In October 2021, the stark beauty of southern Arizona’s U.S.-Mexico borderlands served as the natural stage for a conversation with Gary Paul Nabhan, a botanist, activist, and author whose life’s work is deeply intertwined with this region. For fifty years, these borderlands have been Nabhan’s laboratory, sanctuary, and heart, a mere 22 miles from the Nogales port of entry. It is a landscape that has also captivated me for much of my life, and it is Gary who has illuminated the border not as an impenetrable line, but as a complex, living entity.

Nabhan has been exploring, inhabiting, and traversing the border since the early 1970s, and I have followed his intellectual and physical footsteps since 1984, witnessing the profound human and ecological dramas that unfold along its expanse. On this particular day, he wore his familiar field attire: a faded khaki baseball cap, a T-shirt emblazoned with a Spanish slogan urging "peasants to rise up," and a simple wooden cross around his neck. His graying beard flowed from his chin, a comfortable belly protruded slightly over worn jeans, and his deep gray-blue eyes, alive with warmth and intelligence, shimmered as he spoke in a gentle rasp. He embodies the spirit of a farmer, a identity he proudly holds.

“It’s OK to have boundaries in our lives,” Gary once shared with me, reflecting on the very line that fascinates us both. “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.” This philosophy underscores his lifelong commitment to understanding and protecting the interconnectedness of life, a stark contrast to the increasingly fortified reality of the border.

Our drive took us along the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide federal easement established in 1907 by President Theodore Roosevelt for security purposes, stretching across 632 miles of border. We were on the U.S. side, within the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, a vital ecotone where desert scrub meets grasslands in the Chihuahuan Desert. It is a landscape that Roosevelt could scarcely have envisioned today: a militarized desert, patrolled by Customs and Border Protection agents on trucks, ATVs, and horseback, supported by an extensive network of surveillance towers, drones, and glaring nocturnal lighting.

There, the wall materialized: 30-foot-high, rust-hued bollards starkly contrasting with the impossibly cerulean blue of the early autumn desert sky. We navigated through muddy pools left by late-season monsoon thunderstorms. My gaze was drawn to the north, to the refuge’s ecological richness—a testament to the desert’s ability to sustain life in abundance. Sprays of sacaton grass swayed in the breeze, stoic creosote bushes offered splashes of yellow, and thick-trunked cottonwoods, their leaves shimmering in the sunlight, dotted the landscape. Historically, springs, creeks, and ephemeral washes nurtured wetlands here, supporting a vibrant array of flora and fauna, including hundreds of bird species and dozens of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, among them the endangered Yaqui chub and Yaqui topminnow, and the threatened Yaqui catfish. While human development had depleted these waters throughout the 20th century, the refuge’s designation in 1982 initiated a significant restoration effort.

However, this refuge was also among the hundreds of miles targeted for the construction of what was termed President Donald Trump’s "big, beautiful wall." Numerous environmental and cultural protection statutes were waived in the process. During the initial Trump administration, $408 million was allocated for this area, and construction crews dug a well adjacent to the refuge to supply water for concrete mixing, a move that inflicted damage on the fragile desert wetland biome. Upon completion, the wall effectively halted most cross-border mammal movement, though its impact on drug smuggling was likely negligible, as an estimated majority of illicit drugs enter the country through official ports of entry.

As we rattled eastward along the border, the passage of time invited reflection on the profound changes witnessed over mere decades. I recounted to Gary the sight of crews constructing a border fence west of our location, near the Santa Cruz River. This fence was designed with holes large enough to prevent windstorms from toppling it but small enough to deny human hands a grip for scaling. During my visit, a swarm of grasshoppers had nimbly passed through these openings, an unexpected demonstration of "undocumented more-than-humans" circumventing human barriers.

