Desert Terroir: Exploring the Unique Flavors and Sundry Places of the Borderlands 9780292735880

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Desert TERROIR

Ellen and Edward Randall Series

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Desert

TE R R O I R the

and

E XP LO R I N G U N I Q U E FLAV O R S SU N D RY P LAC E S B O R D E R LAN D S

of the

Gary Paul Nabhan I LLUSTRATI O N S BY

Paul Mirocha

University of Texas Press

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Copyright © 2012 by the University of Texas Press Illustrations © 2012 by Paul Mirocha All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2012 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

L ib ra ry of C ong r es s C ata log i ng - i n - Pu bli c at i on D ata Nabhan, Gary Paul. Exploring the unique flavors and sundry places of the borderlands / Gary Paul Nabhan ; illustrations by Paul Mirocha. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (Ellen and Edward Randall series) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-292-72589-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-292-73588-0 (e-book) 1. Diet—Southwest. 2. Diet—Mexico. 3. Food habits—Southwest. 4. Food habits—Mexico. 5. Natural history—Southwest. 6. Natural history—Mexico. I. Title. TX360.U62S856 2012 394.1'20972—dc23 2011031399

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For Jack Shoemaker, who first imagined where literary natural history and culinary history might converge to delight us all.

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Prologue xi Chapter One 5 The Verve in the Herb: A Culinary Natural History C h a p t e r T w o 13 Hungry for Home: Mostafa al-Azemmouri Discovers a NewWorld of Desert Foods C h a p t e r T h r e e 35 Seek-No-Further: Foraging and Fishing through the Big Bend C h a p t e r F o u r 53 A Flour Blooms: Esperanza and the Magical Mesquite Tortillas C h a p t e r F i v e 59 From the Beeves’ Lips to Paul’s Fears: Grass-Fed Flavor C h a p t e r S i x 71 Pan on a Mission: Capirotada Comes to Baja California C h a p t e r S e v e n 85 Camel Chorizo: A Missing Link

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C h a p t e r E i g h t 97 My First (and Last) Rodeo: Catching Corvina in the Sea of Cortés C h a p t e r N i n e 117 A Desert Communion E p i l o g u e 125 Literature Cited 129

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Acknowledgments

As I finally place these stories together in the same nest, it has become difficult for me to remember all the birds who have flown with me on these migrations and peregrinations. Certainly my old friend Paul Mirocha, my wife, Laurie Smith Monti, and my mentor in all things Near Eastern, Agnese Haury, have been essential to the making of these adventures. But I am just as indebted to a new friend, editor Casey Kittrell, who has had the stamina and vision to help me see these stories to fruition, enriching the manuscript along the way with his own knowledge, values, and keen sense of story. These four folks are the cornerstones that supported the building of this book. Others have played roles for parts of these adventures that were nearly as essential. Joe Wilder provided logistical and moral support back at the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona, as did my interns and field colleagues Kanin Routson, Rafael Routson, DeJa Walker, and Regina Fitzsimmons. Juan Estevan Arrellano, Jesús García, Sulaiman al-Khanjari, Enrique la Madrid, Tom Sheridan, Brad Lancaster, Maribel Alvarez, Carolyn Niethammer, Esperanza Arevalo, Nate O’Meara, Steve Buckley, Patty West, and Micheline Cariño-Olveres have taught me most of what I know about desert agricultural traditions. Amy Trubek, Rowan Jacobsen, Greg Jones, Betty Fussell, Ed Frederickson, J. P. S. Brown, Blake Edgar, Kirsten Rowell,

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Yan Linhart, and Jane Black stimulated and guided my interest in the subject of terroir. Other travel companions for these adventures included Marcos Paredes, Kanin Routson, Wendy Hodgson, Jane Cole, Suzanne Nelson, Ben Wilder, Becca Munro, Ellery Kimball, David Cavagnaro, Deb Moroney, Dennis Moroney, Cody Routson, Duncan Blair, Laura Kerman, Amadeo Rea, Ali Masoud al-Subhi, and Angelita Torres Cubillas and her sisters. I wish to note that in two of the chapters—Chapter Three about the Big Bend and Chapter Eight about the Sea of Cortés—several names have been changed and dialogues bridged in order to maintain confidentiality or respect for participants no longer able to be engaged in such dialogues. I am grateful to the editors of Gastronomica, the Journal of Arizona History, Edible Phoenix, and the International Journal of Biodiversity and Conservation for taking early interest in this work; some elements of these stories have been adapted from earlier versions that appeared in their pages. Over the long haul, I am just as indebted to another editor—one who did not put his hand to any of this work, but who enabled me to see the vital links that could be made between literary natural history and food writing. It is to his longterm legacy of publishing dozens of us with similar values, from M. F. K. Fisher and Angelo Pellegrini to Wendell Berry and Mary Taylor Simeti, that this book is dedicated. Thank you, Jack Shoemaker, my elder brother, for first bringing my writing into this world and introducing me to this writing community some thirty years ago.

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Prologue We crave food with stories. . . . The fact that we can even entertain a phrase like “it’s just food” emphasizes the strange time we live in. Because until the advent of the modern grocery, every food had a story. Anonymous food is not the norm, it’s the aberration. . . . [Most] food comes heavy with history and meaning. Rowan Jacobsen, American Terroir, 2010

Once upon a time, in a cantina not far from the U.S./Mexico border, I heard a vineyard keeper, a winemaker, a smuggler of sotol, a rancher, a soil scientist, a weatherman, and a cultural geographer arguing about the term terroir. “It is the very taste of place—the vineyard’s own geological, ecological, and cultural history—embodied in the grape,” the man who pruned and pampered the vines asserted. “But it is not limited to the grape alone, for the yeast also echoes the place as it ferments the grape into wine,” argued the vintner. “The yeast is the broker for all those flavors from the earth, raising them up from the ripening and rotting.” “Well, you talk as though terroir occurs only in wine,” said the smuggler. “You need to try some of this sotol that just came in from Coahuila.” “And you speak as if it is only found in wine and spirits,” said the cattleman. “You ought to taste my grass-fed beef, unadorned, right off the grill.” “But it’s the parent materials and their decomposition—the geochemistry—that really determine the taste of place,” the soil scientist said with an air of authority.

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“Well, if rain and drought and heat and cold never broke down that parent material and stressed the plants that grew upon it,” argued the climatologist, “you’d never capture that chemistry in a bottle.” The cultural geographer had begun to assert that all these factors were threaded together in every molecule of every bite or sip we take, when into the cantina staggered a wild-eyed storyteller. They could not tell if he was under the influence, or inherently off-kilter. Although he barged in on them uninvited, they had the generosity to welcome him just the same. The geographer turned to him and offered, “You may be able to help us resolve our argument about terroir.We just can’t agree whether it is the soil, the climate, the historical ecology, or the skill of the producer which makes a food or wine come alive.” The storyteller looked at them and began to laugh like a madman, slapping his thighs and then waving his arms. “No, no, no. It’s the genius loci caught in the bottle. . . . It’s the story in the wine, the myth in the mescal, the ballyhoo in the beef. It’s when they enter your memory and lodge in your dreams . . . that’s the taste of place, that’s the terroir . . .” The book you are about to read tests those hypotheses against the weight of evidence uncovered in the desert borderlands, where Mexico meets the United States. As you digest these stories, I hope the true story of the taste of place becomes revealed to you. Let’s see what happens.

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CHAPTER ONE

The Verve in the Herb A Culinary Natural History

I am stumbling along a desert ridge of volcanic rocks on a hundreddegree day, wondering whether I’ve taken my interest in learning where my food comes from a bit too literally. Arizona is far behind me, but a mass of intimidating chain cholla cacti is immediately in front of me. I must be sweating, but my cotton clothes are eerily dry, as if my body has already lost all of the water it has to shed. Nevertheless, I continue to saunter between boulders as black as coal, picking leaves off of a desert shrub that is taking the heat here in Sonora far better than I. I rub a few leaves between my thumb and forefinger, and their fragrance suddenly pervades the dry air, as if I had just broken a bottle of perfume against one of the sharp basalt rocks at my feet. Like a hit of smelling salts, this desert herb awakens me and makes me remember the question that originally brought me to this godforsaken place: Just why do the herbs of a desert landscape seem so aromatic, and why do desert spices and incenses seem so pungent? I needed questions like these to force me out into the field, and out of my blindered way of seeing and smelling the world. They are the only questions I ponder while my wife and I are out picking the leaves of wild oregano with a group of Seri Indian hunter-gatherers. While Laurie talks and sings traditional songs with some of the Seri women, I wander back and forth across

