Student Teacher

OUTBACK TEACHER

WHILE HE SHOWS SENIORS THE MYSTERIES OF A CANYON, AN ELDERHOSTEL GUIDE LEARNS A BIT HIMSELF They came to pick up their name tags, pinned them to their shirts. They introduced themselves in conversation and drank refreshments from an ice chest. I hauled gear on my shoulders, keeping out of the conversations because I still had work to do before the start of their trip. I watched them as I loaded the company truck. Then I drove alone across the desert, south around the Colorado River, then north, beyond Black Mesa and Malpitas Wash. They arrived behind me on a bus in the afternoon. I unloaded gear, shook hands, but kept to my work.

I glanced at their faces, curious about the concealed stories: Who would I come to love? Who would I have to cautiously appease? Whose skin would I become familiar with, cleaning blood off after he or she walked through a catclaw bush?

They were children once. I had to remind myself of this, and the thought startled me. People who had taken bullets in wars, grown corn and soybeans for a living, given birth to nine children, watched those they loved die, received a rose on a first date. They belonged to an academic travel outfit called Elderhostel, coming to follow me down the Colorado River just above Mexico for a weeklong canoe venture and desert ecology course. Most had bounced from one trip to another. Some of them, 60 and 80 years old, had come from visits to Mount Everest, Russia or Wyoming. At night they told tremendous tales.

They swallowed every word I said when we walked into the desert. In their eyes, I was a child, young as most of their grand-children, their great-grandchildren. But they listened to me anyway. They took notes and presented portable tape recorders when I talked about patterns on snake backs, or how to tell what animal had been sleeping in pressed grass.

When we put on the river they strung behind me, canoes in line, bow-to-stern in a formation suggesting they all had tidy closets at home. I showed them down a river that tunnels through the Sonoran

WE ALL REMEMBERED THAT ONE PLACE IN OUR BRAINS THAT HELD THE INSTINCTS THAT COULD FIND WATER.

Desert, raking a hole out of thorn-shaped mountains. Some had harsh, immediate responses to the landscape. "It's so darned dry. Do we have enough drinking water? I would not want to die in the desert."

Over days people began to see. They took into account the increasing coarse-ness of sand the farther one walks from the river. They found the rocks good for sitting, and those good for just being rocks; what plants to touch, what plants to avoid. I acted as an usher only, show-ing them ahead and they found the rest themselves.

I walked one day with a woman, 71 years old. Her story was fierce. She had been pregnant in World War II, escaped Czechoslovakia into the mountains where she gave birth to her first child. She spent months in hiding. Today she stumbled into a cholla cactus in a wash. Five barbed needles pierced the muscle behind her shinbone. Grabbing pliers from my pack, I told her it would be very painful to remove this. I told her to hold my hand. She did. As I pulled, stretching her skin like putty until the first needle came, she made no sound. I watched her face. She did not wince at the second needle. Her eyes peered steadily into the desert.

her to hold my hand. She did. As I pulled, stretching her skin like putty until the first needle came, she made no sound. I watched her face. She did not wince at the second needle. Her eyes peered steadily into the desert.

I pulled the third, fourth and fifth barb with a twang from her flesh each time. I patted the wounds with providone-iodine and as I stood I said, "I've never seen any-one stand still for that."

"I've seen a lot in my life," she replied. When she turned to continue walking, I could not move for several seconds, a pair of pliers with a cholla ball in one hand. I took quick inventory of my life and remembered the familiar pain of a cholla in my leg, how my teeth grind when I pull one out. Another day I sat with them in the sand, drawing a map with my fingers. They came closer to see it, one man recording the sand map in his journal. "Here is the river," I said. Then the side canyons. "This bluff here," I turned and pointed to a bluff downstream, "is above this canyon," another line in the sand. I told them that up here, behind the bluff, all the canyons measure no more than 7 feet wide. I told them the place is like a series of subway tunnels, these narrow slots where the owls live and mouse bones get left in the rocks. There are stone circles, who knows how old, and petroglyphs. "And here, this canyon, it has a smooth floor in one place, gentle enough so that you could take off all of your clothes and lie there and sleep as good as you have ever slept. “And here,” I said, “this canyon, I’ve always been curious about, but have never explored.” I looked up and got their agreement. We would go to this place, new to all of us. We stomped out the map and pushed our canoes onto the river. Later, as we walked up the canyon, I talked

WITHIN MINUTES THEY WERE DIGGING HOLES ALL OVER THE WASH, SHOUTING WHEN THEY HIT WATER.

