Mt. Graham: The Biopolitics of Change

The site manager for the Mt. Graham International Observatory (MGIO) met us at the locked gate to the Telescope Road. He was not there to greet us. John Ratje had driven out from Tucson, starting before dawn and traveling not less than two and a half hours, to demand that we surrender to him a key that would have opened the gate. A member of his staff had loaned it to us the afternoon before, but Ratje swept aside that troublesome fact. Ratje also demanded the two-way radio we’d been issued to assure safety on the narrow road to the mountaintop. “That’s University of Arizona property,” he said. “It should not have been given to you.” Our shock at his demands no doubt showed in our faces. Ratje wanted to forestall argument, so he added ominously, “University police are on their way.” I’d been about to unlock the gate when he stepped from the trees. His truck was parked nearby, and he’d no doubt been waiting quite a while. He was a big man, but uncomfortable. His voice had a quaver of anxiety. At first I thought he merely wanted to inspect our one-day permit for entering the Red Squirrel Refugium, the restricted area that surrounds the observatory, at the top of the mountain. I’d obtained the permit from the Forest Service the previous day in Safford; I pulled it now from my shirt pocket, unfolded it, and extended it to him, but he ignored it. We did not have permission to go in, he repeated: “This area is ours.” I stammered a question or two, but the answer did not vary: our entry was barred, and police would soon arrive to ensure our compliance. Then my companion, Peter Warshall, a conservation biologist whose name was recorded on the permit along with mine, asked, “Is this about me? Am I the reason you won’t let us in?” “Your name was part of the discussion,” Ratje said. A discussion? I had thought our visit was routine.

Apache Pass: Crossing the Line

The mochilla lay beside the migrant trail, an abandoned black daypack still heavy with goods. The Border Patrol agent carried it to the shelter of a corner of rocks, where no one could spot him while he searched it. He dug through the contents. There was a package of refried beans in gaudy plastic, a bag of instant oatmeal, fruit punch in a bottle too small to slake a serious thirst, and other convenience food. Also a half-pound or more of white grains in a punctured bag; the agent wet a finger and tasted: only sugar. Then he heard voices approaching and scrambled up the slope to hide in the brush. There were three of them: a rangy young man with a shadowy face in the lead, an older guy in a ball cap, and a pretty young woman with raven hair behind. They were Americans, not migrants or narcos. Their skin, their clothes, even their posture gave them away. They were too relaxed, too careless to be anything else. The agent stepped out from his hiding place. They slowed but did not stop. “You all out hiking?” “Yep,” said the young man with the shadowy face. “Where you from?” “Tucson,” came the clipped reply. Then the hikers, unsmiling and eyes straight ahead, passed him at a fast clip, the chill of the encounter resisting the afternoon heat, the desert absorbing the silence. The hikers had come from the direction of the Rat’s Nest, a maze of drainages half a dozen miles above the Line, and they disappeared toward Apache Pass—not the famous Apache Pass in the Chiricahua Mountains in eastern Arizona, but a lesser pass on the shoulder of Bartolo Mountain, well south of Tucson and only nine or ten miles north of Mexico. The agent knew they weren’t out for a hike. No one comes just to hike in the contorted and contested, bone-dry mountains along this stretch of the border. Everyone has a purpose. They come to smuggle or to be smuggled. They come to scurry in moonlight and to drag themselves under the blaze of the sun across dozens of miles of steep shadeless rock.

