The Flight of the Iguana (32 page)

Insofar as it was strategy, the strategy seems to have failed. Probably, given the judge's rulings, any strategy would have failed. On May 1 the jury came in with its verdicts.

*   *   *

Late one evening near the end of the trial, Reverend Fife sat in the living room of his home, exhausted from six months of courtroom tension, nursing a beer, and telling me about the large place held in his own Presbyterian heart by the spiritual traditions of the Papago Indians. It might sound as though he were digressing, but he was not.

In the unsparing terrain that is southwestern Arizona, the niche of Bedouin existence has for hundreds of years been filled by the Papago tribe. They are also known, to themselves and others, as the Desert People. The area they traditionally occupied, and within which their reservation now lies, is one of the most arid and least hospitable parts of even the Sonoran Desert—a landscape of flat valleys cobbled with wind-blown pebbles, sharp ridges that curl around confusingly like the walls of a labyrinth, arroyos and washes carved by torrential runoff and opening out blankly into dry basins, where nothing much grows except creosote bush. Drought is followed by flood, in Papago country, then again by drought; the desert blooms, briefly, then withers; the cycle of life for all living creatures entails unpredictable but ineluctable swings between extremes of abundance and dearth. Over the centuries the Papago adapted themselves to this cycle.

One of their adaptations was an ethic of radical hospitality. Under pressure of landscape, a Papago culture evolved in which great premium was placed on generosity, gift-giving of food and clothing, the sharing of surplus whenever there was any surplus. Wildly generous with each other, the Papago lived as though abundance were the rule, in a land where abundance was the exception. Today we might see them as existentialists of the desert—or perhaps just as hopelessly improvident. But in fact they were quite provident. The limitless mutual gift-giving was a survival strategy for a desert people.

That Papago ethos still informs the spirit of Southside Presbyterian Church, which was founded eighty years ago as a Papago
mission in a Tucson ghetto that was then known as “Papagoville.” It also goes far to explain the presence in Tucson of John Fife himself. Twenty years ago, fresh out of a seminary in Pittsburgh, Fife came down to spend a summer on the Papago reservation, where he fell in love with the people and the desert and the strange dynamic between those two. When the pastorship of a little Papago church in Tucson came open, six years later, he jumped for it.

“I've heard their stories,” Fife told me. “We've spent a lot of time talking about traditions. I climb their sacred mountain, Baboquivari, every year. Try to get to I'itoi's cave.” I'itoi is the chief Papago deity, believed to dwell at the moral center of Papago life and at the physical center of their lands, in a cave on the steep slope of Baboquivari. “I've been on that mountain when Papago folk had visions,” Fife told me. “I didn't see anything—but they did.” As he spoke, on the wall behind his head hung a characteristic piece of Papago coiled basketry, flat and circular, woven from tan and black fibers in the design of a concentric maze. At the entrance to the maze stood a small figure, itself woven in black, recognizably human. The large silver buckle on Reverend Fife's belt bore exactly the same pattern. The design is called
I'itoi Ki:,
and has strong resonance for the Papago. The pattern commemorates an episode, Fife explained, when I'itoi escaped from his enemies by leading them into such a maze.

The design is also understood allegorically. “The maze represents all the complexities and dead ends of life,” Fife said. In the course of a lifetime a person must move through all those complexities, through all those tribulations and misleading paths, toward the center point, at which waits safety, fulfillment, Baboquivari. I was intrigued by this maze. Clearly it also represents the desert.

*   *   *

The sentencing of Reverend Fife and the seven other convicted refugee-smugglers was held in early July 1986, the same week as that great orgy of self-congratulation by which some Americans celebrated the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. Fife was eligible for as much as fifteen years in prison, and the other defendants faced between five and twenty-five. But each of them was given a suspended sentence and a period of probation. Evidently such treatment is usual for first-offense cases under the laws in question.

Still, it all seemed a little anticlimactic after such a notorious trial—and it properly
was
anticlimactic, since the real drama had always lain elsewhere. The real drama had always lain in Central America, where noncombatants are still being killed, and in the deportation policies enforced by our government against refugees of some nationalities but not others. The Tucson defendants had never forgotten that, and so they were relieved at the relative leniency they received, but not jubilant. There had been no leniency and no suspension of sentence, after all, for the terrified people who face deportation.

I did not intend this to be an idle rumination on the ecology and anthropology of arid lands. The moral ecology of the United States is what concerns me. As more and more Salvadorans and Guatemalans are deported, under the pretense that they are “economic migrants,” more and more innocent people, America's rejects, may be abducted and tortured and murdered. Of course each of us will share responsibility with our government for those deportations. Some will try to believe that this country, with its poor sad stumbling economy, cannot afford any more refugees. Others will simply not want to be reminded about another group of abused, needy people. Most of us would prefer to forget the whole subject. The thing that we all need to remember is the same thing that John Fife and Jim Corbett have each learned: that sometimes hospitality is a matter of life and death. The desert, in this essay, is just a mnemonic device.

