Desert Wilderness

An Insistent Silence Stillness and Space

The desolate CABEZA PRIETA beckons a writer into his soul A land apart. Requiring no human validation, free from most civilized intrusions, the 860,000 acres of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge simply exist, monument to a desert wildness, sometimes visited, never possessed. Here, decaying cholla cactus skeletons gracefully frame a sunrise view of a saguaro cactus forest. JACK DYKINGA

The world disappears. The heat hangs like a blanket

Over the land, and at night, the stars dangle from the sky and cause me to duck when moving about. The loudest sound-when the coyotes finally fall silent-is the beating of my heart. I am in the Cabeza Prieta, technically a national wildlife refuge. But this designation is a ruse of land management. On the Mexican border, the Cabeza Prieta refuge lies swaddled by the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range against the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument to the southeast. Together, all three spell immensity. I stand in the heart of the Sonoran Desert, and the Sonoran Desert beats as the heart of all the deserts of the world. It is about space, and this space swallows what we call the world and takes us to what is the world. I will explain.

A friend of mine insists that what matters is that here, in the Cabeza Prieta, the wandlike ocotillo's leaves turn blood red. Sometimes I think what matters is that there are populations of coyotes in the Cabeza that thrive without water and get their succor from a diet of blood. But all of these facts are details. This desert is mountains and wide valleys and the rain that does not come. But the soul of the Cabeza Prieta is about space and silence. About leaving walls and roofs and entering a place that refutes all such structures. Thousands of square miles without a house

(Continued from page 26) or human resident. Silence so insistent that at times you hear your own cardiovascular system thrumming. Our ancestors saw this place as a wasteland and named their route of travel through it El Camino del Diablo, the Devil's Highway. I see it as home. True, we have all been warned that we can't go home again. But we can drop by for a visit. I always come from the east because I feel bet-ter when I am heading west. For the last 60 miles I notice the mesquite trees slowly give way to ironwood trees, watch as the desert of random grasses and paloverde trees and cholla cacti dwindles until a sea of creosote brush covers the ground. Always, I pause at Ajo to look west and think that, for a hundred miles, there is probably not a person or cow or paved road or fence. Or a radio crooning in the night. Just a series of mountains-the Growlers, Granites, Sierra Pintas, Cabeza Prietas and, finally, like a wall standing guard just outside the refuge's far western boundary, the Tinajas Altas, the fabled high tanks where water almost never fails if you know where to look. You could walk across the Cabeza from water hole to water hole, spending days with your boots crunching the soil, doves flashing by in the early morning and at dusk. Perhaps, if you are lucky, you will catch a glimpse of pronghorn, and almost certainly at some point you will be watched by desert bighorn, and in that time see no one. Here pools the last reservoir of privacy in the lower 48 states. I have been coming here for many years, and now the place holds a grab bag of memories.

I always come from the east because I feel better when I am heading west. For the last 60 miles I notice the mesquite trees slowly give way to ironwood trees, watch as the desert of random grasses and paloverde trees and cholla cacti dwindles until a sea of creosote brush covers the ground. Always, I pause at Ajo to look west and think that, for a hundred miles, there is probably not a person or cow or paved road or fence. Or a radio crooning in the night. Just a series of mountains-the Growlers, Granites, Sierra Pintas, Cabeza Prietas and, finally, like a wall standing guard just outside the refuge's far western boundary, the Tinajas Altas, the fabled high tanks where water almost never fails if you know where to look. You could walk across the Cabeza from water hole to water hole, spending days with your boots crunching the soil, doves flashing by in the early morning and at dusk. Perhaps, if you are lucky, you will catch a glimpse of pronghorn, and almost certainly at some point you will be watched by desert bighorn, and in that time see no one. Here pools the last reservoir of privacy in the lower 48 states. I have been coming here for many years, and now the place holds a grab bag of memories.

I sprawl on the Pinta Sands. Tongues of lava from Mexico's Pinacate flow lick the earth near my bedroll. It is night, the moon hunts, the dunes turn milk-white and the sensuous curve of sidewinder tracks etches the soft folds of moving sands. Some think the Gila monster population peters out here at the Pinta Sands. It is true that in the Tule Desert, just to the west and north, a reckoning occurs. The rainfall drops off, the mesquite and ironwood trees huddle under a relentless sun and become dwarfish, the deer and javelinas become scant. The endangered Sonoran pronghorns sometimes push farther west, but then for years, scientists were not even sure if they ever drank water (they do). I look north toward the Sierra Pintas and see a black horizon line about 50 miles on foot to pavement and our fourlane fantasies. To be honest, when I am sprawled here on the sand, I never think of heat or water or highways. The Devil's Highway courses by a hundred yards to the north, but this small jeep track hardly matters to me now. I am not in the wilderness, I am in this universe of sensation with milk-white sand, the moon hunting, the soft silence of the night, the stars brighter than a city streetlight.