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this anonymous ridge halfway down the Sonoran Desert coast of the Gulf of California, trying to learn something new about the taste of this bright and shining place. The basalt boulders and volcanic gravel around me absorb the heat of the desert enough to urge me on and keep me moving, searching for a cool breeze as much as for oregano leaves. To the uninitiated eye, it may look as though I am harvesting rather randomly, standing by a shrub for a few minutes, then moving on toward another one upslope before I have removed all the leaves from the first. But that’s because the Seri have instructed us to never take all the leaves off of one bush. Instead, they’ve taught us how to sample its foliage, and then select only the smaller and older leaves, which exude the strongest fragrances. I zigzag along the ridge as I do this, all the while pondering the pungency question as if it is my crossword puzzle or Zen koan for the day. Of course, the oregano here is not the true Mediterranean or Greek oregano of the Old World—the plant in the mint family given the name Origanum vulgare. Instead, it is one of several Mexican oreganos in the verbena family, and this particular species is named Lippia palmeri. Aside from its vernacular name, what it has in common with the herb long harvested by the Greeks is two aromatic oils in its leaves that lend them their characteristic fragrances and flavors: carvacrol and thymol. Indeed, these oils are highly valued for their culinary contributions to salads, sauces, breads, and marinated meats regardless of whether they come from the leaves of oregano or from those of marjoram, Syrian hyssop, or various thymes. In fact, these same aromatic oils can be found in the herbs and shrubs of a number of different arid and semiarid lands around the world, and in several plant families that have long histories in desert climes. When I wear my geeky Dr. Science hat as a culinary naturalist, this chemical convergence in herbs reminds me of the concept of parallel evolution, like gerbils, jerboas, and kangaroo rats all hip-hopping along in different deserts. But this chemical convergence interests me for a far more personal reason: Halfway around the world from where I am picking wild oregano for a taste of its essential oils, my Lebanese cousins are involved in a similar harvest at this time of year. They are out on some limestone ridge above the Beqaa Valley of eastern Lebanon harvesting the wild thyme they call za’atar. It is an irrepressibly aromatic herb that is ground and mixed with sesame seeds, sumac berries, sea salt, and a few secret ingredients to make the signature spice of Lebanese cuisine that is of the same name. The smoothness

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of sesame oil, the lemony tartness of the sumac, and the sharpness of sea salt seem to balance the sharp, warm pungency of carvacrol with the cooling, balsamic, almost bittersweet flavor of thymol. My uncles are so enamored by the particular flavor of the wild thyme gleaned from our ancestral mountains that they refuse to let me purchase or eat za’atar spice blends from other parts of Lebanon, from Palestine, from Syria, or from Jordan. “Throw that stuff away—it looks and smells like sawdust spiked with what you Americans call bebbers,” one of my more opinionated Lebanese uncles once spat out. He had spotted a bag of bright green za’atar I had half hidden in my luggage, one that I had purchased at the Souk el-Tayeb Farmers Market in Beirut. “You want za’atar? I’ll give you the REAL za’atar that our family has harvested and eaten for centuries. All the others, well, you know, they’re for tourists who don’t know any better! Don’t become one of them, because you’re a Nabhan, and therefore you should know what herbs are the strongest and best.” That is exactly what I am now trying to learn: why the herbs from some places are so potent, while others of the very same species seem so bland. So here I am, on a mountain ridge south of the border in Mexico—far from the Mediterranean home of my cousins—attempting to separate the grain from the chaff, the strongest from the more subdued. The irony is that I’m harvesting the very same aromatic oils as my uncles and cousins, but from an altogether different plant! I look up at my lovely wife, Laurie, and the three Seri sisters with whom she and I are foraging. All four of them are bedecked in long, brilliantly colored skirts, long-sleeved blouses, and paisley bandanas—from a distance, they look like a band of Middle Eastern gypsies out on a pilgrimage. Their seasoned hands sample and select the best leaves of this oregano faster than my senses can discern such differences. One of them, Angelita Torres, proudly asserts that their oregano is not only more flavorful than most of what you find in stores, but is medicinally more powerful than other, commercially harvested oreganos from wetter reaches of Mexico. She uses it not only in food, but also as a medicine for lung and throat infections. Like my Lebanese cousins and uncles, Angelita is absolutely sure that her harvest is the best. Call it culinary fundamentalism if you wish, but I would insist that the world is a better place for having people who have hitched their own cultural identity up to that of a memorable fragrance from a locally harvested herb. That fragrance has permeated their lives.

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And yet at another level I’m a bit puzzled by the possibility that an herb might be most potent when gathered at the most arid margins of its range. Looking at the scene before me, I’m amazed that the most fragrant oregano leaves come from the bushes with the scrawniest appearance. Some of the oregano bushes are so scraggly that they can hardly be seen amid all the cholla cacti, whitethorn acacias, and ocotillos on this ridge. When one meets Mother Earth here in the Sonoran Desert, one is inclined to genuflect and greet her as “Her Dryness.” What’s more, a good portion of every shrub around us looks half dead, given that this stretch of coastal desert has just endured six years of brutal drought, going months on end without any rainfall at all. Less than a month ago, a hurricane-fringe storm came in from the Gulf of California, drenching these ridges with more than two inches in a single day, breaking the drought while ushering in a spurt of growth. The oregano leaves are now scattered amid wispy branches three to five feet high, but most of the branches look like leafless, lifeless twigs, broken and discolored. The few supple branches that survived the drought have smaller, grayish-green leaves dispersed along their lengths, while a handful of shoots that recently sprouted at the base of the bush show a flush of larger, greener leaves. Tellingly, Angelita and her sisters bypass this newly emerged lushness, claiming that the bigger the leaves, the less pungent a potherb they make. Suddenly their strategy for collecting the leaves with the most distinctive terroir begins to make intuitive sense to me. They are after the bold and bracing taste of this lava-littered, hyper-arid land, not a watered-down version of it. Older, smaller leaves glisten as though they have concentrated the aromatic oils on the leaf surface, perhaps as a means of reducing water loss from their tissues. As a drought drags on, many desert shrubs produce more of the aromatic oils such as thymol and carvacrol, which chemists collectively call phenols. As the plants get more stressed out, they produce less of other oils like geraniol—the non-phenolic compound in geraniums that releases a roselike smell. It appears that both thymol and carvacrol are not just side effects of drought stress but means for an oregano plant to better tolerate drought. Scientists aren’t exactly sure how they work, but guess that a plant’s production of these aromatic oils serves as a chemical “safety valve” that allows water-stressed leaves to disperse excess heat or energy that they cannot deal with internally. In other words, as drought proceeds and aromatic herbs have

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more heat stress to deal with, they dump more aromatic oils onto their leaf surfaces.This oily surface may somehow slow the flow of moisture away from their photosynthetic workings, muting the giant sucking sound of moisture being pulled out into the dry air. If the plant survives, it becomes resplendent with the fragrance and the glisten of herbal oils. That’s good news for us, or at least for those of us who love particularly pungent herbs in our salad dressings, in the spice rubs we spread on our meat and fish, or in our muffins and dinner rolls. It is also good news for us in another way—the wild oreganos from Mexican deserts are, ounce for ounce, about as rich in antioxidants as a green plant can be. There is something that fascinates me about this ecological chain that links soil moisture stress to plant tissue stress to stressed-out humans. Let me put it in the most crassly anthropocentric and teleological terms: Oregano from Mexico and thyme from the Mediterranean can somehow keep us from getting sick when we get too stressed out. How? By being rich in the very aromatic oils that not only reduce stress in the plants but reduce our stress levels as well. Of course, oregano, thyme, and other aromatic herbs are not the only plants that produce more antioxidant-rich phenols under heat and drought stress. Recently, some widely heralded experiments in the semiarid stretches of California wine country have confirmed that red and purple grapes grown under moderate water stress tend to be far richer in phenols than do lavishly irrigated grapes, or even paler-skinned grape varieties subjected to the same levels of stress. Curiously, these phenols tangibly enrich the flavor intensity of wines and raisins. When ingested in substantial quantities, the same phenols keep cholesterol-rich plaque from building up in human arteries. Functioning as protective antioxidants, they absorb and “retire” free radicals, which aggravate inflammation. “Get those radicals out of there,” I growl to myself. “They want everything for free.” “Are you saying something to us, honey?” I hear my wife ask. “Or are you talking to yourself again?” I see Laurie and the Torres sisters walking toward me, their gunnysacks already filled to the brims with oregano leaves. Mine, of course, is only half full . . . or half empty, depending on your perspective. After we get back in the car and drive the sisters back to their home in the Seri village, Laurie and I head down to a secluded beach to swim in the sea and cool off. I tell her what I was thinking about while up on the ridge.

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Trained in both pharmacology and desert ecology, she reminds me that desert plants are natural concentrators of these beneficial chemicals, since they are regularly called upon to deal with temperature and moisture stress. I remember then that the purplish-colored fruit of prickly pear cacti from the hottest of desert habitats are also unusually high in phenols. Theirs are called quercetin and kaempferol, and contain as much as ten times the antioxidants found in green or yellow cactus fruits from higher elevations and milder climes. Quercetin, like thymol and carvacrol, is well known for its antioxidant properties. Laurie has heard that like the oils in wild oreganos and thymes, quercetin can substantially reduce potential suffering from cancers or from attacks by bacteria or fungi. However, I remind her, it may have the goods but not the bite: Quercetin is essentially tasteless. It can’t give us the kick of fragrance and flavor we can get from desert herbs like oregano. Laurie pays that no mind; she is simply fascinated by the unusually healthful properties found in so many of the herbs that grow in arid lands, noting that deserts have given humankind far more medicines than tropical rain forests have yet to provide. But when I ask her whether she thinks that the desert itself imparts its own distinctive flavor to these herbs, she looks at me skeptically. She asks if I am trying to confuse biological science with culinary art. In defense, I argue that I’m not trying to “confuse” them, for I truly believe that they stem from the same roots. And those roots happen to be embedded in the same soil. I try to recall the soil that was at my feet on that ridge: shiny, almost glazed, black gravel that broke down into a grayish-white silt as fine as talcum powder. It probably had little organic matter in it, since the vegetation there was so sparse and its moisture-holding capacity would therefore be rather low. It was what we call a droughty soil, one that fails to sponge up the moisture from a sudden desert downpour and hold on to it for very long. Nevertheless, such desert soils can still be relatively rich in potassium and phosphorous. The volcanic gravel and the basalt boulders around it accumulate heat well, so they keep the shrubs that grow on that ridge relatively protected from the catastrophic freezes that come to this country once every ten to twenty years. What I’m getting at is this: They are the kinds of soils that only oregano (and a few kinds of cacti) can love. But the oregano bushes that grow there don’t know they are lacking anything—moisture, organic matter, nitrogen,

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and such. They have enough stuff not merely to survive but to thrive, spewing out glistening droplets of aromatic oils on their leaves like so many miniature jewels. When the rain comes, their aromatic oils volatilize and fill the air with a fragrance as heavenly as that of any sacred incense. Rich in carvacrols and thymols, they can then spice up a feast that is fit for any king, queen, chief, or sheikh! The taste of the wild oregano somehow echoes the taste of the desert itself, for although its soils may be poor in water and certain nutrients, they are rich in the things that build flavor and, perhaps, character. When we eat crushed leaves of oregano in a vinegar-and-oil salad dressing or a hard-crusted dinner roll, we are indeed tasting the desert’s essence—the challenges of being green (or gray) in a water-starved land, and the miracle of making it work on the land’s own terms.