A Bizarre Sexual Strategy Among Steadfast Birds

Listen:
uh-whongk, uh-whongk, uh-whongk, uh-whongk,
and then you are wide awake, and you smile up at the ceiling as the calls fade off to the north and already now they are gone. Silence again, 3
A.M
., the hiss of March winds. A thought crosses your mind before you roll over and, contentedly, resume sleeping. The thought is: “Thank God I live here, right here exactly, in their path. Thank God for those birds.” The honk of wild Canada geese passing overhead in the night is a sound to freshen the human soul. The question is why.

What makes the voice of that species so stirring, so mysteriously authoritative, to the ears of our own species?

It is more than a matter of beauty. It is more than the majesty of unspoiled nature. Listen again, to America's wisest poet:

Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood

By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard

The great geese hoot northward.

I could not see them, there being no moon

and the stars sparse. I heard them.

I did not know what was happening in my heart

It was the season before the elderberry blooms,

Therefore they were going north.

The boy in Kentucky, seventy years ago, was Robert Penn Warren. The lines are from
Audubon: A Vision,
Warren's great meditative poem on John James Audubon, the American wilderness, and the nature of love and knowledge. What was happening that evening in young Warren's heart? What is it that happens in yours or in mine when we hear the same sound today? Presumptuously, I propose a theory.

Wild geese, not angels, are the images of humanity's own highest self. They show us the apogee of our own potential. They live by the same principles that we, too often, only espouse. They embody liberty, grace, and devotion, combining those three contradictory virtues with a seamless elegance that leaves us shamed and inspired. When they pass overhead, honking so musically, we are treated to (and accused by) a glimpse of the same sort of sublime creaturehood that we want badly to see in ourselves.

The particularities that support this notion are many, and you can find them in any study of the animal's biology and behavior. Here I want to consider just one. Geese mate monogamously, and for life.

•   •   •

Some thinkers would have us believe that monogamy and (still more extreme) fidelity are masochistic inventions of human culture, artificial limitations inspired by superstition and religion, and running counter to all natural imperatives of biology. Doesn't biology dictate that males of any given species should try to perpetrate their sperm as broadly as possible upon the female population? Doesn't evolution require that a female advance her own genes by selecting the strongest and smartest mate available when she is first ready to breed, and by then selecting another, if
possible even stronger and smarter, the next time around in her cycle? Doesn't the Darwinian dynamic—the relentless competition for reproductive success and survival—entail an equally relentless flirtatiousness among all animal species, an unending lookout for the prospect of a new and better mate? Well, no, not always. The evolutionary struggle, it turns out, is somewhat more complicated than a singles' bar. Among geese, there is an ecological mandate for fidelity.

Geese live a lofty but difficult life, facing the problems of starvation and predation in forms that are acutely particular to them, traveling long distances each year between their wintering ranges and their breeding grounds, struggling each summer to hatch and raise and educate a brood of goslings. Amid these travails, they just can't afford to philander. They need one another there on the scene, male and female, each its chosen mate, at all times. They have committed themselves, by physiology and anatomy, to a life of mutual reliance in permanent twosomes.

Curiously, this commitment seems to derive straight from the two other characteristics that we humans most admire in them: their noble size and their impressive migrations.

Of the world's fifteen species of wild geese, all are confined to the northern hemisphere, and most populations of those species make formidable annual migrations (hundreds or thousands of miles and, in one species, over the Himalayas), traveling northward in spring to breed, south again in the fall. Many fly all the way to the Arctic. Canada geese (also known as Canadian honkers and, scientifically,
Branta canadensis)
are the largest and the most familiar on this continent, with populations that follow flyways on the East Coast and the West Coast and several other north-south routes in between. The particular population I happen to know spend their winters in Arizona and thereabouts, feeding busily to build up fat reserves that will be needed later, and then fly up the Rockies to a certain braided stretch of the Madison River here in Montana, where dozens of tiny islands
separated by narrow channels give them a choice of ideal nesting sites. As with any animal migration, there are routine costs and acute dangers that must be faced by these journeying geese. Why the various populations migrate at all is not completely explicable, but flying up into the far northern summer does bring them to fresh food supplies (they eat grasses and other vegetation), to areas relatively empty of man and other predators, and to thawing wetlands that suit their needs for nesting. Also, the type of food they find by chasing spring northward is especially nutritious, since the young plant shoots they favor tend to hold high concentrations of protein and nitrogen. This last fact is quite important. Nutritionally, geese have to play every angle they can.