Lava Falls: The Blood of Oasis Civilization

Rightly or wrongly, everything challenging on a whitewater river in North America gets compared to the booming rapid that culminates, in space, time, and difficulty, a river trip through the Grand Canyon. Say “Lava” to anyone who has tasted whitewater, and the association to Lava Falls Rapid is automatic. A friend who guides trips on some of Alaska’s wildest rivers bristles when she hears the name Lava North applied to the most sphincter-tightening, life-or-death rapid on the mighty Alsek River. “It shows how Grand Canyon–centric the rafting world is,” she says. Advocates for other rivers say much the same. Still, Lava is king, and the Colorado River, for which Lava is a mere riffle in its eons of canyon carving, is the most mythic of river kingdoms. If you have a weakness for wild rivers, eventually you float the Colorado, and eventually you make your way to the Grand Canyon and to Lava. The drop at Lava Falls is thirteen feet almost immediately, followed by fourteen more in a few hundred yards. At most water levels, Lava earns a difficulty rating of ten, on a scale of ten. It confronts you at mile 179 on the 226-mile voyage from Lees Ferry to Diamond Creek, an incomparable outdoor adventure. The trip has the shape of a well-crafted novel. It establishes its themes in the red-rock stillness of Marble Canyon. It tests its characters in the churning whitewater of the Inner Gorge. Then Lava comes exactly where a novelist would place the climax, about four-fifths of the way through the saga. All the way down the river, you have had Lava in the back of your mind. Everything that precedes it feels like lead-up. Everything that follows is coda, resolution, release, perhaps recovery. The crux of the tale, the defining moment, resides in the hurricane waters of Lava Falls. By the time our small flotilla got there, we’d courted disaster at Crystal, dodged the rock horns of Horn Creek Rapid, ridden the roller coaster of Granite, and thrashed and crashed our way through scores of other rapids.

Introduction: The Tracks at Cedar Springs

March 1919 . Somebody killed the trader at Cedar Springs. The murderer also set fire to the trading post, and soon the dried-out floor planks and the roof beams and split-cedar ceiling erupted in smoke and flame. Except for its sandstone walls, the building would have burned to the ground. The next day a plume of smoke still hung in the Arizona sky, and people from miles around came to see what was the matter. Few automobiles had reached the windy expanses of the Navajo Reservation in those days, and men and women of all ages filed in by foot and horseback and in their buggies and buckboards. The first ones to arrive found the corpse of Charley Hubbell. Cedar Springs was less than a crossroads, not really a hamlet. It stood within a circle of rough-sided buttes a few miles east of the main road between Hopi and Winslow. It consisted of a combined general store, trading post and post office, plus various pens and corrals. Navajos from a considerable distance came to exchange sheep and handcrafts for the things they needed. Charley Hubbell lived at the trading post and presided over what went on. The people who found his body dispatched a messenger on a fast horse toward Ganado, fifty miles northeast, to find Charley’s nephew Lorenzo, who was known throughout Navajo country. A man of giant girth and matching gravitas, Juan Lorenzo Hubbell had bought the Ganado trading post forty years earlier. With acumen and persistence he built a string of almost thirty such establishments from one end of Navajo country to the other. In many cases he appointed members of his large, mixed Anglo and Hispanic family to run them. The post near Ganado, to which the messenger was sent, served as his home and headquarters. Together with its broad sprawl of barns, corrals, and storage sheds, it is preserved today as Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park System.

Mogollon Plateau: Fires Present and Future

Early on June 19, 2002, Paul Garcia looked off the rim of the Mogollon Plateau and did not like what he saw. Down toward Cibecue, the capital of the Fort Apache Reservation, home of the White Mountain Apaches, dark smoke boiled into the Arizona sky. The wind was pushing it in Garcia’s direction, toward the rim, as the prevailing southwest wind always pushed fires that start down on the Rez. The churning smoke—dark-tinged because of solid materials that volatilized without burning—told Garcia that the fire was gaining energy, building strength. He was the fire management officer of the Lakeside Ranger District, a unit of the Sitgreaves National Forest. His boss, a couple of steps up the chain of command, was Forest Supervisor John Bedell, who remembers getting a call from Garcia: “He said, ‘You know, this thing has some potential. . . . If they don’t catch it today, it’s going to get pretty big.’ ” The firefighters on the reservation didn’t catch it. The Rodeo Fire, which began as an act of arson near the Cibecue rodeo grounds, grew from a size of 1,000 acres on June 18 to 55,000 acres the next day. Garcia, Bedell, and a burgeoning army of Forest Service firefighters scrambled to meet the fire atop the rim, hoping to hold it at the rim road that marked the boundary between the reservation and the National Forest. They did not succeed. By mid-afternoon the fire had developed multiple towering plumes of smoke and ash. Its front advanced at an average rate of four miles an hour. Whole stands of eighty-foot trees ignited in an instant, shooting flames 400 feet high and lofting aerial firebrands half a mile downwind. By 4:00 p.m., some of those firebrands were spotting across the rim road. The Mogollon Rim is one of the most pronounced topographic features of the Southwest.

