Authors: Ellen Meloy
The night's camp trades cardans and pitahaya cactus for palm trees, a forest of them between San Ignacio's spring-fed pond and plaza. Although there are RV parks nearby, we have chosen to enter a chained but unlocked gate, whose sign is too faded to read. The driveway leads to over four acres of uninhabited space.
Lush grass grows beneath the palms. Beyond our bed on this “lawn,” water burbles through the acequia. In a small pen, two calves appear to be eating palm fronds and dates. No one is about. Other travelers do not know that this is a camping place. We have date-fed beef and a palm grove entirely to ourselves. The proprietor will come in the morning to collect his fee.
In the night breeze, palm leaves rustle gently, like skirts in a ballroom. We are fat with dates and squeaky-clean from two-dollar showers. We are drowning in stars unfazed by the town's
dim lights, and we have been to church. After barbed plants and volcanic rock, this not-quite-an-RV park feels like paradise, and yet all three of us ache to be in the desert again.
Beneath the date palms of the Jesuits, I think of the simplicity of Mexican churches as a quiet exaltation, quiet by their poverty, perhaps, but less architecturally furious than churches in the mother country, their tenor calmer than Spain's high pitch toward pious fervor. Here, heathen souls might be soothed not by holy faith but by ancient rose-colored stone, by lemons and pomegranates and bougainvillea, by refuge. The best part of the old missionary life, to me, was the mission garden.
For the natives of central and southern Baja California, for the Cochimí, Pericu, and other groups, the Jesuit mission itself, physically, was Christianity. The material things—stone church, fruit, corn, meat, cloth, dams and ditches, beasts of burden—may have drawn them more than the abstractions. Father Piccolo gardened and they came out of the desert to the garden.
Out in the desert, the people lived as close to a true bare-bones wilderness life as most hunter-gatherer cultures have come. The land gave them little but the meager foods of its own mar-ginality They had tools of stone and a calendar fixed on two measures: the time of hunger and the time of the sweet joys of cactus fruit. The priests believed that such lives needed rescue from the flames of hell.
Three hundred years later, one cannot begin to comprehend the price of “rescue.” An entire culture, born of this spare place and woven with story maps to seeps and springs and ways to find roots, seeds, wild sheep, or fish, is gone. Few know how to live anymore without the garden.
The Jesuits of the Mexican deserts were masterful cartographers, and to map their territory, they needed to walk or ride its every
detail. Father Francisco María Piccolo was among the most itchy-footed.
Shortly after his arrival in Baja California, Piccolo set off across the peninsula in search of a possible port on the Pacific side. On his travels, he became a naturalist as well as a seeker of potential converts. He described places with Indian names, which he promptly changed to Spanish names. Of Ohobbé, a place with reeds and willows, he wrote, “We called it Santa Rosalía.” Kada-kaamán would become San Ignacio. The saints of Europe overlaid the spoken native tongue and went down on the maps in ink.
The padres impressed the locals with their pistols and their horses. When the natives did not understand Roman Catholic heaven, they were told it was a field of pitahayas with ripe fruit. Conversions and baptisms were performed en route. Piccolo complained of thorns in his cassock.
Into the sierra west of Loreto, into the wild interior, Piccolo traveled on foot “among horrifying peaks” and later with a party “on good and fat horses and accompanied by Indians.” His evangelized territory grew; it was a country filled with potential converts.
In a report to his superiors, he wrote, “Here the good Savior was pleased to open the door of the Gospel for the benefit of so many souls who live under the dark clouds of death, and desire, as they so clearly assured me, to emerge from them into the bright light of our holy faith.” As they so clearly assured me.
On his explorations into the “horrifying peaks,” Piccolo carried hard bread, sugar, and chocolate. He rode barely tamed stallions. Always on his person was an image of the Virgin Mary, perhaps brought from his native Italy, an image that had survived arrows and shipwrecks. In Baja's sierra, it went underwater when his packhorse plunged into a lake of reeds. The men freed the pack and saved the icon. Then they ate the horse.
Piccolo regarded the natives with affection. They were as “pre-
cious as pearls” when their souls were saved, but otherwise they were known as “these wretched Indians.” He denounced “their infernal priests” (shamans) and “diabolic and deceitful races, wizardry, and all their evil actions”—which included polygamy and practices that the fathers interpreted as infanticide.
