recorded history.

Listening to the recording from that day, I repeatedly sighed and uttered "God!"

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

We returned to the pupfish one last time. My eyesight is poor, and I hadn’t clearly seen them 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. These guppy-like fish were critically endangered even before 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 research center’s "desert biome" as a sanctuary to perpetuate the species should it disappear from Quitobaquito.

Gary was carrying a cherished volume of desert verse, Ocean Power, by his friend, the Tohono O’odham poet Ofelia Zepeda. He sat at a peeling, splintered picnic table and wrote a letter to her on the blank pages at the end of the book, expressing his desire to "speak" to Zepeda from this sacred place, where cell reception was non-existent. 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 conciseness, clarity, and spare desert imagery. Consider her poem "Morning Air":

The early morning air,
enveloped in heavy moisture.
I go outside and it lays on my shoulders.
I go about my business,
carrying the morning air
for the rest of the day.

This is how desert dwellers, both human and non-human, survive: the moisture is both material and spiritual. It emerged into the world with the wet breath of the creator-god I’itoi from a cave high on Baboquivari Peak, the magnificent, ruddy, heart-shaped sky island that dominates the Tohono O’odham landscape and cosmology. It is a place where arroyos and tinajas fill during the sudden deluges of summer and the long, soaking rains of winter. I once visited the mountain alone and became lost; clearly, I was neither prepared nor welcome. Decades ago, Gary, already deeply immersed in his work alongside the "people of the desert" (the literal translation of "Tohono O’odham"), hiked to I’itoi’s cave with young O’odham pilgrims. In The Desert Smells Like Rain, he described the offerings in this emergence place: rosaries, gum, cigarettes, and numerous other items hanging in the dimness. This experience prompted his reflection: "There is always something hidden in this world, that you can’t just realize from the outside. You need to make contact with it now and then, to nod your head in knowing, to receive its blessing."

In a landscape marked by loss and grief, this contact signifies holding onto the spirit of what came before, what remains of what is even now being lost, and what will be—perhaps even what will be again, reborn from drought, fire, or flood, from steel that slashes through the desert. The healing process must be simultaneously a science and an art, a policy and a prayer, a poem. This is the essence of sacred activism.

Known for his role as one of the founders of the regional seed bank Native Seeds/SEARCH, Nabhan has long been an advocate of conserving and sharing seeds.

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

As is common with many writers who engage with border regions, Gary is not a native of the area. Like countless other artists and thinkers, he came West in search of himself within a world of overlapping cultures, with its inherent tensions and syntheses. The Borderlands have been geopolitically constituted on land that is itself a waystation, migratory in its essence in both human and non-human terms—a place of transitions reaching back into deep time.

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

I was born in Southern California to an immigrant mother from El Salvador and a Mexican American father whose parents hailed from the arid North of Mexico; between my parents, they represented a riparian desert. This is what Gary and I share: borders, and a ceaseless desire to cross them, as well as to be beaten back by them, to laugh at their absurdity, to shout at them until our voices are hoarse, to despair of them, to contemplate them, to kneel in prayer before them, and to mourn 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 calls the "deadliest land crossing in the world"—and non-human.

Left: The wall bisecting the Sonoran Desert appears as out of place as the monolith that drove early hominids to violence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Middle: Rubén Martínez, the author, with Nabhan in the burn area at Covington Flats in Joshua Tree National Park, California, March 2026. Right: Nabhan translating Comcáac ethnobotanical history before cameras on the Sonoran coast of the Gulf of California; eelgrass is visible on the sand.

In 2023, I embarked on another road trip with Gary, this time to the Sonoran coast on the Gulf of California, a place of profound significance for him. He first encountered these traditional lands as a young undergraduate at Prescott College, which has maintained a presence there since 1969. The journey was not without its challenges. On the way down, we visited with his friend Wenceslao Monroy, a respected community leader who has hosted delegations of Zapatistas from Chiapas. Monroy recounted a harrowing tale of a close encounter with cartel violence that forced him to flee his family’s historic ranch for weeks. Later, Gary spent an extended period conversing with students at the Universidad de Sonora herbarium in Hermosillo, a testament to his true nature when engaging with those eager for knowledge and dialogue. It was then nightfall on an unlit two-lane desert road, which seemed to be traversed only by the foolishly brave, with no other vehicles in sight for miles. Yet, we arrived safely at the shore, where the next day, as a documentary film crew’s high-definition cameras rolled, he gathered a bunch of glistening eelgrass, showcasing his expertise on what celebrity chefs have hailed as the new superfood—"sea rice," the grain that sprouts from the grass.

This attention was welcomed by the Comcáac, an Indigenous people so geographically remote from centralized Mexican government authority that they tenaciously cultivate their traditional identity, yet remain vulnerable to Mexico’s simultaneous romanticization of Indigenous history and disregard for the welfare of contemporary Indigenous communities. Here, in one of the communities Gary has visited for decades, the inevitable question regarding his positioning arose. It is a question I have grappled with myself since first venturing into the peripheries of Indigeneity as a young writer. Fifty years ago, anthropology was still a discipline tainted by a largely unconscious colonial gaze, the inheritance of centuries of scribes who recorded Native geographies and identities in service of military conquest, economic exploitation, and, at least according to the Church, spiritual salvation. Then, while Gary was in graduate school, Palestinian scholar and Columbia professor Edward Said published his groundbreaking work Orientalism, exposing that very gaze. The immediate consequence was a critique of the ethics of representation and increased scrutiny of "objective" research for its 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 conversation.

To journey alongside Gary is to be in dialogue with the world, to see it up close in landscape and species, in policy and poetry.