Highway 79 Revisited: “Mega” Trends in the Sun Corridor

Whether you are breaking prairie sod in the nineteenth century or raising a family and scrambling to make ends meet in the twenty-first, it is hard to get worked up over abstract possibilities. There is too much that needs doing, right here, right now. Even knowing the odds, people still live in earthquake zones, hurricane alleys, and the unprotected floodplains of mighty rivers. The warm embrace of a thirsty aridland city is not so different. Generally speaking, it is hard for any of us to get seriously concerned about what might happen until it does happen. That’s why the politics of climate change are so difficult. The measurements and observations that convince scientists about the warming of Earth are invisible to the rest of us. We fail to sense them at the scale of our personal lives. And believing in the verdicts of computer models about what might happen twenty or forty years in the future, well, that is tantamount to a leap of faith, and most people don’t ordinarily jump that far. Believing in the growth of cities can be difficult, too. Beginning in 2007, the domino of subprime mortgage defaults knocked over the domino of overleveraged investment banks, which toppled a wobbly world credit system, which upended industries around the globe and ushered in the Great Recession. 1 The home-building industries of growth-crazy cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix collapsed virtually overnight. Suburbs from Florida to California became ghost towns where wind-driven litter piled up in doorways and weeds grew higher than the sills of boarded-up windows. Some analysts predicted the emergence of a new generation of suburban slums and the death of gas-guzzling, car-dependent, long-commute suburban lifestyles. 2 Indeed, in the long run, considering the implications of peak oil and peak water and the likelihood of more severe climate reckonings than we’ve yet seen, such a demise seems likely—though maybe not quite yet.

Janos: A Mirror in Time

The rains have forsaken El Cuervo for nearly a year, and the mountain-ringed plain that used to be a prairie is as naked as a parking lot. Not a blade of grass is in sight, scarcely a bush. A few low mesquites, defoliated and dormant, hug the parched ground, the wind having packed into their thorny embrace the dried-out stems of last year’s tumbleweeds. Except in the burrows of the kangaroo rats, nothing can be hidden here. A lost coin or key would shout its presence, much as the potsherds do on the mounds of the ancient pueblo by the arroyo. Every edible thing has been consumed, every plant nipped off at the level of the ground. Even the soil is leaving, blown away, tons to the acre, by winds that sweep down from the Sierra Madre, a dozen miles to the west. If you were to make your way to the top of one of the chipped-tooth peaks of the sierra (no small task), you would be able to look down into great canyons. One of those canyons belongs to the Río Gavilán, where in 1936 Aldo Leopold glimpsed a kind of ecological heaven that no longer exists. From atop the peak you would also see for great distances, certainly as far as Janos, the crossroads and market town through which nearly every visitor to this northwest corner of Chihuahua passes, and on a dustless day you might see the gritty penumbra of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, far on the northeastern horizon. The air is dry, and here it is empty of pollution, which makes El Cuervo and its environs a good place for looking long distances, even into the past. One way to understand changes in the land is to visit a place that shows how things used to be. That’s what Leopold realized when he visited the Río Gavilán. He saw it as a fragment of the Southwest that had escaped the pressures of white settlement, and he recognized it as a mirror of how Arizona and New Mexico used to be, back in the days when the Apaches still roamed their homeland in freedom.