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CHAPTER TWO

Hungry for Home Mostafa al-Azemmouri Discovers a New World of Desert Foods

Have you ever wondered how the bounty of the Desert Southwest—or any other American region, for that matter—originally tasted to the unacquainted? What flavors of the native fruits and varmints of the newfound land were immediately acceptable to the first immigrants from the Old World, perhaps because they seemed vaguely familiar? And when the initial immigrants began to sample more of the New World’s rather weird cornucopia of wild plants and animals, which did they find to be too rank or repugnant for regular consumption? And how did the very first foreigners who ventured into the Southwest feel when their hosts warmly welcomed them into a camp and then, after three of four days without offering their guests any food, conceded that there probably wouldn’t be much to eat for a few more months? Imagine their reaction when the native inhabitants “tried to cheer us up by telling us that we needn’t be too sad, for if we survived the next five or six months of famine, we could then glut ourselves on eating cactus and drinking their juices until our bellies swelled up.” I’ve continued to ruminate over such questions for the last few years, I suppose because I’ve been trying to imagine what it was like for my own family members to taste a new place after they emigrated from the Middle East to the Americas. I had learned that some of my own Arab kin, the Nebhans,

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came to El Paso via Mexico more than a century ago, and that my own greatgrandfather had sought to enter the United States by way of Mexico before he tragically died of malaria in the port of Veracruz. What did America taste like to them, and how often did they long for lamb, figs, olives, and wild thyme? These questions intrigued me even more once I learned about the very first Arab-speaking immigrant to the desert borderlands. I became a bit obsessed with trying to reconstruct his life and his tastes. He arrived in the Desert Southwest in 1529, nearly four centuries before my great-grandfather. What did that pioneer think of the foods he encountered here? And which fragrances and flavors from his childhood welled up in his memories whenever he tasted something reminiscent of the foods in his natal grounds? The answers to such questions—if there are any answers at all—are not exactly obvious. In fact, they are deeply buried in the story of that first immigrant to the Desert Southwest, one who left no oral or written record of his own. He was simply one of four men who involuntarily trekked across Texas and northern Mexico after surviving a shipwreck, but he was also the only one among them who returned on his own volition to explore Arizona and New Mexico, where he eventually met his end. His identity—not to mention the identities of many of the foods he ate in arid America—remained rather obscure until recently. But his physical, spiritual, and yes, culinary pilgrimage through the desert is now heralded as one of the more bizarre episodes in the history of the Southwest. It also sheds much light on the native cultures of the region and their traditional “cuisines,” if we care to call them that. That remarkable immigrant from the Old World, the first Arabic speaker to sample an ample swath of America’s desert foods, was Mostafa al-Azemmouri. Doesn’t immediately ring a bell, does it? Well, that’s because he is known in most history books as Estevanico el Moro (Esteban the Moor), Estevanico el Negro, Black Stephen, or Esteban de Dorantes. For this and other reasons, Mostafa has never been as well known or as celebrated as his three Spanish companions, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, and Alonso Castillo Maldonado. As historian Rolena Adorno observed, on his return to Mexico City Mostafa “was never allowed to speak for himself. As a slave, he was prohibited from offering legally certifiable testimony about his and his companions’ seven-and-a-half-year captivity in North America.”

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And yet his charisma and contradictions shine through in the accounts left by his Spanish companions and in Indian oral histories. Most historians now regard Mostafa as an “ethnically ambiguous” changling. He first appears as an Arab-speaking black African who was born and raised in Morocco, then as a Christianized, Spanish-speaking slave, and later as a powerful shaman, a multilingual guide and cross-cultural mediator who decked himself out in all manner of indigenous talismans and adornments. Compared to the Spaniards with whom he traveled, Mostafa al-Azemmouri was probably the one among the four who was best suited to making sense of the foods of the Desert Southwest, and the most responsible for repeatedly keeping the vagrants from starving to death in the desert. That’s because he grew up in a semiarid landscape that was ecologically analogous to that which he stumbled across between the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico and the Sonoran coast of the Gulf of California. And stumble he did. After sailing as a slave on an expedition to Florida that began in June 1527, Mostafa was among those who were hit by a storm and stranded off Galveston Island in November 1528, and spent most of the next six years on the Gulf Coast shoeless, shirtless, and as proverbially sheepout-of-luck as Jonah in the belly of the whale. And yet he somehow used his wits to get along while dozens of his equally barefoot, naked, and hungry shipmates perished. It seems that Mostafa must have already known how to procure and prepare many kinds of foods and herbal medicines from desert plants and animals in his homeland. He had a way of using that knowledge as a bridge by which he “cross-walked” into the deserts of the New World. Because he grew up in the port town of Azemmour on the coast of Morocco before being enslaved and sent to Andalusia and America, Mostafa was deeply familiar with one of the great cuisines of desert cultures, the Moorish food traditions of both the Maghreb and Andalusia. So, in trying to understand what the desert tasted like to its first immigrant, I decided to start not by tracing where Mostafa wandered into the Desert Southwest, but by looking for his roots in Morocco and Spain, the places where his taste buds were initially trained. That may sound contrarian—and it is, of course—but I figured that discerning how the desert’s flavors were originally perceived and received depended upon where the person came from who was doing the tasting.

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To gain a sense of “where he was coming from” when he first tasted and evaluated the novel foods in his adopted American homelands, I started my own adventure where his began. I made my own pilgrimage to the dry coastal plains and canyons found along the Atlantic seaboard of Morocco. Although that landscape has been modified in some significant ways since Mostafa was raised there in the years between 1490 and 1513, some of its features have not changed all that much over the last five centuries. Sure, Mostafa might be surprised to see maize, maguey, peppers, and prickly pear cactus growing in his birthplace today, but many other plant foods from his time remain on Moroccan tables. Although it is even now hotly debated whether Mostafa was a Hahi Berber or a descendant of West African slaves brought up to Morocco by the Portuguese, we know that he grew up in the multicultural port town of Azemmour, where the semidesert steppe edges the sea. Before my recent visit to Azemmour and Essouaira on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, I had no real inkling of just how multicultural the communities and cuisines of those port towns had been during Mostafa’s era. Not only were Hahi Berbers and Arabs native to these natural harbors, but Sephardic Jews, Portuguese and Andalusian Christians, as well as Gnaoua blacks had long been in residence. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and perhaps even Persians had previously taken harbor in these ports, bringing with them novel notions of how to cook and present a great variety of meats, fishes, fruits, grains, legumes, and spices. Thus the local native, and naturalized, flora and fauna gave Mostafa’s neighbors much to work with. When I first saw the outskirts of Azemmour along the Oued Oum el Rbia watercourse draining into the Atlantic, I was struck by how much it reminded me of the limestone-formed basins and ranges above the Gulf Coast of Texas. Semiarid, with low rolling grassy ridges above coastal sand dunes and flats, the landscape in the Oued Oum el Rbia watershed had the temperament of the Nueces, Pecos, and Colorado at the southernmost reaches of Texas. The canyons were gorgeous; the grassy plains above them were well suited to goats and sheep; and the sinuous river itself seasonally ran thick with shad and eels. It had sizable trees on its banks, from the wild date palm to the pod-laden carob, which offered up hundreds of pounds of food even during times of drought.

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When Mostafa was young, his entire community suffered the impacts of a decade-long drought, which made the semiarid lands there more vulnerable to famine than most true deserts are. And yet, the proximity of the Sahara itself—a mythic place that Mostafa may have crossed by camel caravan at least once—offered most North Africans an object lesson regarding aridity through which they could metaphorically address issues of abundance and scarcity, control, and humility. It is entirely improbable that Mostafa al-Azemmouri could have lived so close to the Sahara without hearing parables like this one, recorded centuries later by North African storyteller Nohou Agah: “I will tell you something about the Sahara,” he finally says, pulling off his gold-rimmed glasses to wipe them clean. “The desert is very simple to survive in. You must only admit there is something on earth larger than you . . . the wind . . . the dryness . . . the distance . . . the Sahara. You accept that and everything is fine. The desert will provide. Insh’allah. If you do not, the desert will break you. Admit your weakness to the Sahara’s face, and all is fine.”

Or, as Saint Jerome once noted with a certain black humor, “The desert loves to strip [you] bare.” And so desert travelers endeavored to keep from doing anything brash, for they had to concede that they were simply not in control of all the variables that might affect them. They paid keen attention to the location of each and every watercourse along their trail, each oued, no matter how big or small. (That Berber term oued bridges the Arabic term for intermittent stream courses, wadi, with the Andalusian Spanish term for intermittent streams, guad, as in Guadalajara and Guadalquivir.) When I saw it, the Oued Oum el Rbia ran wide but slow and shallow out to the coast. In Mostafa’s time, it dwindled down to a trickle due to a pervasive drought that affected even the highlands of the Atlas Mountains. In fact, when Mostafa reached his twenties, the prevailing drought caused complete crop failures since there was no water for irrigation, forcing many of his peers to flee Azemmour for good. Those who remained survived on thistles, the wild greens and seeds of the Sahara mustard, carob pods, and wild dates.