About river deposits, tea for hangovers made from desert lavender, and how to identify coyote urine in the sand by shoving your nose against it and inhaling deeply. It smells strong. All but two in the group got down in the sand to smell the spot where a coyote had urinated. Our footprints crossed those of coyotes, kangaroo rats and feral burros. The cliffs of this canyon are the color of ivory, rounded at the bottom by floods. We walked up the wash a couple of miles, stopping every 20 or 30 yards to examine a dead scorpion, translucent ghost flowers or lizard droppings. In one lizard dropping remained the head of an ant, pointed out by a 63-year-old woman.

We sat on the cool sand of paloverde tree shade, going through the seeds we'd been gathering, sorting them as schoolkids would arrange crayons. I told them we should turn back, that lunch awaited us at the canoes. They resisted. They wanted to see what lay farther upcanyon.

So we walked. Scanning ahead, I saw black streaks on the bedrock. “Water,” I said, the word getting out of my mouth by accident. I picked up my pace. They followed me without prompting. Like a group of kindergartners on a field trip, they stepped on my heels, staying just behind me. We came to a place where the wash had not yet cut through bedrock, and pink rhyolite rose like an island out of the center of the canyon. A negligible spring emerged from a crack. Below the spring glimmered a collection of water the size of a cereal bowl in the sand. In it 20 tadpoles squirmed over each other. Red-spotted toads, I told them, Bufo punctatus. The ones taking notes wrote the name down, asking for the spelling.

I skirted to the top of the spring where coyotes and burros had been digging in the sand for water. I found no good hand-holds and told them this. The group did not care. They were behind me, climbing from all around the rocks. I showed them where to dig, talking about finding water sources in dry washes. “You look at a place like this and you think there is no water,” I said. I bent over and shucked the sand out with my hands. I lost my breath spray-ing sand away, and it began to darken and dampen. “You look for the perfect place,” I said. “Just the right kind of sand in the right part of the canyon and you start digging for water.” I kept digging, saying, “The perfect place, where the slope is just right, steep upstream, not too steep downstream. At a curve against the bedrock. Do not go to the middle, but dig at the outside of the curve. There is a bowl cut out of the bedrock below the sand. You want to imagine the deepest part of the bowl and start there.” That is where I dug, and I asked aloud how a coyote or a burro would know so well where to dig and find water. Do they memorize the routine, look for the turns in the bends, or do they just know? Do they have the skill of a diviner, or is it a cell in your brain that you choose to remember or forget? Answers came from the Elderhostelers, ideas about how nature works.

About 3 feet down, water bubbled out. Usually it doesn't happen this way. Usually it is only damp, and you have to wait until it is cooler for water to escape from the ground. I was actually doing it just for show, so the water completely surprised me.

The weight of everyone pressed on the streambed and spewed water from the hole. They cheered at the sudden fountain. It was muddy first, then clear as it settled. They liked the magic of it. We all remembered that one place in our brains that held the instincts that could find water. Within minutes they were digging holes all over the wash, shouting when they hit water.

“We’ve got to eat lunch,” I announced. “Time to turn around. Don’t argue with me. I am hungry.” We drank the water and shoved sand back into the holes. They asked about what might be farther upcanyon and I shrugged my shoulders. Mysteries. Walking back down the canyon we came to a pile of flash-flood debris jammed against a smoke tree. It looked like remains from a car accident made of plant matter and rock from upstream. I walked to it with the people on my heels again. I thumbed through it, uncovering several orphaned palm fronds, the remains of Washingtonia filifera - and they wrote the name down, again asking for the spelling.

A flood had sent the fronds racing down, tumbling with rocks and roots, and wedged them here. They were coated with dry mud. We all turned our heads and peered up the canyon. “That’s what is farther upcanyon,” I said. “Palm trees.” They were stunned at the thought.

I had to tug hard on them to keep them moving, and I knew some were still looking over their shoulders as we left.

At camp that night, one of them wrote in her journal and brought it to me. She wrote, “God is in charge out here. Somehow there is balance and order.” AH