Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [105]
The next morning, Carlos talks about his business, how he has moved away from cattle ranching and begun to diversify into less environmentally destructive activities such as hunting and ecotourism. He has turned his ranch house into a retreat center, its many bedrooms with fireplaces, its central kiva-like living room and open porches refitted for large or small groups of students, researchers, and sportsmen. “I can do anything people want,” he tells me.
“Horseback riding with a barbecue?” I ask.
“Si. And campouts, nature and bird tours, guided hunts.”
“What about a bed and breakfast so I can bring my wife?”
“Si.”
El Aribabi is one of the premier ranches in northern Mexico, hosting at least thirty endangered and/or threatened species. The ranch boasts 165 species of birds, including elegant trogons and rose-throated becards. Green rat snakes and Gila monsters patrol the riverbanks where pig-like javelinas come to drink. Troops of coati, a long-snouted mammal that looks like a cross between a raccoon and a spider monkey, root in the undergrowth for grubs and tubers. And there are trophy-class Coue’s white-tailed deer, whose antlered bucks attract hunters from all over the world.
Recently, Carlos Robles and Sky Island Alliance entered a groundbreaking international collaboration with a Memorandum of Understanding. “It’s more than an agreement not to shoot predators,” Sergio explains to me on our last day. “It outlines our shared goals about conservation and will help us shape strategies to restore and protect the rivers and desert of El Aribabi.”
Jessica, who participated in the signing celebration at El Aribabi, says the event marks a new and hopeful outlook on conservation across international borders. “It is so inspiring to see people working together to make the world a more diverse and beautiful place,” she said, “especially people divided by so many barriers: languages, lifestyles, and fences.”
It was the path of water that originally drew Native peoples to the Southwest, water for life and water for direction in life. It was the same for all who would follow them, whether Spanish or Mexican or American. Water creates community. And sometimes more. Writer Peggy Schumaker says that water in the desert is always holy. If this is true, then people like Rodd and Kendall, Carlos and Sergio are holy men, the first true holy men of rivers I’ve met.
When Ken Lamberton published his first book, Wilderness and Razor Wire (Mercury House, 2000), the San Francisco Chronicle called it “entirely original: an edgy, ferocious, subtly complex collection of essays.” The book won the 2002 John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. He has published four books and more than a hundred articles and essays in publications such as the Los Angeles Times, Arizona Highways, the Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000. In 2007, he won a Soros Justice Fellowship for his fourth book, Time of Grace: Thoughts on Nature, Family, and the Politics of Crime and Punishment (University of Arizona Press, 2007). He has just completed a book about southern Arizona’s “Dry River,” the Santa Cruz. He holds degrees in biology and creative writing from the University of Arizona and lives with his wife in an 1890s stone cottage near Bisbee. His Web site is www.kenlamberton.com.
Questions for a Sacred Life
BODHI BE
It’s a good day to die!
We as humans have two very important things in common.
Our bodies will die, and, we don’t know when.
At least 90 percent of the people who will die today
did not know yesterday that they only had one more day to live.
Take a moment and feel that.
Can any one of us guarantee we’ll be alive tomorrow?
Could this