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Before the drought of 1517, the croplands along the Moroccan coast offered an abundance of figs, olives, and grapes from small orchard-vineyards, as well as date palms and citrus in groves, wheat in extensive fields, and fava beans, lentils, vetches, okra, mints, onions, and saffron in smaller gardens. Certain fruits would be dusted with salt or sugar and then cured, or simply sun-dried. Other fruits, like olives and capers, were brined; still others were cured in the juices of bitter oranges and sour lemons, or in vinegars. In fact, the juices of sour citrus were used in Moorish cuisine even more than those of sweet oranges. The drought changed that. The fruits on trees became desiccated in the dry winds while grapes withered on the vine. Dry-farmed wheat and barley crops failed, so that grains as well as hardtack had to be imported from Spain and Portugal. The pashas, sheikhs, and spice traders sold off their own slaves and those of their debtors—breaking up entire families—in order to obtain this food relief from afar. Cattle died as a result of either the paucity of forage or the consumption of toxic herbs. Goats and sheep survived but were so thin that they produced little milk and meat. Camels were overworked, and those culled from the herds were butchered for their meat, which could be dried in the sun or cured into sausages for extended consumption. Of course, living close to the ocean, the Moors still had the seasonal catch of finfish such as shad, which could be salted and dried, or kept in olive oil. Shellfish were scoured out of coastal estuaries and lagoons, and then kept alive in barrels full of saltwater. Wild greens, roots, and fruits were gleaned wherever they could still be found in the countryside. Despite the drought magnifying the prevailing aridity of the landscape during Mostafa’s time, some Berbers still found enough resources to survive upon and to trade to their seafaring and camel-caravanning visitors, who brought in goods from other lands. Spices such as sesame, the malagueta pepper or “grain of paradise,” and the Kani or negro pepper came from the south, while tumeric, cinnamon, nutmeg, and saffron came from the east. Many youths of Mostafa’s age had to work loading or unloading salts and spices for Portuguese traders in the Azemmour harbor, and we can at least guess that he had tasted or smelled most of these items. Having become a commodity himself, Mostafa likely accompanied barrels of spices from Africa and the Middle East aboard a ship

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when he was taken from his people to Jerez, Spain, then resold in a slave market in Seville around 1522. By the time Mostafa al-Azemmouri was purchased by infantryman Andrés de Dorantes and christened Estevanico de Dorantes, nearly all unconverted Moslems and Sephardic Jews had been expelled, not just from Seville and Jerez but from all parts of Andalusia. By the time he arrived in Spain, a full three decades after the so-called Re-Conquest, ham and other pork products had begun to replace lamb as the most widely produced meats in the region—in part to discover the infidels who might refuse to eat them for religious reasons. Estevanico had to tolerate this religious and culinary repression in Spain for at least five years, but it made him acutely conscious of how adapting one’s diet was an issue of political and social as well as nutritional survival. Those who refused to eat the foods offered by those in power would be marginalized; those who accepted the gifts of their hosts could count on them as allies. These lessons would come back to him over and over again as he and his Spanish companions walked from the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico clear to the Sonoran coast of the Gulf of California. Estevanico and the others were shipwrecked off Galveston Island in November 1528, and spent most of the next six years near the Gulf Coast staving off starvation. Although the sea had food resources even when the desert was too dry to offer much to eat, their captors desperately wanted to move inland, where freshwater was abundant and biting insects were scarce. If they had all stayed together near the Gulf, perhaps their diet would have been rich in fish, shellfish, and turtles. But in the aftermath of their shipwrecks Cabeza de Vaca was taken away and hidden inland from Andrés Dorantes and his young slave. They were not reunited until many months later, long after their makeshift rafts found beachheads on different barrier islands along Galveston Bay. At the onset of their respective journeys on land, they were still in the geographical region we now call “the South,” with pecans, pines, pawpaws, and persimmons, as well as magnolias and live oaks adorned with Spanish moss. It was the western reaches of bayou country. Cabeza de Vaca later called the cultures of the Gulf South “the People of the Pinyon Nuts,” for he likened the small native pecans of the bayous to the pignoli pinyon nuts of his homeland. Meanwhile, Andrés and Estevanico had been captured by one group of indigenous coastal dwellers who moved them just a few miles inland from

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the coast, to the sandy, tree-stunted plains where wet prairies and marshy lakes and rivers made for a more open landscape. Not far away from them, Cabeza de Vaca barely hung on, enslaved with a few shipmates by a related band of hunter-gatherers who frequently extracted menial labor from them. Cabeza de Vaca’s less hardy shipmates soon perished. We can surmise that Estevanico and Andrés Dorantes ate many of the same foods that Cabeza de Vaca ate. And yet Cabeza de Vaca appears to have been more frequently appalled by the kinds of food the coastal Karankawa peoples offered him. Recalling the early part of their journey years later while he was dictating parts of the Naufragios in the safety of a city, Cabeza de Vaca remembered just how utterly foreign their diet had been during the first months after the shipwreck along the Gulf Coast of Texas: [Our native hosts’] hunger was so great that they ate spiders and ant eggs and worms and lizards and salamanders and [harmless] snakes as well as venomous vipers that can kill a man by simply biting him. . . . They swallowed clay and chewed on wood pulp and devoured whatever else they could find, including the dung of deer as well as some other ungodly items which I must refrain from telling you about. . . . I truly believe that if these people suddenly encountered some rocks [along their otherwise sandy coastal plains], they would out of sheer hunger attempt to eat them.

One of Cabeza de Vaca’s initial companions on the coast, Lope de Oviedo, later explained that both the Spanish slaves and their Native American masters were getting sick and dying one by one, some directly from starvation, some from illness, and others from the sheer fatigue of chasing after any animal they might be able to catch or digging with sticks for any root crop they might be able to unearth: Because all of us were sick and were dying just as the natives were dying, [those who enslaved us] agreed to cross over to the mainland to some seasonally-flooded mud flats and backwater lagoons where we [found] some oysters to eat, which the Indians then consumed for the next three or four straight months without bothering with anything else. . . . After another four months, they began to eat herbs from the open flats, and

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dark-skinned “berries” [sugarberries or small Texas persimmons] found in the shrub lands. After another two months, they began to consume some roots. They would also eat [when they had luck to capture them] some very large spider-like invertebrates [crayfish?], lizards, snakes and rodents [cotton rats], and on occasion, deer. For another two months [when the floods returned?], they caught fish [mullet, filled with roe] which they brought aboard and killed in canoes. At this time, they also gathered and ate certain roots [corms and tubers] which can be likened to truffles, except that they get them from the water, not from the land.

The Coahuiltecan-speaking captors of the castaways made their slaves get down on all fours to dig roots from the wet sand prairies as well as from the edges of coastal marshlands and shallow shoals. Most historians simply have assumed that these “roots” were the stem bases and rhizomes of the common cattail, but other plants of the Gulf Coast are more likely to have served as their staples. Native American women may have shown them how to boil the roots of the rather starchy American lotus or water chinquapin. They may have peeled, pit-baked, boiled, or roasted the tubers of three wapatos that reach the coastal marshlands: the bulltongue arrowhead, the lanceleaf arrowhead, and the duck potato. Wapatos make for very good eating when boiled and mashed. Then there were the underground parts of a morning glory vine called Man of the Earth, kin to the commonly cultivated sweet potato but with a more telling, phallic profile.This wild sweet potato was used as a famine food by several Plains tribes, who roasted it in its skin, but they were always careful not to eat too many, for it had both laxative and diuretic properties. The corms of the Virginia spring beauty were also much like spring potatoes, and could be roasted in hot sand mixed with coals. If the coastal folks ventured a little southward and inland to the sandy plains, they may have used their digging sticks to uproot a wild ramp with a sharp bite, the Runyon onion. The common cattail was indeed available, but one hardly needed to invest in a digging stick or a slave labor force to reap its bounty. Of course, not all of these root crops suited Cabeza de Vaca or the other Spaniards. They later complained that among the coastal dwellers,

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Their food supply principally consisted of two or three kinds of roots. .  .  . They search for them in all the country they pass through, even though the roots taste very bad and bloat the men that eat them. On top of that, it takes a good deal of labor to unearth them, two full days to roast them, and yet they continue to taste very bitter after all this effort. But so great was the hunger of those [coastal] people that they felt they could not go without any [roots] at all, so that most days they walked two or three leagues in the naïve hope of encountering them.

