ONCE IN A VERY BLUE MOON
The wilds of Sonora: not quite the final frontier, World Nomads, 2023
Covering 2,760 square miles of the Mexican border state of Sonora, the El Pinacate and Gran Desierto de Altar Biosphere Reserve is vast – “visible from space” vast. But its amplitude had no say in UNESCO making it a World Heritage Site – no, it owes that distinction to having an inscrutable quality: “outstanding universal value”. A fitting accolade for a place whose pleasures are largely otherworldly.
Much of that value lies in the improbable habitat diversity of this subtropical desert ecoregion, and the ingenious adaptation of its denizens – 44 mammal species, more than 200 birds, 40 reptiles, several amphibians, even two endemic species of freshwater fish – to the extreme environmental conditions that prevail there, one of the driest, hottest places on the planet.
A reserve of two parts – dormant volcanic field in the east and, in the west, a desert with mostly active dunes – El Pinacate* provides habitat for the gila monster, bighorn sheep and a subspecies of pronghorn antelope, as well as sustaining colonies of barrel, cholla, organ pipe and saguaro cacti. As for other forms of plant life, mesquite, brittlebush, creosote, ironwood and thornapple notate the landscape; the poetry of their names, a Shipping Forecast for fans of Louis L’Amour. And the dunes, stabilised by Mormon tea and buckwheat, harbour a rare treasure: sandfood, a parasitic plant with a long edible stem, tasting a little of sweet potato, a favourite of the indigenous O’odham and Cocopah peoples.
During most years, plant cover in the dunes is below 15 per cent. However, in high rainfall – typically El Niño – years, in late winter and spring, the Grand Altar Desert supports displays of violet verbena, burnt orange chuperosa, white evening primrose and blue lupine that are worthy of a florist’s shop window.
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I first got to know the reserve in 2013. I was in Mexicali, the capital of Baja California, reporting on the drug war, which I’d been covering, off and on, for three years**. My nerves were at their end and, after a brush with cartel muscle, I reckoned I was due a break from the low-rent thriller, with an expendable lead, that my life was turning into. I borrowed a friend’s truck and headed straight to Puerto Peñasco, on the north shore of the Sea of Cortez, from where it was just a 30-minute drive to El Pinacate.
It was summer time, and the living – in a sparsely accoutred rented room in an apartment block close to the beach – was as easy as the fishing, which kept me in red snapper, bonito and calico bass for the duration of my stay. Google Maps prefers “the Gulf of California” to “the Sea of Cortez”, but I won’t be adopting it – I was 12 when I got word-drunk on John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez, the novelist’s account of his exploration of its waters by sardine boat, and the romance of that vicarious adventure will never leave me.
I despair, however, at what commercial fishing – and its attendant development – has done to “the world’s aquarium” (to borrow a phrase from the oceanographer Jacques Cousteau). Once a dazzling pageant of marine life, the Sea is counting more losses than victories right now. Indiscriminate gillnets used to catch totoaba, a large member of the drum family whose swim bladder is considered a delicacy in China, were recently banned, but their prohibition came almost too late for one animal.
In August this year, the International Whaling Commission issued its first “extinction alert” for the world’s most endangered marine mammal, the vaquita. This species of porpoise, the smallest cetacean, is endemic to the shallow waters of the Colorado River Delta. Just ten individuals are thought to remain, down from an estimated 600 in 1997.
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El Pinacate came to possess me. I had intended to spend a week with it, but a month went by without me so much as looking at the calendar. In much the same way, I barely broke a sweat, though it was Death Valley hot in the desert, and muggy as a sauna by the sea.
I camped there for a couple of days at a time, snacking on Fig Newtons and beef jerky, watching the heavens darken and their diamonds spill. A CD of Calexico’s Feast of Wire saw in my nights, the borderline between America and Mexico, not yet fortified, running through its fusion of parched blues, roadside jazz and exhausted mariarchi horns; the squeaky wheel call of a pygmy owl making everything sound like a field recording.
My dreams were a distillate of my experience of the reserve, of slack-jawed wonder at the sheer scale of it, of scrambled perceptions (my ears seeing and my eyes hearing), and of following neatly printed animal tracks, only for them to disappear, as though my quarry had entered another dimension and I had not passed the test. There were bats, too, long-nosed bats, feeding on night-blooming cacti, their faces and bibs fuzzy with pollen; and when I woke, it was to the taste of baconara – a Sonoran mezcal made from the century plant, Agave augustifolia – on my tongue. I would return to El Pinacate just to have one those of dreams again.
Each visit I paid to the reserve was like my first. The map in my head couldn’t contain it, and disintegrated with each unfolding. Landmarks would change position, moved, I suspected, by a celestial scenery wagon: cinder cones and laval tubes; erg dunes, linear, domed or star-shaped, rising to 250 metres; granite islands forming their own sierra half a mile up from the desert floor; and craters, a mile wide, as deep as a canyon and perfectly circular, created by steam explosions that had the power of an atom bomb. And all at the mercy of levers, buttons and whim.
But for all its physical drama – if ever there were an altar for God to worship at – it was something that happened at the reserve when I wasn’t there, all of 54 years ago, that made my trip so memorable.
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One morning over coffee in Peñasco, I told a neighbour, a softly spoken man in his seventies, that I’d heard astronauts had undergone training of some kind in the reserve – but I had put that down to people speculating on its unearthly appearance. Gus smiled, benign as a pane of cool, clear glass, and slowly, as if a rite were being performed, took a photo out of a large wallet and, watching my face, passed it to me.
As I examined it, he said: “An American businessman – a hotelier and horse breeder – threw a party for some important people here, at his house, in January 1969. He asked me if I would play with the band he had booked, so I took my cornet along. Everyone was very excited, but I didn’t know why or who the men were. They were friendly and they tipped us well, and that was all I really cared about then. I would learn their names later.”
He paused, as though summoning nerve, then said with inordinate care, his eyes wide and wet: “Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.”
And there they were, faded and a little furred at the creases, but it was undeniably them, grinning up at me in their civvies, holding cocktails like tiki bar regulars, a few months before universal fame would come knocking and never, ever stop.
I asked if I could take a photo of his icon, but Gus shook his head, still smiling, and gently took it from me, tweezer fashion. The “three amiable strangers” – in Collins’ own words – returned to their rightful home, Gus placed his wallet on the table between us. I swear, for a moment then, it glowed.
* It takes its name from the Mexican-Spanish word – via Nahuatl – for a species of endemic stink beetle, which, when distressed, performs a headstand and emits a foul-smelling fluid
** Travelling from Tijuana to Matamoros, and based in Ciudád Juárez and Culiacán, I covered the drug war for The Times, Borderline Beat, InSight Crime and Metro periodically from 2010 to 2013. See For the chop in Ciudád Juárez
Below, Sunken Waltz, the opening track on Calexico’s Feast of Wire