The “diabolic and deceitful races” particularly seemed to rankle Piccolo. The Wretcheds, he said, run about in crazed footraces over deer skins, a kind of cape, which they laid out on trails during ritual feasts. Somehow, Piccolo forced them to surrender the “abominable capes.” He put the capes under the altar with “other diabolical instruments” and felt better. The Indians then lined their racing paths—obviously places of great meaning—with Christian crosses.
Piccolo's jornada brought him in contact with the flora of Baja California, much of it endemic by virtue of its isolation between two seas. He ate the fish of his parishioners—sierra, cabrilla, pargo. He noted the wildlife in the eroded peaks and deep canyons: fox, mountain lion, bobcat, gray wolf, and deer, donors of the abominable capes.
High on the cliffs, its hooves resting on vertical air, was a creature unfamiliar to European eyes. Piccolo described it in Informe de la California, his 1702 report on the Jesuit mission, as a kind of deer “as large as a Calf of one or two years old: Its Head is much like that of a Stag: and its Horns, which are very large, like those of a Ram: Its Tail and Hair are speckled, and shorter than a Stags: But its Hoof is large, round, and cleft as an Oxes.”
A later natural history repeated the description and added an illustration of the “Tayé or California Deer,” depicted as a tail-less, barrel-bodied animal with a proportionately undersized head, shaggy neck, dark curled horns, and hooves like a horse's. A hundred years after Piccolo's description, a Canadian specimen of a “tayé” relative would be collected and ultimately classified as Ovis canadensis, not a deer but a wild mountain sheep.
Piccolo's sheep description was one of the first to be widely published in the European world. Perhaps he and the Jesuit fathers had seen the bighorn portraiture right in front of their eyes, painted in caves throughout central Baja California by those whose cultures long predated that of the Jesuits’ indigenous contemporaries. Here, and on rock faces throughout the American Southwest, were “published” descriptions of wild sheep.
Across the cave murals of central Baja surge figures in red, black, ocher, and white paint: deer, pronghorn antelope, mountain lions, dolphins, manta rays, whales, sea lions, vultures, rabbits; a supernova of a
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1054; horned serpents with bulges of food midbody; humans with arms outstretched, their bodies a pincushion of arrows.
Bighorn sheep dominate a number of friezes, drawn in profile, showing both ears and all their dewclaws, mouths open, sometimes pregnant, sometimes impaled by spears, heads turned slightly, no eyes—never shown with eyes.
The Indian groups of the Jesuit era were not, to anyone's knowledge, practitioners of rock art. They did not claim to be descendants of the cave painters. The Jesuits recorded their myths, including oft-repeated stories of giants, perhaps imaginary, perhaps an actual group of men and women of extraordinary stature, who came from the north but later disappeared. The giants, the Indians said, painted the cave murals of the sierra. The giants wore capes.
To Sicily and Spain, Piccolo's birthplace and his country of allegiance, the occupying Moors of the Middle Ages brought the mathematics of the sky and the arts of water in the desert— water, too, for pleasure, run through fountains and courtyard cascades.
To an eighteenth-century priest in the pathless, “thornful rock”
of far-west Mexico, such sounds would have been hallucinations. The missions clung to scant springs, largely on the coasts, the high cordillera behind them not to be lived in, only to be crossed on stallions with the protection of chocolate and the Holy Mother. If the land itself fed his imagination, Piccolo was restrained in the telling of it.
Piccolo spent more than half of his life in the deserts of Mexico, held there by his own vow of obedience. Mediterranean Europe was likely an imaginary homeland more than a remembered one, even though bits of it were reproduced in the mission templates of church, pueblo, and garden. He could not allow himself to be homesick; Jesuits don't get homesick. He planted olives and orange trees. He laid his hands on the ebony hair of the Wretcheds, purifying them, he thought, in the fire of divine love lest they burn up in their own metaphors.
The orchards and gardens fed the Indians, but just barely. The adobe shelters and the vaults of stone enclosed their attention and directed it toward the altar, the altar under which this edge-less Jesuit had stuffed the instruments of their animism, taken from the land, their own way of embracing mystery.
After thirty-two years in the Californias, Piccolo died at age seventy-five. The Jesuit fathers continued to cultivate soil and souls in the wildland between two seas. Here is a tally from a report in 1762: infant baptisms, 327; burials, 155; marriages, 112; “couples living in concubinage corrected,” 21.