While his colleagues could endure being root-eating vegetarians for months on end, Cabeza de Vaca was not so inclined. In fact, he developed an insatiable craving for meat. At one point, he entered a camp when all of its inhabitants were out foraging and stole from their dwellings some dried fish and a small but plump and rather succulent dog. He hid out and ate the fish and the dog by himself until he was found by his slave masters and dragged back to their camp with his tail (not the dog’s) tucked between his legs. Improbably, after many months, the two groups of castaways crossed paths when their bands congregated in the same foraging grounds miles inland from the Gulf. They had only a brief time together, but secretly pledged to reunite under a full moon in September when all the bands of foragers would once again gather to take advantage of a bumper crop of prickly pear cactus fruit that fostered cross-cultural feasts and frolics. Estevanico and Andrés Dorantes first rendezvoused with Cabeza de Vaca and slipped away with him from the intertribal gathering. They found the other surviving Spaniard, Castillo, the next day. They were once and for all free from their slave masters for the first time in six years. They moved southwestward, away from Galveston Bay and closer to Matagorda Bay, where one can still find some of the easternmost shrubby mesquites and prickly pears growing just upslope from marshlands alongside cut-grass, sea oats, saltwort, and railroad vine. During the fourth week of September in 1534, they were welcomed into the lodges of a neighboring band of prickly-pear-fruit foragers known as the Avavares, who let them stay free as equals, for they had heard rumors that the newcomers were powerful shamanistic healers. Trained as neither physical nor spiritual healers, the castaways quickly caught on that it might be advantageous to assume this prestigious but

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demanding role. No one asked for their physician’s licenses anyway. At first, Cabeza de Vaca humbly tried his hand at medical practice, but it sooner or later became clear that Estevanico had the shamanic charisma and skills to cure the natives of their psychosomatic maladies. In addition, he exhibited a remarkable knack for learning new languages—a talent gained while becoming conversant in Arabic, Berber, Portuguese, and Spanish. This skill eventually made him the de facto leader and guide of the group, despite his legal status as its slave. The farther the group got from their homelands, the less European law and social conventions applied. In gratitude for Estevanico and the others curing several tribal members of their infirmities, the Avavares showered the four castaways with a glut of food and gifts. The food in question was again the fruit of a cactus, most definitely the Engelmann’s prickly pear. But this desert plant was never called a cactus by the castaways, for that term referred to spiny thistles in Europe. Prickly pear is also what they found and ate at the next gathering ground near the Nueces River, where the four shipwrecked survivors met more “Fig People,” who called themselves the Maliacones and Arbadaos. Of course, it was Estevanico who called them the Fig People, demonstrating to the others how the prickly pear fruit could be cured and dried like figs. From that time on, their adopted name for prickly pear was tuna, derived from the Arabic and Berber tiine. And yet the Spaniards were not initially as enamored with the taste and texture of Engelmann’s prickly pear as Mostafa might have been. Cabeza de Vaca moaned: Over any entire day, they gave us to eat no more than two handfuls of that fruit, even though it still was green and immature. It had so much milky [sic] mucilage in it that it burned our mouths. . . . What’s worse is that it made everyone who ate it thirsty, and we were already lacking sufficient water to get us by.

At a later point along their journey, it appears that the pilgrims had finally figured out how to deal with the thirst caused by all the hygroscopic mucilage in the fruit: Over the entire time that we had been eating the tunas, we tended to become thirsty. To remedy this, we learned that we could drink the juice

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of the tunas themselves. We would prepare it by extracting the juice in a trench that we made in the ground, and when it was full of juice [free of the mucilage], we would drink directly from it for lack of vessels, until we were satisfied. This juice is sweet and the color of sherry or grape syrup. We found that among the many different kinds of tunas, there are some notable ones of very good flavor.

About this same time, Estevanico and the others observed that some of the Maliacones were adding to their diet the pods of certain legume trees growing in washes within the Great Sand Belt of the coastal plains south of present-day Corpus Christi.They called these edible pods maguacates, a name that no longer has much circulation. Historians have speculated that these edible pods might have been harvested from mesquite trees, either the screwbean or another species with plump, straight pods much like those of the carob tree with which Estevanico had grown up. But the travelers more likely used this name because they were already familiar with the straight-podded mesquites, which they called algarobba, the Spanish name for carob. Estevanico knew them as al-jarub. And so it is more likely that the maguacate pods that the travelers found to be so bitter were from the Texas ebony tree, since screwbean mesquites are generally found a bit farther to the west and along rivers. Both were indeed eaten at different places in the desert borderlands, usually after some processing in water or mud to remove their bitter aftertaste. The young, flat pods of Texas ebony can be eaten raw or toasted, but they inevitably generate halitosis or intestinal gas among those who consume too many. Again, Cabeza de Vaca eschewed such plant foods, trading the nets and skins he had been given as payment for his curing in order to obtain two dogs, which this time he ate with his friends, roasting and eating them as if they were kid goats. The adventurers had at last been replenished enough to make some headway, moving southward and westward toward where they thought the northernmost Spanish outposts might be, given Estevanico’s conversations with widely traveled natives. They were now strong enough to cover considerable ground, as much as four leagues (twelve miles) a day. They eventually came upon a sizable river near the present-day town of Roma,Texas, close to where the Falcon Reservoir now sits downstream from Laredo. The Spaniards likened the river to the Guadalquivir near Seville, the

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same watercourse that Estevanico would call Wadi al-Quibir in Arabic. The name that has stuck for this river among inhabitants on the northern and eastern sides of its banks has that very same meaning—the Rio Grande. But those who have followed it as it raucously tumbles out of the Sierra Madre Occidental in Chihuahua have always referred to it as the Rio Bravo, reflecting their mixture of fear and respect for its wildly cascading flows. The travelers crossed that river in the summer of 1535, heading south for several months into the limestone and gypsum country now called Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Coahuila. Although prickly pears still clustered near every encampment they found south of the Rio Grande, the pilgrims were treated to a meal in one camp that reminded them of foods they had not encountered since before their shipwreck. That meal was ground from the drought-hardy flint and flour corns that had reached the Rio Grande watershed several thousand years before the three Spaniards and the Moor arrived. Sweet corns were nearly nonexistent in the borderlands at that time, and most of the maize kernels came on stubby, cigar-shaped eight-rowed cobs. They were good for making fat little tortillas called gorditas, or for finely ground trail foods such as pinoles and atoles. From then on, the travelers’ preoccupations with starvation seemed to diminish, even though they occasionally went for several days without their immediate hunger being quelled. It seems that they merely had to endure periods when their involuntary fasting lasted as long as it might during the voluntary fasts of Lent or Ramadan in their former lives. Soon after coming into the lands of maize, the pilgrims at last found a wild plant food that they deemed better than the analogous ones back home. It was a thin-shelled pinyon nut, and depending where they were in Nuevo León at the time, it could have been gathered from either the Texas papershell pinyon pine, or farther to the south, Nelson’s pinyon pine. As Lope de Oviedo later wrote about his friends in his Historia general y natural de las Indias, the natives gave them a great quantity of piñones as good or better than those of Castile, for their shells were so thin they could be cracked and eaten along with the meat of the nuts. Although the cones of these pinyon trees were very small, the trees themselves were loaded with them, and carpeted the mountain slopes.

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And yet, as the travelers journeyed west from outlying ranges of the Sierra Madre Oriental, they entered into the burnt-out heart of the Chihuahuan Desert, where creosote bushes, cholla cactus, lechuguilla agaves, and towering yuccas offered little satisfying fare. They covered some fifty leagues—one hundred twenty-five miles—without an edible prickly pear fruit in sight, and little game as well. Fortunately, they ran into other native desert dwellers who offered them as many pinyon nuts as they could carry with them, which allowed them to make it back to the Rio Grande. After moving through several bands of nomads, the four vagabonds entered a sedentary village—an agricultural oasis at La Junta de los Rios—where the Rio Grande and the Rio Conchos converge just above the Big Bend. Their days of subsisting on prickly pear fruit alone—or supplementing their tunas with the meager fare of reptile flesh, crunchy cicadas, and legume pods—appeared to be behind them. Not only did the Jumanos people at the rivers’ confluence have maize, but they also cultivated various beans and squashes that had diffused up over the centuries from Mesoamerica. They were, in fact, in the most remote island of native agriculture found in the entire sea of hunter-gatherers dwelling in the Chihuahuan Desert. What’s more, the Jumanos had culinary skills that reminded Estevanico of the cooks back home in Morocco. They cooked up a harira-like soup or gruel that the Spaniards called mazamorras, but they did so without the use of cooking pots like the tagines that Estevanico knew so well. Although they had no pottery vessels to cook in, they prepared their mazamorras in the following manner, using large bottlegourds in the following manner: They would first start a woodfire and place within it many stones that they cleaned off all dirt in order to heat them up. They then scooped up some fresh water into each gourd and dropped the hot stones into it. Since these stones were already red hot, they made the water boil. When it did, they threw bean flour into the hot water and dropped more hot stones in on top of that, until the mazamorra was fully cooked. Then they savored it.

And yet the Jumanos were not exclusively agricultural and did not remain sedentary year-round. They took the four castaways with them when they moved northward onto the high plains near present-day Marfa, Texas, to

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hunt bison. Antelope also occur on the West Texas grasslands today, but if the castaways saw them at all, they may have simply responded to the animals as “another breed of cow.” The plains of West Texas were not merely populated by grasses and bison; there were native walnuts and sumacs along the washes that may have reminded Mostafa of pistachio and simmaq, the red, lemony sumac seasoning that Arabs add to salads and sauces. There were acorns galore and abundant mesquite pods. The local tribes used a rather unique technology now known as the gyratory crusher to crack open acorns and the hard seed coats embedded in mesquite pods, so that they could grind the protein-rich beans into a meal with the sweeter but coarser flour from the dried pods. Both the screwbean and the honey mesquite had been staples in the region for upwards of eight thousand years, so the indigenous peoples of the Rio Grande had developed sophisticated means of processing them. Cabeza de Vaca’s account does not quite catch all the critical details on how a gyratory crusher functions, but it is still instructive: They loaded us down with the flour of the mesquite [mesquiquez, from the Nahuatl term mizquitl]. This mesquite is a pod that can sometimes be bitter when it is still on the tree, but prepared properly, it can taste like the carob bean [algarobbas]. It is often mixed with clay to take away the bitterness to make it sweet and good to eat. The way that they treat it is like this: They grind a mortar hole into a rock to a depth that they find desirable, and after it is well-shaped, they toss the pods into this mortar. Then using a hard wood pole as thick as a thigh and longer than your arm, they crush the pods against the stone until it generates a very fine flour. In addition, they mix clay with the pods in the mortar, which sticks to the mashed pods in a manner that allows them to grind the meal even finer. Afterwards, they pour the meal into a special basket that serves as a colander, pouring water on top of the meal and draining it through the colander in order to remove any remaining bitterness. The person who is doing the grinding often stops the process long enough to taste the mixture to sense if it has become sweet enough to eat. If not, she asks her companions for more clay to stir into the mixture to extract more of the bitter substance and counterbalance it until she finds it to be sweet.