Sand Canyon: Vanishing Acts

In the southwest the specter of climate change invites a long look into the deep past. For anyone who hunts for insights about the nature of the region and the trick of making peace with its aridity, the ubiquitous signs of vanished communities beckon irresistibly—in the ruins of Chaco Canyon, the empty cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, and the mounded rubble of abandoned villages scattered near and far. The “lessons” they offer, however, are not always as clear as we would like them to be. Cautionary tales about the truths and errors of distant centuries can be easy to spin but surprisingly hard to reconcile to the complexity of the archaeological record, which is never static. As with any domain of science, the story told by the archaeology of the Southwest is always emerging, always gaining in heft and detail. When I went looking for someone who could help me read it, the trail I took led to the head of a rugged canyon, choked with piñon and juniper, in the far southwest of Colorado. “There’s a kiva, there’s a kiva, there’s a kiva,” says archaeologist Mark Varien, who is vice president of programs at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center, outside Cortez. He points in succession to three circular depressions amid the rubble, signatures of the remains of subterranean rooms that once housed much of the life of the pueblo. Rough blocks of sandstone outline the space the kivas occupied, their roofs having long ago caved in. Wind has filled their cavities with the dust and litter of centuries. Now they bloom with cliff rose and sagebrush. We stand just behind the kivas on a mound of half-buried building stones, which are canted at every angle—the remains of masonry rooms. To either side lie the mounds of more room blocks, their rear walls forming the perimeter of the pueblo, and the pueblo itself wrapping around the cleft of a rocky draw. The draw leads south and widens into Sand Canyon, a dry tributary of McElmo Creek, which flows west out of Colorado and joins the San Juan River not far away in Utah.

Hawikku: Welcome to the Anthropocene

History commenced for a large portion of North America on July 7, 1540. One may quibble over the dimension of territory affected, but the date is certain: it was duly written down, which is what distinguishes history, narrowly defined, from other ways of recording human experience. History is based on a documentary record; it begins when the documents start to pile up. On that July day nearly five centuries ago, a small army of Spaniards and Mexican Indians gathered before a stone village in what is now New Mexico and informed the residents thereof that henceforward they owed obedience to someone called the Pope and to the Catholic Sovereigns of Castile, in whom the Pope had entrusted authority over the bodies, souls, and lands of every person living on the islands and continent of the Mar Océano. This included the people of the stone village. No doubt these ideas sounded strange to their intended hearers, if indeed they were translated with the remotest accuracy. The intruders’ puzzling message was shouted out by someone who appeared to stare at a cloth, or a material similarly thin, flat, and flexible. It was a sheet of thick paper, nearly the size of one of the natives’ bison-hide shields. It bore many small marks, but no one from the village was close enough to observe this. Not that it mattered. The document asserting Spanish sovereignty over the village and its people was called the Requerimiento. Its purpose was to justify, in legal terms, the bloodshed and robbery that were soon to follow. An official of the Spanish host duly recited the entire document, which stipulated, on behalf of his commander, Captain-General Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, that if the natives failed to obey the commands of the Requerimiento, “I will make war against you everywhere and in every way I can. And I will subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and His Majesty. I will take your wives and children, and I will make them slaves. . . . I will take your property.

The Canal at River’s End: Thirsty Arizona

“ If you run the math,” says Brad Udall, “You sort of go, wow, Arizona, they may be totally out of their Central Arizona Project water.” Udall is referring to Arizona’s unenviable position as California’s aquatic whipping boy. The two states have long fought over water, and although Arizona has won a battle or two, it has taken a beating in the war. A key result of their combat has been to make the majority of Arizona’s Colorado River water rights expressly junior to California’s. This means that during inevitable and possibly imminent periods of shortage, the people of southern California, under a strict interpretation of the law, will be able to wash their cars, water their lawns, and keep their showers streaming while the millions who live in Phoenix, Tucson, and points between watch the flow from their taps slow to a dribble. Fortunately, events are unlikely to turn out so apocalyptically. When crisis comes, emergency negotiations will produce a less black-and-white outcome, and Arizona’s groundwater reserves (some of them recharged in recent years with CAP water) will be tapped to meet priority needs—at least for a time. Nevertheless, the potential for a winner-take-all showdown between large populations highlights the vulnerability of the urban centers of the arid West in an era of climate change. Fates are hardly fixed. How the cities of the region grow and change in the years ahead will significantly determine their ability to withstand the shocks of a hotter and drier future. How well they respond to the challenges ahead will also determine the future of their states and of the entire West, for in an arid land, a modern society is obliged to be an urban society. The survival of aridland cities and the struggle to preserve their quality of life will become a matter of national concern, even obsession, and the entire world will watch their stories unfold. Arizona has always been jealous of California’s economic power, its political heft in Congress, and its early and abundant claims to Colorado River water.