In 1767, the Spanish government expelled the Jesuits from the peninsula. The sixteen fathers then running the missions had to leave or face execution, a decree based on nefarious accusations from distant Madrid.
In a ferry bound for the mainland, then on foot across Mexico to a ship bound for Europe, the Jesuits of the Californias turned their backs to the desert. Each was allowed to carry his cassock, a breviary, and two books, one of theology, one of science.
For a long stretch of days, we leave bighorn terrain to become fish-eaters, affixed to the littoral, to places of lesser hunger. Home is a casita beyond the southern city of La Paz, on isolated coastal bluffs (population: us) with a white sliver of a beach and fish that rise to Mark's and Joe's lures and flies, then fall onto a grill or a tostada shell or into a bottomless bowl of ceviche, made on the spot, on the boat, the fish cut up on top of the cooler, then thrown into a marinade of fresh lime juice.
Sierra, bonito, and cabrilla leap into the clear blue air from deep emerald waters. One day, Mark catches a snapper so big, he and Joe stop fishing for a few days until we can finish it: a twelve-tostada fish.
The gulls fuss and shriek over the entrails of the day's catch. Frigate birds move in and make the whole scene edgier. A gull nonchalantly swallows an entire fish head and bulges with meat. Too heavy to get off the ground, it sits on the sand like coyote fodder, shoulders hunched, belly distended, looking as if everything would be fine if it could just belch.
Every evening at the same time, a line of brown pelicans, always in odd numbers—five, seven, nine—glides by us, low on the water, somehow achieving forward motion without a single flap of their wings. If they passed in even numbers or changed their flyby clock, you would worry about the world.
Manta rays leap out of the water and slap down again in noisy belly flops, clearing their gills, tickling off parasites. Mark guts a bonito and finds in its stomach sculpins, a squid, and a mess of shrimp with threadlike limbs intact. Needlefish, as long and slender as shafts of chrome light, have green bones.
At low tide, Sally Lightfoot crabs sidle up the wet rocks. Across their blue carapaces runs a galaxy of white dots. Red-orange legs and claws cling to the slippery rocks even as blasts of
roiling surf pound them. The crabs move forward and in reverse, but their sideways scuttle seems the most swift. Their wariness stays true to Steinbeck's description of creatures who know your every move, hurrying or slowing as you hurry or slow, reacting to the direction of every approach. “When you plunge at them,” he wrote, “they seem to disappear in little puffs of blue smoke.”
Beneath the crab-covered rocks, in pools of clear water, lie dozens of lost spark plugs, the weight of choice for Mexican anglers who line-fish from the shore. Mark tries this spot with his fly rod. Like all Montanans, he held a fly rod in his baby fist soon after birth. In cap and wet shorts, legs planted firmly on the rock as waves curl around him, he casts long arcs of filament over the sea as if he were working a spring slough on the Beaverhead River.
When we have enough to feed us, we stop fishing. We stop fishing when the wind blows, and sometimes it blows all day and night. The boat stays tied up, which does not deter Mark and Joe. They have enough gear to create a fish, even if they don't catch one. Eating the lures will be like eating the padres’ leather belts and shoes.
On inland walks, I stare up at fat cardéns with vultures in them, flush quail and doves from a deserted well, and pick the beadlike sweet ruby fruits of the mamalita cactus so we won't get scurvy. On steep slopes, the footing becomes precarious over coarse granules of beige granite that slide like loose marbles. When I accidentally ski downhill, I can feel the heat of friction through the soles of my sandals and hope that I can arrest my slide before I end up planting my face in the thorny trunk of a cardén. The walking is easier on the open bluffs above the sea, amid shell middens and soil darkened by ancient cooking fires.
Across the strait lies a piece of drowned coastline, an island of mountainous desert scrub that takes the morning light as thin blue haze, then lets itself be carved into amber ridges and
amethyst shadows by the late-afternoon sun. When the sun sets, the desert drains its dusk colors into the sea.
The water around the island turns from a silky sheen of aquamarine to burnished silver, the color of the cuff bracelet of Navajo silver around my wrist, silver made lustrous by the warmth of flesh. In mere seconds, the sea leaches the silver and deepens to vermilion. Its beauty stirs the imagination, and I wonder if the last refuge of all that is truly wild lies not on earth but in light.