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When the processing is done, they all seat themselves around the crusher and each person dips his hand into the mortar and takes out what he can hold in his palm. He sifts out any larger foreign matter and the residual seed coats, then spreads the rest onto some hides, and winnows out any remaining seed coat “hulls.” Once the meal is ground again, it is sifted into a basket and water is poured over it as before. They then squeeze out of the basket a sweet gruel, and then discard the lumps left inside. They repeat this process three or four times after each grinding until they are left with a dough or porridge that is both sweet and smooth.

And yet cornmeal, acorn flour, and mesquite flour were not the only ground meals that these Chihuahuan Desert cultures ate. They would catch fish or lizards or snakes and grill them, then pick out the meat and eat it, saving the bones. They then processed them into calcium- and iron-rich bonemeal. Before the Spaniards and the Moor left the Chihuahuan Desert uplands to cross the Sierra Madre Occidental, they gained some respect for the natives’ traditional knowledge about how best to hunt various forms of game: They are so adept at running that without really resting or even getting very tired, they can follow a deer from morning to night until it falters, which allows them to bring home a great volume of venison. On occasion, they are so fast that they can even catch up to a herd of deer and take them alive. Of course, at other times they harvest deer by setting fire to the grasslands and the savannas in order to kill them. . . . The smoke and fire frightens the game so that they are driven toward where the hunters are hiding, and once the deer arrive at their blinds, they are all ambushed.

Such hunting techniques were once used by the Apaches that ranged from West Texas to Arizona and down into Mexico; to this day, the Tarahumara of Chihuahua still run down deer. The castaways may have veered just north of the Tarahumara and south of the Apache as they crossed the Sierra Madre— the backbone of the continent, and trailed down the RioYaqui of Sonora until they reached the Sonoran Desert. Once into the Sierra Madre Occidental, the pilgrims were never too far away from cultivators of maize, beans, and squash. What is remarkable,

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however, is what Cabeza de Vaca and his followers failed to mention: any presence of howling-hot chile peppers, either wild or cultivated; the fermentation of century plants and maize into alcoholic beverages now called mescal and tesguino, the latter name derived from the Berber/Arabic term tiswin; or the towering profiles of giant columnar cacti topped by edible fruit—unless, by a long shot, the following description refers to a saguaro, cardón, or organpipe cactus: We left together with the Indians who were going to eat a small fruit from certain trees, on which they maintain themselves ten or twelve days while the tunas are ripening.

The ripening times for columnar cactus fruit do indeed predate those of prickly pear fruit in the summer, but so do the ripening times of many fruits that grow in the Sierra Madre on true trees. That’s because many perennial plants (including the tall cacti) of the desert and the thornscrub schedule the maturation of their fruit to occur just before the onset of summer rains, so that their seeds have a chance to germinate and their seedlings survive with the soil moisture that accumulates once the summer monsoons begin. The next thing we know from their accounts is that the three Spaniards and their Moorish trailblazer arrive on the other, western side of the Sierra Madre, descending to the coastal plains of Sonora. There, they run into an entirely different suite of foods as they trail down into the Sonoran Desert proper: [West of the Sierra] there are three kinds of deer [i.e., horned game]; those of one of them are as large as the yearling bulls of Castille. . . . In the village where we arrived, they not only gave us emeralds as a gift, but they gave [Estevanico or Andrés] Dorantes more than six hundred deer hearts, dried and opened, of which they always have a great abundance for their sustenance, and for this we gave the pueblo the nickname of Corazones, the Village of Hearts.

That latter gift offered by Sonoran tribesmen may have been considered both a delicacy and a sacramental feast: the capture of six hundred individuals of any species of wild game is an astonishing feat. The wildlife in question probably

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included the small white-tailed deer found in the Sonoran foothills, for it is considered a sacred, even magical animal among the Yoemem of Yaqui Indians; the more common mule deer, which enters the desert proper all the way out to the coast of the Gulf of California; and perhaps the desert bighorn sheep, which was also sacred to many Uto-Aztecan tribes, and large enough to be compared to the bulls of Castile. Another, more remote possibility is that they encountered the now-endangered Sonoran pronghorn antelope at the southernmost limits of its historic range near the westward-leading bend in the Rio Sonora. The inclusion of pronghorn antelope would put the pueblo of Corazones farther north and farther out on the coast than most earlier historians would have it, unless that species range once extended south of the Rio Sonora toward Bahia San Carlos. All four of the big game species mentioned were regarded as totem animals that were to be given the utmost respect; their bones were cremated and their horns never allowed to hang on the walls of homes in Sonoran Desert villages, for fear that it would anger their spirits and cause whirlwinds that would destroy the entire rancheria. The extraction of six hundred recently dried hearts of big game in any one place at the same time must have meant that the Yaqui, Pima, Eudeve, and Seri tribesmen they encountered knew that powerful shamans were coming their way well in advance of their arrival. Virtually every man in several villages must have gone out hunting in order to contribute meat held for the feast celebrated upon their arrival. We know that more than one tribe was likely involved because the interior of central Sonora was a transition zone between the Yaqui, Lowland Pima, and Eudeve nations. But there is evidence in their account that the non-agricultural Seri or Comcáac also arrived from the coast to witness the Spaniards and the Moor; they sometimes stayed among the Yaqui at the village now called Belem, or traded with the Pima. Here’s what Cabeza de Vaca recorded of their presence: [We came] through a gateway to the many Indian territories that situated along the South Sea—[Sea of Cortés]. And if those who go look for the sea do not enter it in the same way that we did, they will be lost, because the coastal peoples have no maize. Instead, the Indians of the coast eat a meal ground from the seeds of a wild amaranth that we call bledo, and

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they also eat a straw-like grass and fish from the sea that they catch on the water using [reed] rafts because they do not build wooden canoes.

This description perfectly fits what we know of the Seri Indian dietary. They did eat the black seeds of two wild amaranths, toasting and grinding them into a fine flour. They also caught more than a hundred different kinds of fish from their balsa kayaks made of carrizo, which were far more seaworthy than wooden canoes. And finally, Cabeza de Vaca, Estevanico, and the others may have made the first recording anywhere in the Americas of indigenous peoples eating the grains of a straw-like sea grass, eelgrass or hatam in the Seri language, that was later observed by other Spanish explorers such as Pérez de Ribas. The group of four waited several weeks near Corazones in the foothills of Sonora north of the Rio Yaqui, because they arrived during the rainy season when summer floods inundated all coastal lands between the Rio Yaqui and the more southerly Rio Mayo. These seasonal floods temporarily blocked their passage to the south until the waters receded. Not long after they ambled south of the Rio Yaqui, they stumbled upon Spanish mercenaries in Sinaloa who had been buying up slaves to take back south. The mercenaries were dumbfounded when they saw the four bearded, naked, feather-bedecked travelers crystallize like a mirage on the coastal plains. They heard Spanish words arise from the throats of these phantoms, but they had never seen any Spanish speakers who looked anything like them. Let us just say that the pilgrims fit the description of being “lean and mean,” given that they had survived all that they had over a matter of eight years and 6,500 miles. Three years later, Estevanico would be enticed by Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza into returning to Corazones along with Fray Marcos de Niza, in a scouting trip for the Coronado Expedition to Arizona and New Mexico. He would be killed that same year on the present-day Arizona-Sonora border near the sacred Zuni Salt Lake. Although the circumstances of his death remain obscure, Native American oral histories have suggested that he had become far too fond of indigenous women for his own good and that Zuni men took offense at his actions. It is not known what his last supper was, only that over his decade in the Americas, he had probably eaten a wider range of Southwestern foods than

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nearly any man has since. His Spanish colleagues never returned to what we now call the desert borderlands, although they did continue to travel. At least two of them returned to Spain, where I assume they hastened to taste once again those comfort foods for which they had longed during their years away from hearth and home. And yet they remained fond of telling about their time away, especially among “the Fig People,” the cactus eaters of the Southwest. Although the Native Americans did not cultivate grain crops or fruit and nut trees, Those of the Figs [were] people [who] did not recognize the seasons simply by the movements of the sun and moon, for they had means other than counting the month and year to keep track of time. Those people, on the other hand, deeply understand the seasons and read subtle differences between them by observing when the prickly pear cactus fruits begin to ripen, and timing of when the fish die in the backwaters, and by the appearance of the stars. In all these things, they are extremely clever and extraordinarily skilled. No matter that they raise no maize, or acorns, or nuts.

No matter, at least to the castaways, who were grateful when anyone offered them food. Hunger, of course, was the strongest factor in how this Moor and his three Spanish companions reacted to the foods placed before them by the cooks in the many Native American communities where they ate. To be sure, the poignancy of their accounts of eating native desert foods was undoubtedly heightened by the hunger and thirst that nagged at them as they trekked thousands of miles across arid America in the 1530s. It seems that food (or the lack of it) trumped all other topics noted in their Naufragios, the account of the disasters that they survived. But even extreme hunger appears to be inextricably tied to cultural memory. Let’s face it: When you’re hungry, you dream of the foods that nourished you as a child, or delighted you during the best of times. When you’re first given an altogether novel food—and these four were offered everything from cotton rats and hornworm larvae to deer hearts and cactus pads, you compare their novel tastes and textures to the foods from your own home ground. That may be exactly why the gang of four called pricklypear-fruit-eating South Texans “the Fig People,” the mesquite-eating Jumanos “the Carob People,” and bison-eating West Texans “the Cow People.”