Gary then brought up the San Miguel Gate on the Tohono O’odham Nation, a vast territory that straddles dozens of border miles. This had been an informal crossing, where the fence simply ceased to exist, the "gate" being symbolic. Historically, it was respected by Border Patrol due to O’odham ceremonial routes and binational Indigenous families. Although closed to vehicular traffic for years, it wasn’t CBP that enforced the closure; in a poignant irony, an actual gate was installed and welded shut by a Mexican landowner on the other side. Both of us fondly recalled another informal crossing, the one at Boquillas on the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park. 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—a scene immortalized in a song by singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen.

The bittersweet nostalgia for these freer times made the sight of today’s fence even more poignant. The 30-foot-high barrier stretched across the desert plain for miles, appearing as alien and intrusive as the black monolith that instigates primal violence in Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey." It was a foreign object, violently inserted into the land, fundamentally altering its character, with no resemblance to anything in the natural desert landscape.

Then, as abruptly as it appeared, the wall vanished. We stopped the truck and got out. The most recent monsoon storm had flooded the wash the fence traversed, tearing a series of bollard gates from their hinges and rendering the wall effectively open. While the Army Corps of Engineers had designed these gates to accommodate 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 per minute—surged northward, striking the wall with a force that may have reached 25 feet in height. To provide scale, I asked Gary to stand beside the fractured remnants of the wall, his body mere inches from the Mexican side. The debris line was several feet above his head. A Border Patrol surveillance tower stood a short distance away.

"The Border Patrol’s gotta show up any minute," I remarked to Gary. They never did. For those fleeting moments, Gary and I shared a glimpse into the past, before the wall’s imposition, and a premonition of a future where all human-made barriers might eventually be swept away by the currents of time.

There are many facets to Gary Nabhan. He is the MacArthur "genius award"-winning ethnobotanist who pioneered the integration of rigorous scientific inquiry with compassionate social witness and accompaniment, a practice inspired by Catholic social teaching, which emphasizes being present and offering service where needed, particularly within Indigenous communities. He is the dedicated scholar and activist of the Arizona and Sonora Borderlands, where he has lived and worked for half a century. Gary co-founded Native Seeds/SEARCH, a pioneering arid lands seed bank, ensuring the preservation of vital genetic diversity. He is also a spirit-questor, a member of the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans, deeply influenced by St. Francis of Assisi’s profound respect for the holiness and vulnerability of all life, human and non-human. A prolific writer, Nabhan has crossed numerous genres, producing 36 books that range from scientific articles and narrative nonfiction to poetry. In these works, he fluidly navigates diverse forms, places, peoples, and the natural world—exploring the biological, cultural, and spiritual significance of mesquite trees, the origins of agave spirits, a collection of vignettes featuring American and international activists, artists, and visionaries, and a Christian Gospel-oriented guide for farmers and fishers. This past summer, he published Water in the Desert, his first true autobiography, which reads as an ambitious attempt to weave together these diverse threads into a unified field theory, braiding together matter, history, and spirit.

From his earliest days as a college student studying and observing the Borderlands, Gary has consistently documented loss—loss of habitat and species, erosion of civil rights, and the disappearance of desert vistas unmarred by walls. His first book, 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 details the severe degradation of the border biome near his home in Patagonia, Arizona. Throughout his career, Nabhan has maintained a tone of Old Testament-like lament, softened by wry humor and an effortless command of puns—writing, for example, about the complex interconnectedness of mesquite trees with a playful "ménage à tree." His work consistently cycles through grief, ultimately offering hard-won seeds of renewal and recovery.

I had intended to write this story in 2021, but found myself unable to write at all. Five years passed, and only recently have I begun to write again, having navigated my own profound losses. Gary, who is just over a decade my senior, was a significant catalyst in my return to writing. Having reached an age where I receive AARP mailings, one of the season’s revelations is that being an elder doesn’t preclude the need for those older than you to guide the path ahead, even as you increasingly become a source of wisdom for those younger.

Thus, I write as an account of my elder. But Gary is also, particularly in the desert West, our elder, for all who cherish the land and all that inhabits it. My journalistic project evolved into a deepening mentorship and friendship as the writing process led me to his home and onto the road. Even when I believed I would never complete this story, our conversations continued. More accurately, he maintained contact with me. I recall hiking in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the foggy breeze rustling through Monterey cypress branches—a mirroring of my own melancholy state—when he would call simply to discuss a new book he had read on the Sanctuary movement, folk music, or a recent desert thunderstorm. I believe he was intentionally accompanying me through my period of darkness.