If Gary were a novice graduate student today seeking to research the Indigenous cultures of the Sonoran Desert, he would likely face questions—from academic advisors and Indigenous leaders alike—concerning the nature of his relationships with his research participants (previously referred to as "research subjects"). Would his mixed parentage (he identifies as Arab American) be perceived as fostering a more "horizontal" relationship, partially mitigating his colonial baggage?

Today, Gary states he would not feel comfortable in such positions—that is, as an outsider with the privilege to come and go as they please, wielding the power to represent Indigenous "others" in writing. Gary and I stand at a generational crossroads, witnessing a changing of the guard. Slightly older than me, he was educated under the academic ancien régime of mostly white male researchers working within Indigenous communities. However, we both participated in the post-Orientalism discourse that celebrated the border not just as a physical place but as the Borderlands—a cultural space, a site of violence and suffering, but also of intentional blending and matching of languages and aesthetics—the theory and practice of forging a "third country," a distinct and transcendent region, as an act of creative and spiritual survival. But that moment too has passed, and in recent decades, there has been a more stringent demarcation of cultural boundaries, particularly between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, in alignment 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 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 evolved is that the Indigenous communities of the Americas, both North and South, have steadily taken control of their own means of representation. This was vividly apparent with the Comcáac. We spent time with Alberto Mellado Moreno, a brilliant young scholar who has authored a quartet of history books and cultivated a robust social media presence, sharing spectacular drone footage of the Comcáac landscape. He is now an elected official within the community. With a population that had dwindled to about 130 at the turn of the 20th century, the Comcáac have since rebounded to over 1,000 individuals today.

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

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

A children’s book about the Seri Indians (below) is just one of the 36 books that he has written or edited.

In March 2026, I found myself hiking with Gary in the Mojave Desert. My elder maintained a steady, sure-footed pace. Earlier that morning, he had risen at 6 a.m. for a twenty-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 by spring break crowds that day, so I suggested the less-visited Covington Flats area, which offered fewer granite boulders, a broader vista, and a nearly thirty-year-old burn area that provided a valuable window into a key climate impact in arid lands: the desert on fire.

It had been a peculiar water year in the Mojave. Soaking rains arrived in November and December, followed by an unseasonably warm and dry January; modest rains finally returned in February, all of which caused the flora to respond out of its usual rhythm. During my visit in early January, there had already been enough rain and sun for the Joshua trees to prematurely sprout their large, creamy blossoms; in the dense stand of trees lining the road to Covington, it appeared as though popcorn kernels had burst within the spiky green bowl of a gentle draw. We parked several miles in, with no other vehicles in sight. A sweeping panorama unfolded before us—the land descended steeply southward before rearing up again; a rock-walled canyon opened to the east, while modest, gently formed peaks rose to the west.

Back in 1999, the Juniper Complex Fire had burned nearly 14,000 acres, with one finger of the blaze coming within a few hundred yards of the community where I lived at the time. I visited Covington Flats in the immediate aftermath of the fire and, with no scientific authority whatsoever, believed that the desert I knew and loved was lost forever. Humans process loss through developed rituals of grief, an experience that is both intimate and communal. The non-human world also suffers losses, and its corollary to grief is adaptation, which is both species-specific and "communal"—no species exists as an island. On our walks, Gary consistently pointed out instances of cooperation rather than competition among organic life, noting a mature piñon pine "nursing" a Joshua tree seedling with its shade. The fire did not destroy the desert.

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

He has the look of a farmer, which he is, and oh, his eyes: deep gray-blue pools that shimmer as he talks to you in a gentle rasp.

The devastation from decades past was most evident in the charred skeletons of old junipers. The Joshua trees that burned are long gone; fire consumes their fibrous internal structure more rapidly and completely. However, what was lost to the fire served as mulch, enriching the soil with potash that is now aiding the emergence of young yuccas, junipers, and piñons. In any event, the damage was not uniform. Here, a nearly barren hillside; there, a stand of centuries-old piñon in a gully that the fire had leaped over. I noticed a silky-silvery cloud within a wolfberry bush, which my untrained eyes initially mistook for a catclaw. A spider web, I wondered?

Nabhan holds a horned lizard mask made by his friend, the artist Beckie Kravetz, for him to wear to a late July gathering of Borderlands activists and Indigenous community members to protect the sacred Quitobaquito Springs from encroaching border wall construction.

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

I told Gary about an essay titled "The Desert" by Aldous Huxley that I had read years ago. (Gary immediately recalled it; I suspect he has read every essay ever written about the desert.) The most striking scene in the piece depicts Huxley walking into the Mojave, where he lived during the 1940s, and encountering a carpet of caterpillars, the 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 heralded 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 embrace our "not-selves," like the caterpillars, we will find a way out of the climate crisis we face today, a danger every bit as profound as the nuclear shadow Huxley lived under. As Gary and I stood amidst the wriggling mini-accordions within the glowing silk of their tents, I remembered the grasshoppers that had popped through the fence years ago and thought of the jaguar that had been captured on wildlife cameras crossing the border not far from Gary’s house. I also thought of the human migrants in both his and my family lineages, and of the migrants who even today arrive at the wall, dreaming of ways across it. Mingling the ideas of both Gary and Comcáac chronicler Alberto Mellado Moreno, we find the skin of our bodies and the "skin" of the land, and the necessarily porous border between them. The same can be said for the porousness between the skins of 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 so much harm on both the human and non-human realms, Gary Paul Nabhan stands steadfast at the line, beckoning us to cross it.

Originally from Indiana, Gary has spent the majority of his adult life living and working throughout the Sonoran Desert.

"Morning Air" from Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert © 1995 Ofelia Zepeda. Reprinted by permission of the University of Arizona Press.

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This article appeared in the September 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline "Desert Sage."

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