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Sadly, those same nomadic hunter-gatherers of the desert borderlands were held in contempt by the next waves of Spaniards to reach their territories, and so most were enslaved, exposed to horrific diseases, or converted to Christianity and cultivation. Most have vanished, although one culture of nomads, the Seri, survived a reduction in population from several thousand down to a mere hundred at the end of the nineteenth century. Their population in Sonora has now rebounded to nearly a thousand people in two coastal communities. Other tribes of the Gulf Coast of Texas and the Rio Grande did not fare as well. With them went detailed knowledge of how to harvest and prepare hundreds of native plants and animals, each in its own season and place. It is only through the words of Cabeza de Vaca and the fragments of interviews recorded with Mostafa al-Azzemouri that we have even an inkling of what the Desert Southwest tasted like over the course of more than eight thousand years.

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CHAPTER THREE

Seek-No-Further Foraging and Fishing through the Big Bend

There was a particular moment in my life when I knew I must live where I could fully taste the place in which I lived every week for the rest of my life, if not every day. I call it my Seek-No-Further moment, named for an heirloom apple that sometimes grows in old streamside orchards of the Desert Southwest. This revelatory moment did not occur exactly where I live today, but along the Big Bend of the Rio Grande, where barren rocks and towering yuccas dwarf any gardens, fields, orchards, or pastures. It was along the Big Bend that I learned the pleasure of making a meal of foodstuffs gleaned only from the surrounding landscape. I gained the urge to make such a meal by meeting some poor Mexican families who had to eat off the land in order to survive. My time among them humbled me, for it suggested that I should never again ignore or waste the harvestable foods within reach of where I stood. To do otherwise would certainly dishonor the borderline families that so generously shared with me the little foods that they had, but it would also dishonor the plant and animal foods that emerged from some of the driest reaches of this earth. My revelatory moment of homing took place some twenty-one years before I write this, but it has taken me all this time to fully acknowledge how that epiphany has guided my life since then. Before Big Bend, I had moved along listlessly, without much of a place or taste of my own. I meandered

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through life like a disengaged visitor, strolling through the garden of earthly delights merely reading the signs in front of each plant rather than reaching out to pluck the ripest among them. And then, as I broke out of the chaos of cactus and brambles on that day of epiphany, I could at last see, as well as savor, the fruits of the tree of life growing right before me. Ironically, my Garden of Eden was devoid of apples (no Seek-No-Furthers nor any other heirloom varieties). Instead it tasted of cornmeal-crusted catfish, wild oregano, chile pequin, and a few poisonous nightshade berries tossed into some goat’s milk to make it curdle. If you can wait a little longer for me to cast the rest of this story, I think you’ll understand how a catfish, some goat cheese, chiles, and oregano came to lead me home. Oddly, I can’t remember much about my life at that time. I had been living rather unhappily in the sprawling metropolis called Phoenix, working at a botanical garden filled with desert plants that seemed to be assaulted on all sides by asphalt, concrete, plywood, wallboard, and two-by-fours. Fortunately, someone suggested to me that I should study the edible flora of the Big Bend, and that I might be able to get a deal serving as a guest guide with a rafting outfit that regularly ran through the canyons there. I had never spent much time in the wilds of Texas nor in the monte of Coahuila, but portions of those areas had recently been conserved as biosphere reserves. I knew little about biosphere reserves except that they allowed the local, more sustainable uses of edible and medicinal plants to continue within their boundaries. I needed to get out of the city, and Big Bend was the ticket. The Big Bend, as you may know, is a raggedy dogleg of the Rio Grande. That river—hardly more than sixty yards across and four feet deep through much of the Big Bend—briefly cuts through a series of canyons with walls four hundred feet tall. The population density of that region of the U.S./ Mexico border rivals that of the bleakest reaches of North Dakota. There are more cacti than people along the Big Bend, and more emptiness than busy-ness. Perceived by most folks as an empty, desolate, and desultory place, Big Bend has also been neglected by wild food enthusiasts, but is held in great esteem by desert rats. I myself had not thought much about nor thought much of the Tex-Mex borderlands until I was granted the chance to float and eat my way through Big Bend on a raft trip with Far-Flung Adventures in the autumn

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of 1988. When the proprietors of Far-Flung sent me a postcard of their sixmonth-old baby smiling, sitting naked in a pile of jalapeño peppers, I became intrigued. There was a lot more than jalapeños, however, among the groceries when I and the other rafters arrived at the “put-in” site known as Solis, where we loaded the rafts with waterproof river bags, grills, canteens, and coolers with a half ton of canned food and beer. I began to wonder whether the familiar foods we’d brought along might serve as a disincentive for discerning the unique flavors of the Big Bend, but I readily accepted a cold one when someone popped open a beer and offered it to me. Mexico’s Sierra San Vicente was in sight as the trip began, and as we glanced downstream, we saw the glistening river disappear into a three-mile “tunnel” called San Vicente Canyon. Its limestone walls rose above us in subtle shades of grays, buffs, and creams; where the sun shined upon them, they were so barren and bright that we could have gone stone-blind by simply staring at them for more than a minute’s time. “This ain’t Eden,” I grumbled to myself, wondering how in the hell I was going to lead an “edible plant walk” later in the day when everything in sight looked as though it might bite at me before I could take a bite out of it. If there was anything edible along that first stretch of San Vicente, it remained hidden from me. However, Marcos Paredes, our head guide, reminded me that we were visiting during the season of hunger weather, when food was hard to come by. That’s why Mexican cowboys brought the cowhides they cured and candelilla wax they refined across the river to get cash so that they could buy canned groceries and beer. Yes, there were some desert foods out there, but they would be slow to reveal themselves. Instead, we turned our immediate attention to all the other plants that poked their thorns and spines and stickers out from the otherwise naked canyon walls. After our first riverside lunch of cold cuts, chips, and beer in the shade of an old mesquite tree, we put the rafts in and began to float the Rio Grande in earnest. Like the Rio Colorado, the River Nile, and most other desert rivers I have floated, the Rio Grande has its banks choked by a dense thicket of shrubby tamarisks and a canebrake of bamboo-like grass that the Mexicans call carrizo. As the sinuous river curved and looped back on itself like a coiled snake, grassy curls of carrizo offered a minimalist’s hint of greenery in swirls and corkscrews and commas on the water’s edge. Beyond this narrow

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little lip of lushness, the limestone slopes of San Vicente Canyon appeared barren, that is, unless you got down on your hands and knees beneath the creosote bushes and took a good hard look at the ground. There, hunkered down amid the dull-colored stones, were beautiful “rainbows,” highly prized by cactus collectors, along with a dozen other species of cryptic cacti unique to the Chihuahuan Desert. In some places, as many as thirty-five kinds of spiny gray cacti were hiding out on each acre, some of them bearing delicious strawberry-like fruit. To recognize the cacti and to eat their succulent fruit, I first had to learn how “to get over the color green” (as Wallace Stegner once urged us to do) so as to take note of their world. Down on the river, the most obvious objects other than our rafts were two-liter Coke bottles bobbing up and down, especially in the eddies just downstream from where the river bent. “Holy mole!” one of my raft companions exclaimed, pointing and frowning. “The Mexican folks around here must toss all their Coke bottles into the river with no respect for the river itself.” “Well, I’m not saying they’re pretty, but at least they’re functional,” explained Sammy, a boatman from the Far-Flung crew. Sammy was skinny, leathery, gray-haired and goofy, and wore as few clothes as possible, rain or shine. He rowed as he spoke: “A lot of those bottles . . . I guess they’ve been scavenged from our camps or rescued from the river. The Mexican folks retrofit ’em, turn ’em into floats for jug-lines to catch catfish.” “What do you mean . . . they’re not all free-floating trash?” Sammy shook his head. “No, not at all. Especially during the drought, people need to eat from the river cuz, well, they can’t eat a helluva lot from the land. So they gather up four or five of those two-liter Coke bottles, put a little gravel in them, sometimes paint ’em white, caulk them closed, screw the caps back on, and they’ve got some pretty cheap floats for their jug-lines. Then they tie some braided twine tight around the bottlenecks. They might extend the line, oh, maybe some twenty feet or so, and start adding hooks, leaders, or sinkers, or anchor them with bricks. Or tie them to a lead line tied to a tree off the bank. Now, when a catfish hits, the bottle dips, the gravel rolls to one side, and weight shifts to the end with the cap. They come by and see the jug has shifted position, check it, and find a big ol’ catfish on the hook.” “Muy suave. Pretty slick. Wish we could do it,” I said.