His voice and his messages have been a constant companion for years. The stack of books on my desk, lectures on YouTube, and our conversations in his aging Prius (its driver’s side door bearing a peeling "No Border Wall" sticker in cholo-style Old English script) as we navigated the roads of southern Arizona. Dozens of photos and videos on my phone, and Gary’s presence in my laptop journals and indecipherable reporter’s notebooks, all bear witness to this enduring connection. To journey alongside Gary is to engage in a profound dialogue with the world, observing it intimately through its landscapes and species, its policies and its poetry.

Listening to a recording from a 2021 visit to Quitobaquito, a natural spring just yards from the border, I am reminded of its significance as 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, maintained to this day for Indigenous migratory and ceremonial routes, as well as for the region’s diverse flora and fauna. Bulrushes formed a reedy fringe around the pond, while ancient cottonwoods stood sentinel nearby, taller than anything else in sight save for the Border Patrol surveillance towers. While I had heard about the construction of Trump’s wall here, nothing could have prepared me for the jarring juxtaposition of this miraculous spring—the largest water source for miles—and the imposing 30-foot-high bollards, identical to those at San Bernardino, over 200 miles to the east. Apart from distant traffic on Mexican Highway 2, the area was quiet. Joe Biden was in the White House, and wall construction had halted. Gary, along with longtime friend and Tohono O’odham leader Austin Nuñez, had recently published a manifesto in the New York Times advocating for the healing of the wounds inflicted upon the Borderlands during Trump’s first term. "We must reimagine the landscapes we share with Mexico," 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 that this moment of hope was merely a temporary reprieve. The modest reclamation that occurred under Biden would not only be reversed in a potential second Trump term but would be followed by a new wave of violence, with preparations for a second wall parallel to the first, a far graver wound than that inflicted under Trump I. At the time, we naively anticipated an era of open-ended recovery.

A solitary coot, its pale beak a stark contrast to its glossy black feathers, glided across the main pond, seemingly indifferent to its human observers. Rivulets feeding the pond created small pools where the endemic and endangered Quitobaquito pupfish, one of the desert’s most resilient inhabitants, have adapted to high salinity and water temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit. This tenacious species had somehow survived the border wall construction and the rumbling of Border Patrol vehicles along the Roosevelt Reservation. I noticed a distinct, uniform color change on the bulrushes—a shift from vibrant lime-green to a muted oatmeal hue about three feet above the waterline.

Inquiring about the groundwater depletion, Gary explained, "They pumped 800,000 gallons per mile of border wall to do 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, due to agricultural use on the Sonoran side. Coupled with record-breaking heat, the water level had reached its second-lowest point in recorded history. On the recording, my own sighs and exclamations of "God!" punctuated the silence.

Gary has been visiting this site since the 1970s. The pause in wall construction did not undo 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 observe the pupfish one last time. My eyesight is not keen, and I had missed them during our initial walk past the shallow pools in the filtered light of a mesquite thicket. This time, I knelt and caught flashes of iridescence—blues and silvers distinguishing males and females. These guppy-like fish were critically endangered even before the wall’s construction began, facing such a high probability of extinction that Biosphere 2 collected a few dozen and introduced them to a stream environment within its "desert biome" research center, a sanctuary intended to perpetuate the species should it vanish from Quitobaquito.