In the city, the minutes slip by. Here, the minutes, ripe and full, spell endless delights. The world here swallows the world, and I am left with myself and the planet we call Earth. They gather in the early summer, dozens of desert bighorns lounging about on the rockpile of the Sierra Pintas. Heart Tank, a hole in the rock, stores the rare rains. The Cabeza has no streams and but one tiny spring. Water is found, if at all, in these isolated holes in the rock, charcos or tinajas in Spanish, life in any language. My bedroll faces the Tule Desert baking at the canyon's mouth. Some think Father Eusebio Francisco Kino once visited this tank. No one knows Cabeza has no streams and but one tiny spring. Water is found, if at all, in these isolated holes in the rock, charcos or tinajas in Spanish, life in any language. My bedroll faces the Tule Desert baking at the canyon's mouth. Some think Father Eusebio Francisco Kino once visited this tank. No one knows The Cabeza Prieta has no real focal point . . .

no singular peak towering over everything.

One place looks much like another, a slab of light and space and silence.

for certain. Hawks and eagles come each day at separate times. The turkey vultures arrive as a group. They form a line and then drink one by one. After a day or so, no one pays attention to me. Big rams walk past maybe 20 feet away as I make notes in the June heat. A coyote pads past my bedroll twice each day with hardly a sidelong glance.

At sunrise, the sky goes blood red, and then the heat comes on. Slowly, the heat waves leach all color from the land until, by noon, I face the white light of high summer, a blaze that flattens mountains into footstools and chases birds from the sky to their roosts to wait out the heat. Except for the vultures, who carelessly ride the thermals roaring off the desert floor and watch for death. I have been living with a family of vultures for days now. They bed down 50 yards from my bedroll. I am here to tell you that they no longer look ugly. And they are very friendly. I look up in the sky and see one brush the wing of another and then wheel away in sport.

Each night at a specific time I am supposed to concentrate and try to communicate telepathically with a woman in Texas. Each night I fail to do this. I do not want to reach anyone out there.

The small stove flares up, and then I put on water for hot chocolate and coffee. I am now camped in the Growler

Valley, a swatch of creosote about 30 miles long, and I have not seen a footprint other than my own all day. The Granites rise up to the west; the cliffs of the Growlers, where prairie falcons nest, frame the east. I will never return to this rest stop, and I will never find it again. The Cabeza Prieta has no real focal point, no Yosemite Valley, no singular peak towering over everything. One place looks much like another, a slab of light and space and silence. For photographers, this leads to frustration. For the rest of us, it is a balm.

I have slowed down this time. I have been walking for days and seem to live largely on sunflower seeds, raisins, salami, coffee and hot chocolate. I carry a book, but seldom open it. In the heat of midday, I crawl under a creosote bush and simply exist . . . hour after hour. I turn off the stove; its hissing has become deafening.

You will be in the Cabeza when you can no longer tolerate the hissing of a stove. That is the thing to make into a picture: silence, space and the shadow of a creosote bush on the ground. You will look back and see your own footprints and think they are an insufferable invasion. The best part of the day: sitting in the scant shade of the creosote and waiting out the heat. Put down the cup of hot chocolate, lean back. Now the world swallows you whole.

What is an event?

Once a desert bighorn with a broken leg walked past me on the same thin mountain trail. A badger shuffled by another time and hardly gave me a glance. I once stared for six or eight hours at the same rock 50 feet away. At dusk one evening, a rosy boa slithered across the ground. But the best times I cannot remember at all.

The Cabeza is not about events. It flows in a deeper part of life. It is barely about time, since minutes and hours and days slowly become meaningless. Along El Camino del Diablo, stones laid on the ground sketch crosses to mark the graves of forty-niners who did not make it to the goldfields of California. Even their faintly scribbled intrusion seems to annoy me.

In the Cabeza, you find that person who has been hiding from you for your entire life. That person is yourself.

When I leave,

I learn where I have been. At first, there is too much of everything-too much sound, too much motion, too many people, too many objects. When I leave, I always have a deep craving for some meal or slice of pie, and I have never once gone into a cafe and ordered this fantasy. The craving remains behind in the Cabeza, along with the silence and space. I cannot explain this fact, but it always happens.

After a day or two, I drive my truck like everyone else, I answer the phone like everyone else. I listen to the hum of my refrigerator in the kitchen and watch images dance across the television screen.

But a part of me stays in the Cabeza, perhaps that part that actually is myself. The huge desert holds precisely nothing, nothing at all. When people ask you about your visit, you will say that nothing happened, that there is nothing special to see.

But you will never really leave the place, no matter how far you drive or how fast.

This place will own you, even though in no sense can you ever own this place.

Space, silence, a world swallowing a world. Frankly, you will give up trying to explain it to people. It is enough to know it. More than enough. All