Authors: Ellen Meloy
At the U.S. border, the peninsular bighorn range spills into the mountains east of San Diego, where some are protected in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and others stare down from their cliffs at Southern California's perpetual agenda of sprawl. In the United States, at about four hundred animals, the peninsular bighorn is federally listed as an endangered species.
At the onyx camp, we are in the domain of the peninsular bighorn. Their geography, rather than physical features, distinguishes them from the Weems, Mexican, and Nelson's bighorns. In coloring, size, and habits, these races are similar, though Mark and Joe insist that if we find the locals, we shall have to speak Spanish to them.
After breakfast, Mark and Joe hike up-slope and disappear. Scattered palo bianco trees gleam white against rust-colored rock. When I rub them, the trees’ white trunks leave chalky powder on my hands. I follow one of the arroyos that cut the slope's flank. The arroyo narrows into a rugged canyon. Behind a bend, the walls close in and hide the horizon's band of lapis. Inside this cleft, who would know there is a sea beyond?
I seek tinajas, literally translated as “earthen jars” but also known as tanks. Here, rainwater collects in crevices of rock that are often deep and shaded, slowing evaporation. Bighorn ewes
use specific springs and tinajas generation after generation, bringing the others, young or old, male or female, to this hardened fidelity, binding a band to its own geography.
Winter storms refresh the tinajas. Leaves on the elephant trees and ocotillos are signs of recent rains along this stretch of coast. In this climate of extreme aridity, numerous plants drop their leaves in dry weather, then leaf out quickly when there is moisture.
Against one wall of the canyon, a low arch of rock marks a cave. Although I am pathologically terrified of caves, the mouth of this one reveals, oddly, a shaft of light behind it. I crawl in. It is a roofless cave, a kind of chimney in the canyon wall. Inside are a small chamber and, on the near-vertical back wall, a staircase of pool-and-drop ledges, each ledge about ten feet above the one below it.
Joe, who was hiking on the ridge above, drops out of the sky like Tarzan off a branch and joins me. Nuevo Anasazi, painter, sculptor, and archaeologist, Joe is also a wizard of southwestern rock art and, on a certain South Pacific island, a minor deity. He is a magnet for the signs and remnants of ancient desert cultures. Whenever we walk with him, it is as if he sees a shadow landscape beneath the real one. Already this morning he has found shell mounds and lithic scatter—fragments of worked stone—as well as sheep trails and day beds.
The water pooled on each ledge is neither pocket nor tinaja, which hold water from seasonal rainfall. This water comes from inside the earth, emerging to the surface like something alive. The roofless cave holds a rare spring. The pools are shaded from the sun.
Everywhere we look, we see sheep scat. The blackish brown pellets have nippled tips and indented bottoms. Some pellets are old; others are new. We find one the size of a corn kernel, a lamb's pellet, but it is not fresh.
I am torn, as always, between curiosity and reluctance to intrude, disturb. The spring has but a single route of escape: straight up the “chimney.” At water holes, desert bighorns are capable of drinking a considerable amount quite rapidly, a speed that quenches their thirst yet exposes them to predators for only the briefest time. Watering in a group, their muscles ripple with attention. When they drink at this closed-in spring, surely the rock shivers with their wariness. It is a dangerous place.
Joe and I scramble up the wall and out of the spring. In the jumble of pinnacles around the onyx quarry, we find more bighorn day beds. On our hike back to camp, we find Mark.
Over and over, I scan the dry sierra for the sheep. I listen for a faint hoof-loosened rockfall and look among the boulders for bones. I find only a rabbit spine, still attached to the pelvic bone, and pieces of shell brought in from the faraway beach by the onyx miners, who must have known about the spring and just as likely hunted bighorns.
Perhaps water-hole fidelity brought the animals fatally to the spring, there to drink in the crosshairs, an ovid form of sitting duck. Or they stayed away from the danger, found water elsewhere, and then, when the onyx quarry closed, tiptoed back from the margins of disappearance. Resurgence after such peril is not the usual desert bighorn story.
Darkness falls quickly, ushered in by coyote song and an owl's cry from a distant palo blanco. The night is so clear, I am convinced that we can see all the way to Isla Tiburén off the coast of Sonora, on the other side of the Gulf, purely by starlight. The island is a cultural protectorate of the indigenous Comcáac (Seri) people and a refuge for introduced bighorn sheep.