Gary carried 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, explaining his desire to "speak" to Zepeda from this sacred place, where cell reception was nonexistent. He had heard her speak of her childhood visits to Quitobaquito, and he expressed his gratitude for her mentorship in O’odham dialects. Zepeda’s poems are characterized by their concise, limpid, 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, human and non-human, survive: the moisture is both a material and spiritual sustenance. It emerged into the world with the wet 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 long, soaking rains of winter. I once visited alone and became lost on the mountain—clearly, I was neither prepared nor welcome. Decades ago, Gary, already years into his work alongside the "people of the desert" (the literal translation of "Tohono O’odham"), hiked to I’itoi’s cave with young O’odham pilgrims. In The Desert Smells Like Rain, he described the offerings within 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 involves holding onto the spirit of what came before, what remains of what is even now being lost, and what will be—perhaps even what will be again, reborn from drought, fire, or flood, from steel tearing through the desert. Healing, therefore, must be both a science and an art, a policy and a prayer, a poem. It is sacred activism.

The initial whisper of my dialogue with Gary predated our meeting, occurring in the 1990s when I first read 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 offered the poetic observation that became the title, a 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 borderlands, Gary is not a native to this region. He, like numerous other artists and thinkers, came West seeking self-discovery in a world of overlapping cultures, with all its inherent tensions and syntheses. The Borderlands have been geopolitically constructed on land that is itself a waystation, migratory in its very essence for both humans and non-humans, a place of transitions stretching back into deep time.

Gary grew up on the Indiana Dunes, an arid oasis on the shores of Lake Michigan, with an Irish Catholic mother, a Lebanese American father, and an extensive paternal extended family. His fascination with the deserts of the American Southwest can be traced to the dunes of his youth and to his relatives’ ancestral ties to 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; my parents, in a sense, bridged a riparian desert. This shared experience of borders, and a ceaseless desire to cross them, yet also be beaten back by them, to laugh at their absurdity, shout at them until our voices are hoarse, despair over them, contemplate them, kneel in prayer before them, and mourn their terrible cost—the border dead, both human and non-human—binds Gary and me. The United Nations’ International Organization for Migration refers to the border as the "deadliest land crossing in the world," with at least 10,000 human lives lost since 1994.

In 2023, I embarked on another road trip with Gary, this time to the Sonoran coast on the Gulf of California, a profound origin point for him. He first encountered these traditional lands as an undergraduate at Prescott College, which has maintained a presence there since 1969. The journey was not without its challenges. On the way down, we met with his friend Wenceslao Monroy, a respected community leader known for hosting delegations of Zapatistas from Chiapas. Monroy shared a harrowing account of a close encounter with cartel violence that forced him to flee his family’s historic ranch for weeks. Later, Gary lingered too long chatting with students at the Universidad de Sonora herbarium in Hermosillo, a characteristic display of his engagement with those eager for knowledge and dialogue. It was then night, and we found ourselves driving on an unlit two-lane desert road, seemingly the only foolish enough souls on it. We arrived safely at the coast, where the following day, he collected a handful of glistening eelgrass as a documentary film crew’s high-definition cameras rolled. His authority on what celebrity chefs have declared the new superfood—"sea rice," the grain that sprouts from the grass—was on full display. The attention was welcomed by the Comcáac, an Indigenous people so remote from centralized Mexican governmental authority that they fiercely maintain their traditional identity while remaining 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 about his positionality arose. It’s a question I’ve grappled with myself since I first ventured to the edges of Indigeneity as a young writer. Fifty years ago, anthropology was still heavily influenced by an often unconscious colonial gaze, the legacy of centuries of scribes documenting Native geographies and identities in service of military conquest, economic exploitation, and, according to the Church, spiritual salvation. Then, during Gary’s graduate studies, Palestinian scholar and Columbia professor Edward Said published his groundbreaking work Orientalism, exposing that very gaze. The immediate consequence was a critique of representational ethics 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.

If Gary were a novice graduate student today seeking to research the Indigenous cultures of the Sonoran Desert, he would likely be questioned—by academic advisors and Indigenous leaders alike—about 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 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 significant shift. Slightly older than me, he was educated under the academic ancien régime of mostly white male researchers working in Indigenous communities. However, we both participated in the post-Orientalism discourse that celebrated the border as the Borderlands—both a physical place and a cultural space, a site of violence and suffering but also of the intentional blending 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 era, too, has passed, and in recent decades, there has been a more rigorous demarcation of cultural boundaries, particularly between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples, following the ideal and practice of Native sovereignty.

