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By Root 406 0

are rare, in the scope of human experience. A great many people will live out their days without ever seeing such sights, or if they do, never gasping. My parents taught me this—to gasp, and feel lucky. They gave me the gift of making mountains out of nature’s exquisite molehills. The day I captured and brought home a giant, luminescent green luna moth, they carried on as if it were the Hope diamond I’d discovered hanging on a shred of hickory bark. I owned the moth as my captive for a night, and set it free the next, after receiving an amazing present: strands of tiny green pearls—luna moth eggs—laid in fastidious rows on a hickory leaf. In the heat of my bedroom they hatched almost immediately, and I proudly took my legion of tiny caterpillars to school. I was disappointed when my schoolmates didn’t jump for joy.

I suppose no one ever taught them how to strike it rich in the forest. But I know. My heart stops for a second, even now, here, on Horse Lick Creek, as Camille and I wait for the butterfly to light and fold its purple, gold-bordered wings. “That’s a morning cloak,” I tell her. “It’s very rare.”

In her lifetime it may well be true; she won’t see a lot of these butterflies, or fern fiddleheads, or banks of trillium. She’s growing up in another place, the upper Sonoran desert. It has its own treasures, and I inflate their importance as my parents once did for me. She signals to me at the breakfast table and we both hold perfectly still, watching the roadrunner outside our window as he raises his cockade of feathers in concentration while stalking a lizard. We gasp over the young, golden coyotes who come down to our pond for a drink. The fragile desert becomes more precious to me as it becomes a family treasure, the place she will always like to think about, after she’s grown into adult worries and the need for imaginary refuge.

A new question in the environmentalist’s canon, it seems to me, is this one: who will love the imperfect lands, the fragments of backyard desert paradise, the creek that runs between farms? In our passion to protect the last remnants of virgin wilderness, shall we surrender everything else in exchange? One might argue that it’s a waste of finite resources to preserve and try to repair a place as tame as Horse Lick Creek. I wouldn’t. I would say that our love for our natural home has to go beyond finite, into the boundless—like the love of a mother for her children, whose devotion extends to both the gifted and the scarred among her brood.

Domesticated though they are, I want the desert boundary lands of southern Arizona to remain intact. I believe in their remnant wildness. I am holding constant vigil over my daughter’s memory place, the land of impossible childhood discovery, in hopes that it may remain a place of real refuge. I hope in thirty years she may come back from wherever she has gone to find the roadrunner thickets living on quietly, exactly as she remembered them. And someone, I hope, will be keeping downy woods and crawdad creeks safe for me.

THE VIBRATIONS OF DJOOGBE

From Benin, West Africa, eight degrees north of the Equator, you can see both the North Star and the Southern Cross. They crouch above their opposing horizons, ready to guide you north into the Sahara, or south, down a flank of white beach into the sea. You can look for them even from Cotonou, Benin’s largest city, where the night sky blazes, untouched as yet by serious competition from electric lights.

My first night in Benin, my eyes returned again and again to the sky, searching for my bearings. The night held the tricky, sensual promise of a dream. A wide-bodied jet had touched down briefly to leave me there, and once it was gone that whole event of armored comfort seemed as fantastic as extraterrestrial contact. Now I was left to walk through Cotonou’s hot, rich-smelling darkness on streets lined with women selling ordinary and inconceivable things: grilled bananas, shoes, gasoline sold in liter wine bottles. Each vendor’s face was lit by the flame of a small oil-burning lamp; the crowds of tiny