From the sierra behind camp, near the arroyo, I hear a faint baa-a, sweet and small, like a lamb's bleat, a little borrego cimarrén in the dark. The others herd it away from us, using the owl's voice to find their way in the moonless night. Perhaps I imagine this.
I fill a small bowl with camp water for rinsing the day's dust off my face. The Comcáac named the land that surrounds them Conéaax Oacta: the planet Venus reflected on the water and seen when one washes one's hands.
The peninsula's wildness resides largely in its interior, in the bony rib of mountains that separates the Gulf of California from the Pacific Ocean. It is a geometry of jumbled ranges and ridges creased with steep alluvials and of much space between scant settlements of stone and stucco houses, small orchards, water catchments, and goats.
The mountain people seem created by the interior's sheer stamina. They are dignified and direct in manner, traits common to bajdcdlifornianos. Not so very long ago, sewing machines and the seeds of bougainvillea came into their villages on the backs of mules.
For centuries, this land protected itself, “a pile of stones full of thorns … a pathless, waterless thornful rock,” inviolate by its failure to meet the standard human measures of utility. In the words of one of the Jesuit padre-historians in this desert in the early eighteenth century, Baja California was “destitute.” Without asking the natives if they were miserable, he wrote, “The source of all misery in this country is the lack of water.”
With greater sympathy, the Jesuits noted the hunger. The sparse bands of natives ate whatever they could pick or catch: cactus fruit, fish, mollusks, birds, grubs, ants, mice, crickets, snakes, small game, and, in the mountains, bighorn sheep and deer. When the pitahaya cactus ripened in summer, they gorged on fruit so lush and juicy, it was food and drink at the same time. After this harvest, the larder grew spare again.
For many natives in the Jesuit era, Christianity was not a means by which to give order to mystery. It was food. To come to
the scattered missions was to eat. The fathers may have been trying to find and feed the soul, but another kind of appetite could lead people there.
Once they came, they were taught that Christian hell looked a lot like the life they had left, a life of feuds, sorcery, murders, near starvation. On the other hand, many Indians so hated the cold that on a chilly day at the mission, a sermon about the fires of Christian hell delighted them. They wanted to go.
The padres talked of trading the “dark clouds” of heathenism for the bright light of the holy faith. They also told of an Indian man who, after eating nearly twenty-four pounds of meat, ate seventeen watermelons at one sitting. “The hunger,” they wrote, “was continuous.”
On his four-thousand-mile journey around the perimeter of the Sea of Cortés in a sardine boat, chronicled in 1941 as The Logfrom the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck and his companions seldom ventured into Baja's wild interior. The purpose of his trip (“we dignified it by calling it an expedition”) was to travel the coastline, gathering marine specimens with Monterey, California, biologist Ed Ricketts. The crew's work bound them to tide pools and collections of crabs, cucumbers, eels, annelids, snails, urchins, conchs, holothurians, anemones, and other Gulf fauna.
During a brief onshore stop on the south coast, at the foot of the Sierra de la Giganta, Steinbeck by chance encountered a rancher and his party on their way to hunt borrego cimarrén in the “tremendous and desolate stone mountains.” The rancher invited the Americans to go along.
“We didn't want to kill a big-horn sheep, but we wanted to see the country,” Steinbeck wrote. “As it turned out, none of them … had any intention of killing a big-horn sheep.”
From a ranchería of gardens and grapevines and houses with
walls of woven palms and earth floors neatly swept, the hunters rode into the mountains on mules. Two Indian men went ahead of them on foot, waiting for the riders on the steepest ascents because the pack stock were too slow for them. The party camped on a high ledge with palm trees and a cascading spring.
Of night in camp, Steinbeck wrote, “We have noticed many times how lightly Mexican Indians sleep. Often in the night they awaken to smoke a cigarette and talk softly together for awhile, and then go to sleep again rather like restless birds, which sing a little in the dark, dreaming that it is already day. Half a dozen times a night they must awaken thus, and it is pleasant to hear them, for they talk very quietly as though they were dreaming.”