None of this diminishes the reality of Gary’s relationships with the Tohono O’odham or the Comcáac, certainly not in the social sense, which I have witnessed on numerous occasions, nor in his body of research, nor in his dedicated 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, North and South, have steadily taken over the means of representation themselves. 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 rebounded to over 1,000 today.

One afternoon, 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." So intertwined is the story of the Comcáac with the story of the land that Mellado’s desert "skin" cannot conceive of its own survival without the Indigenous presence: "I knew that as long as they continued to live, I too would exist." This positions the Comcáac as guardians of that skin and calls upon the rest of us to follow their example—a summons that reached me from Mellado through Gary. This is one of Gary’s essential roles: an interlocutor, passing on knowledge, continuing the vital conversation between those who were here before and remain, and those of us who, in the context of the region’s human history, arrived only yesterday.

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 been up at 6 a.m. for a 20-minute run. We were staying at the 29 Palms Inn, one of the last vestiges of old-school, pre-Airbnb accommodations in California’s high desert, with 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 features fewer granite boulders, a wider vista, and a nearly 30-year-old burn area offering a critical research 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 returned in February, prompting the flora to bloom out of sync. 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 along the road to Covington, it appeared as though corn kernels had popped within the spiky green bowl of a gentle draw. We parked several miles in, with no other vehicles in sight. A sweeping panorama unfolded: the land descended steeply southward before rising again; a rock-walled canyon opened to the east, while modest, softly formed peaks emerged to the west.

Back in 1999, the Juniper Complex Fire had consumed nearly 14,000 acres, with a finger of the blaze coming within a few hundred yards of the community where I lived at the time. I had visited Covington Flats immediately after the fire and, with absolutely no scientific authority, believed the desert I knew and loved was irrevocably lost. Humans process loss through established rituals of grief, an intimate and communal journey. The non-human world also experiences loss, and its corollary to grief is adaptation, which is both species-specific and "communal"—no species exists in isolation. On our walks, Gary consistently pointed out instances of cooperation rather than competition among organic life, noting how a mature piñon pine "nursed" a Joshua tree seedling with its shade. The fire, it turned out, did not kill the desert. On my iPhone recordings, one can hear our footsteps crunching on the pebbly earth, our voices filled with wonder. The Joshua blossoms, the carpet of brittlebush shoots with their yellow daisy-like flowers across the loamy plain, desert bluebells nodding their otherworldly cobalt hue, and evening primrose thriving on the road 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 evident in the charred skeletons of ancient junipers. The Joshua trees that burned are long gone; fire consumes their fibrous internal structure more rapidly and completely. However, what was lost to the fire has mulched the soil with potash, which is now aiding the emergence of young yuccas, junipers, and piñons. Regardless, the damage was not uniform. Here, a nearly barren hillside; there, a stand of centuries-old piñon in a gully that the fire miraculously leaped over. I noticed a silky-silvery cloud nestled in a wolfberry bush, which my untrained eyes initially mistook for a catclaw. A spider web, I wondered? No, Gary corrected me, it was a caterpillar tent, hanging like cotton candy, intricately woven around the bush’s branching structure. I now realized there were at least a dozen such tents glowing within the wolfberry patch. Upon closer inspection, I saw hundreds of wriggling caterpillars inside each silken cloud. Within days, Gary 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, ensuring the next generation by laying eggs on the very twigs where they were born. The caterpillars jogged my memory. 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 arresting 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 ruminated 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 had tens of thousands of years developing language and its symbols, and look where it has gotten 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 under which Huxley lived. 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 in both his and my family lineages, and the migrants who even today arrive at the wall, dreaming of ways across it. Merging the ideas of both Gary and the Comcáac chronicler Alberto Mellado Moreno, we find the skin of our bodies and the "skin" of the land, and the necessarily porous 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 flourishes when difference is allowed to roam freely. At a time when borders inflict so much harm upon the human and non-human realms, Gary Paul Nabhan stands steadfast at the line, beckoning us to cross it.