Revenge of the Saguaro. Tom Miller
could from the East Coast—without getting to the West Coast. Ultimately I jumped through that window and landed in Tucson. All that my friends and I knew about Arizona at the time was that Barry Goldwater and marijuana both came from there, and I thought that any place that could simultaneously sustain both would indeed be intriguing.
I wrote for the underground and the rock press then, and was gratified to find an active antiwar movement and low-profile counterculture firmly in place. As a writer who took part in the events that I covered, I enjoyed a 360-degree mobility into those worlds. Not long after arriving in the Southwest, I had an opportunity to carry this out when I arranged for the Dusty Chaps, a longhair country-rock band that played original tunes as well as Merle Haggard and Faron Young covers, to entertain at the Safford Federal Correctional Institution. Safford, a minimum-security prison, housed white-collar criminals, draft resisters, and Mexicans who had crossed the border illegally once too often. We were bringing aid and comfort to our troops, a USO show for conscientious objectors.
A short time after I wrote up the Safford show, two-year-old San Francisco-based Rolling Stone called: “Can you drive over to Taos this afternoon?” an editor asked. “The hippies on the Lower East Side are headed that way this summer. We need a piece on what they can expect when they get to northern New Mexico.” It proved a reasonable assignment once I informed him that Taos was 650 miles distant and I couldn’t get there that afternoon. A few years later, having expanded the range of publications I wrote for, I heard from an editor at Esquire. He wanted coverage of an event in Texas, and asked if I could—I believe these were his exact words—“mosey on over to Houston for a day.” I informed him that if we both started moseying at the same time, he’d likely mosey into Houston before me.
Initially ignorance and misconceptions about the Southwest bothered me, but I soon learned their source and history. “Lying about the West in general and the Southwest in particular,” writes author Charles Bowden, “has been an American cottage industry for over a century.” And one, I discovered, in Central Europe as well. Karl May, a German writer, wrote stories about the American West that featured valorous and admirable Indians. Winnetou, his best-known series, began in the 1870s and was as wildly inaccurate as it was popular. The three volumes about an Apache scout so captivated the German reading public’s imagination that to this day they hold Karl May festivals, reenact Indian gatherings, conduct May-oriented excursions to the American West and Southwest, and continue to practice a somewhat guileless but entirely genuine devotion to Native Americans and all that they symbolize. Winnetou and other May adventures, published in dozens of languages, are among the best-selling fictions of all time. Herman Hesse and the Alberts Einstein and Schweitzer were big fans of his. May resolutely established the classic image of the West in the European mind; it was a land of tepees and cowboys on the receding frontier.
Not that it mattered to his millions of fans, but Karl May did not visit the American West until long after his Westerns were complete. And although his writing, curiously, has never been embraced in the United States, its pastoral, late 19th-century romanticism of the Noble Savage tinged the popular notion many Americans still hold of their own West. Yet if Winnetou himself were alive today, he would likely be the greeter at an Indian casino.
“The Southwest still exists upon realities,” wrote noted author Paul Horgan in 1933, “instead of symbols of realities.” Today, myths that endure in the Southwest are the ones worth dissecting, deconstructing, and, when warranted, dismantling. Replacing them is harder, and writing about them can be challenging, but it is often this mythology that draws me deeper into the region and inspires my writing. It motivates me to explore the unexpected twists of events and the fierce emotions that both provoke and sustain the Southwest’s enduring legends. There is no substitute for researching an historical incident at the very spot it took place, suggested author Barbara Tuchman; it is how you acquire the all-important “feeling of the geography, distances, and terrain involved.” The difference between radical travel and conventional travel is simply how much you inhale along the way.
We all endure hardships in the Southwest, large and small, whether we moved here from elsewhere or know no other region. Earnest assurances to the contrary, a Chicago native will never be completely satisfied with the pizza here; likewise a New Yorker with the bagels. The poet Luci Tapahonso, a member of the Navajo Nation, complains that finding good mutton off-reservation is impossible as close as Albuquerque. Culinary borders can be as real as any other sort, and like the others we must accept them while hoping to find our way around them. A border implies the end of a territory; a frontier intimates the land beyond. They both crisscross the Southwest, and the daunting task can simply be to understand them both. “One place comprehended,” Eudora Welty has noted, “can make us understand other places better.”
The Southwest, now subsumed under the commercial rubric of the Sunbelt, has watched much of its identity snatched away by advertising and suffocated by urban explosion. “The growth of the Sunbelt has altered our perception of our landscape,” author Rudolfo Anaya observes. “The old communities, the tribes of the Southwest, have been scattered, and they have lost much of their power.” This process began in the mid-19th century when, with the spoils of the Mexican-American War, our national saddlebag fairly overflowed with two-thirds of Mexico. Anglo colonists were encouraged to travel to the new territories; they brought with them the ability to ring a cash register and quickly developed the talent to run cattle.
The dynamic that this created has not yet reached an equilibrium; fortunately the Southwest’s quiet, romantic qualities are still with us. It is through this shifting balance that I invite you to travel the Southwest and dip into neighboring Mexico with me.
TOM MILLER
Summer 2000
NOTHING HAPPENS ALL THE TIME IN THE SIERRA DEL PINACATE. This region of extinct volcanoes, lava flows, and sand dunes, covering more than 600 square miles just beyond the Arizona border in Sonora, Mexico, supports little life and less industry. Throughout history, hunters, smugglers, and missionaries have walked the Pinacate floor; writers, artists, and soothsayers have sung its praises. Traces of Indian life from the first millennium have been found just beneath its surface. Astronauts destined for lunar voyages have trained in its craters. Earth must have looked like the Pinacate before man evolved, and I imagine Earth will again resemble this haunting and seemingly infinite land when no one remains to appreciate it.
The Sierra del Pinacate embodies some of North America’s most striking contemporary themes: wilderness exploration, space travel, environment, contraband, nature’s delicate balance, immigration, and solitude. In the course of my occasional wanderings there by foot and truck, I have uncovered shining exemplars of them all.
When I first visited the Pinacate in the mid-1980s, the region fell under the jurisdiction of a Mexican bureaucracy seemingly too stingy to maintain the land’s pristine qualities. It was a staging ground for illegal foot and contraband air traffic, a feature that has changed only somewhat. Longtime Pinacate junkies—for the most part, an agreeably ornery bunch of weathered scientists, adventuresome artists, and hard-core campers—fear that more visitors there will forever damage the delicate landscape and ruin their magnificent and eerie turf. The Pinacate beetle, Eleodes armata, which when threatened stands on its head and gives off a slightly foul odor, provides both the region’s name and perhaps the best perspective from which to view this unfriendly land. Militant naturalist writer Edward Abbey, a man intimate with inhospitable desert land, described the Pinacate terrain as “the bleakest, flattest, hottest, grittiest, grimmest, dreariest, ugliest, most useless, most senseless desert of them all.”
Fernando Lizárraga Tostado, the Pinacate’s one-man ranger-caretaker-policeman-host-naturalist for most of