In the morning, the Indians were given a broken rifle and off they went, Steinbeck said, straight up the mountain, while the others lounged by the palm-shaded pool and told stories.
“And we sat in that cool place and looked out over the hot desert country to the blue Gulf. In a couple of hours our Indians came back; they had no borrego, but one of them had a pocketful of droppings. It was time by now to start back to the boat. We intend to do all our future hunting in exactly this way.”
The party descended the mountain and returned aboard the Western Flyer, with Steinbeck proclaiming, “This, our first hunt for the borrego, or big-horn sheep, was the nicest hunting we have ever had.” They could think of only one way to improve their method. The next time, he vowed, “we shall not take a gun, thereby obviating the last remote possibility of having the hunt cluttered up with game.” On a hardwood plaque the crew mounted their trophy: a perfect borrego turd.
The crew chugged along the coast in their boat, continuing the quest for marine specimens. The sierra, the difficult interior, was left behind. Offshore from another village, Steinbeck noted, “Food is hard to get, and a man lives inward, closely related to time.”
Better roads and bigger tourism, a predatory brand of industrial leisure exemplified by Cabo San Lucas, have changed Baja California. The visitors seem to come as groups defined by their technology: They aren't people; they are four-wheelers, dirt bikers, dune buggers, yachties, anglers, surfers, windsurfers, sea kayakers, the RV crowd, the visored throngs on immortal golf quests.
Perhaps we, too, are a group, a goofy one with animal notes, plant books, and Jesuit literature, casting rods and Montana fly rods, and an old boat with big yellow Colorado River white-water oars, ready to save us if the outboard fails.
The land has always been extraordinarily beautiful, harsh, and agonizingly stubborn, and for a long time hunger and beauty locked it into its own keeping. We, too, reap the aesthetics, nature's scarce and precious beauty. We and so many norteáos like us can do this because we have the time and the means. We are not hungry.
In one arena, we cling to the delusion of feral self-reliance, to citizenry in the republic of resourcefulness: fishing. Mark declares us protein-dependent. Our daily meat will come from the sea, he says, and he and Joe will catch it.
In a village behind a slip of a bay, we stop for a local fishing report. One family occupies most of the village. The news of the day is that its patriarch has died.
The old papa lived to be over a hundred years old and drove his pickup over the hellish roads until he was ninety-five. One day, he ate a huge breakfast of eggs and tortillas and lay down on his bed. He asked for three santos to be brought to him, then “breathed funny” and died.
His son tells us this, although I am unsure if I have correctly translated the part about the funny breathing. Papa's offspring and offspring of offspring surround us, home from a distant town,
where they must go to school or work in a wage-driven economy that has eclipsed the small-scale family fishing trades in the remote campos.
The family compound is scattered with overturned pangas, some functional, others morphed into doghouses. The son shows us a sculpture of a santo welded from bits of scrap metal. Someone has colored the saint's face and feet pink. Perched on a fence post is a fat stuffed teddy bear, its body painted to look like a black-and-white Day of the Dead skeleton.
At a junction farther down the road, we stop at a Pemex station and fill the gas tank. On a shelf in the tienda is a horn from a bighorn ram. The tip is broomed. A chunk missing from the curved keel marks an old battle. No one at the store remembers where the ram's horn came from, but they have seen borregos in the nearby mountains. Rich people come to hunt them, with or without a special permit but always with money, we are told. Occasionally, there is local poaching.
A chain of ridges between a broad llano, or plain, and a small bay, where we hope to fish, slows our progress. The truck crawls over the ruts of a brutal ascent. On the crest, a Mexican rest area: two ten-gallon plastic water jugs by the side of the road, ready for the radiator in need.
The bay yields no fish. We eat rice and beans, tortillas, and nuts from Trader Joe's in Phoenix. Joe says the fishing will not be any good until we rid ourselves of the canned tuna in our cache. “Navajo,” he says of our neighbors in Utah, “do not go to the hunt carrying meat from home.”
Like so many of our camps, this one lies on a bajada above the shore and out of the wind: home on the “thornful rock.” The desert is a stage for a hundred-square-mile out-of-control explosion of bristles and wildly gesticulating arms. Backlit by a
low sun, every plant glows, creating an aura of needles and spikes.