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“Well, hell, just keep your eye out for one of them jugs that has got loose.” Sammy put one oar in his lap and pointed over toward an eddy, where the drift lines tend to get waylaid. “We like to pull in the drifters, anyway. Maybe it’ll already have a fish on it, maybe it won’t, but you can float it behind the raft for a while. As long as you don’t let it drift loose again, and check it every half hour or so, I doubt anyone will bother you.” Late that afternoon, after we had set up camp in San Vicente Canyon, not far above the town of Ojo Caliente, I found a ghost line drifting along with a jug behind it. I pulled it in, refurbished it a little, and set it out.Within fifteen minutes of placing it in the water, I saw my Coke bottle float by, bobbing. I grabbed some gloves out of my pack, and a bucket from the cooking area, and went over to pull up my first fish of the trip. It was most likely a Chihuahua catfish, close kin to the widespread channel cat, but a species more common on the middle and lower Rio Grande. Its tail has a shallower fork than those of both channel and headwater catfish, and the Chihuahua seldom reaches a full foot in length. Differences aside, they are all good eating, as we learned later that evening after gutting and grilling four or five more that we had caught (by rod as well as by jug). While the Far-Flung crew reheated a pre-prepared pan of enchiladas, poured out a can of beans into a skillet to refry, and mashed some avocados into guacamole with the bottom of a beer bottle, a couple of us sat in the sand next to the grill and pan-fried our catfish. We passed around nuggets of catfish as finger food just after dark, and most everyone agreed that fresh catfish was much tastier than canned beans. The catfish was soon forgotten, however, as more beer appeared out of the coolers—Dos Equis, Tres Equis—all the X’s you could count or drink. A little beat-up guitar was passed around the group, and we tried our best to remember the words of songs by Gary P. Nunn, Doug Sahm, Steve Fromholz, Butch Hancock, and other Texas songwriters. With the jagged lines of the canyon rim above us, I put my sleeping bag on a tarp ten feet from the river and looked up at the sky to watch for the moonrise from my sleeping bag. As usual, I faded off to sleep before the moon arrived. In the twilight time the Mexicans call la madrugada, I awakened to roosters crowing not all that far away. The stars were still visible in the slot of sky framed by the canyon, but I could see from a rose-colored patch of the Sierra

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del Carmen in the distance that the day was coming on. I pulled on my jeans, slipped into my huaraches, put on my straw cowboy hat, grabbed my plant collection bag, and began to walk toward the sound of the roosters, where I presumed I would find the little spring-side settlement of Ojo Caliente. The hot springs had been tapped to irrigate a few small fields, and they were in the last throes of being harvested. There were melons and squashes, corn and beans, broom sorghum, sugar cane sorghum, and pasture grass. It was hard to tell who had harvested more of the crops, the Mexicanos or the grasshoppers. Grasshoppers were everywhere, hopping around as if they had bit parts in a motion picture about biblical plagues. I wondered if these grillos were ever grilled and eaten when other foods were scarce. (Later in life, I carried grillos asados from Mexico along with me as a trail food whenever I ran rivers.) Just as the dawn’s light spilled into the canyon, I met a young Coahuiltecan woman who was going to fetch some drinking water from the springs. She carried two beat-up plastic water jugs. She had three small children in tow, and another one or two on the way, judging from her bulging shape. She was willing to talk for a while in exchange for me carrying the water back to her house. Her name was Maria de Lourdes. When we were going back to her place, she stopped to rest in the shade of a big mesquite, so I opened the bag of plants I had been collecting and dumped them in the sand before her and the children. “Would you mind telling me if any of these are eaten here?” I queried her. “Pues,” Maria said haltingly, as she sorted through the plants freshly picked from the river’s edge. “Well, you should really talk to an older, more knowledgeable woman like the yerbera downstream in Boquillas del Carmen.” “The yerbera?” I asked. “You know, well, she’s the curandera. Her name is Isabela. Everyone knows her in Boquillas. Even the gringos come to see her.” “Well, I’ll try to find her when I get to Boquillas, but perhaps there are plants here too that you yourself use as food . . .” “Well, yes, there are some, but most of these plants you have picked this morning are medicines, not foods. I can tell you a little about them, but Isabela knows them better.” Maria de Lourdes paused for a second to rummage through the pile, and her children crowded in around her.

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“Look, you have the gobernadora [creosote bush]. Very good for stomachache and for kidneys.You have calabacilla loca [buffalo gourd]. That’s not good to eat. It’s good for bleaching out our bowls and towels and pots and pans. And there, you have the hierba de la golondrina.We give it to the babies to stop their diarrhea.” “Sounds like you have got a lot of plant medicines around here that can help you deal with stomach problems,” I noted. “What would you expect?” Maria said flatly, running her fingers back through her braided hair. Her mouth closed tightly before she began again. “Asi es la vida. That’s how it is where you have bad well water. Here, you got river water contaminated with mierda from the cows. The meat and the vegetables spoil quickly in the heat if you don’t have any refrigeration. On top of that, the drought all the time, too. It can keep you hungry, too.” “Well, what do you try to grow over here?” I asked. “The nopal and the tuna—what you call the prickly pear cactus—that’s the most reliable thing we got. Even in drought, we can rely on it. Not so the beans and the corn and the squash and the melons over there in the field. Even if we irrigate them, maybe we get something two, maybe three out of five years. If the heat doesn’t get them then it’s the grasshoppers. Or else the cattle break in. I’ll show you what we grow, what we keep inside the fence around our house. . . . I can always grow some onions there. Sometimes the plants of chiles, tomatillos, and cilantro survive. You know, I just throw the dishwater on them. That’s all they get.” Maria de Lourdes got up to go, motioning the kids and me to follow. I grabbed the water jugs she had filled at the springs. “What else can you eat when the corn and beans fail?” “You know, you have some of them here in your pile [of plants], but it takes work to pick enough of them to eat. Like this one here, the garambullo [hackberry]. Or that other red berry, agrito [wolfberry]. Sometimes, we’ll even make a drink from the mesquite bean pods. Not too often anymore. Like anybody else, we’ll eat the wild greens if they come up in the fields. Quelites. Verdolagas. But some years, they don’t even sprout—too dry here.” When we approached her little adobe house—one of only five left in the village—I was ready to drop the jugs of water from my shoulders. I looked at her, so young, pregnant for the fourth time, and wondered how she did it each day. Of course I had guessed that it wasn’t easy to fill the larder from this

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stretch of desert, but I had never realized that a shallow well, some edible wild greens, and berries might be the only buffers against thirst and starvation. “So how do you make it? Do the men here gain much cash from the livestock? I mean, do you gain any income from your own work—cooking, crafts, sewing?” “With the children this age? I can’t do much more than keep them fed and clean. The men proudly say they are ganaderos—stockmen—but they are just poor vaqueros. You know, they don’t really keep enough vacas to gain much cash. If a cow gets hurt, we have to butcher it right away, no matter what the size. Butcher and jerk and dry the meat for later. My husband, he cuts candelilla for wax, cuts lechuguilla for fiber, cuts the sotol for the bootleggers, picks oregano or chile pequins. It’s whatever people will buy. Anything so we can keep the kids fed.” “You have wild oregano and wild chiles here?” She pointed to the backyard as I set the water jugs down for her. “We have a plant or two in our huerta behind the kitchen. But you’ll see them down by the river, up on canyon walls, if you know how to look.” If you know how to look . . . as I had to learn to look for the ground-hugging cacti and their fruit on the canyon slopes. If you’re hungry enough, you have to learn how and where to look for them. You would have to learn how to pick them with as much speed as you could possibly muster.You would have to learn how to dry them so that they wouldn’t spoil before the buyer arrives. You would have to learn how to do all of this as efficiently as possible because your family needs food and the drink and the medicines, as well as the cash for the things you can’t grow or forage.This desert is not for wimps. It exacts its price. I looked at Maria’s hands: a few scars, a few burn marks, chipped fingernails . . . “So how much might they pay you or your husband for the harvest of chile pequins?” “Two dollars a pound,” Maria whispered, as if trying to keep her neighbors from knowing what a deal she received from the buyer who came from the other side of the border. Two dollars a pound? The same chiles retailed in stores from West Texas across New Mexico and sometimes into Arizona for sixty dollars a pound! The harvester—the poorest player in the entire value chain, since the chiles changed hands five or six times before reaching a kitchen table—received

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only one-thirtieth of the final market value. With the entire economic deck stacked against them, no wonder Maria de Lourdes and her husband could hardly keep their children fed and clothed. “Do you have any chile pequins I can buy from you?” Maria motioned for me to stay on the porch, and she went inside. She brought me back a glass Nescafé jar filled with small bright-red wild chiles, some of them round, but some of them beaked. I couldn’t easily guess their weight, so I just handed her a hundred-peso bill. “No, that’s too much, and I don’t have any change.” She sighed, looking embarrassed. “You just take them as a gift. After all, you carried my water.” Now I was the one who was embarrassed, if not humbled. “Keep it all. Get something for the children. . . . I can eat chiles, but they need something else to eat that isn’t hot.” “I know,” she said, relenting. “I’ve had to stop eating so many chiles now that I’m pregnant since it makes the baby inside me kick. . . . Here, if you’re going to give me money, why don’t you take all of our chiles?” I heard Marcos or Sammy whistling for everyone to come back into camp, get some coffee and breakfast, and pack up. “Es la hora para embarcar,” I explained, and she nodded. As I picked up my plants and turned to go, Maria de Lourdes put a small gunnysack of chile pequins in my hands. She then tucked the hundred-peso bill into her blouse and shooed me out the door. I bowed to her, departing from her ramshackle home with enough wild chiles to last me for a year. The next village we visited, Boquillas del Carmen, was many times larger than Ojo Caliente, claiming some fifteen houses down below a mesa, another nineteen houses up on top, and five more intermingled among a few tourist stores. In Boquillas, they will try to sell you anything that can move, that has moved since the time of the dinosaurs, or that will appear to move if you ingest enough peyote to send it into flight. When I was there, I could get bootlegged sotol for five dollars a quart, and false peyote (the star cactus) for the same price. If I had persisted, I might have been able to find some real peyote for far more than that per button. I could also purchase petrified wood, ponchos, ammonites, crystals, leather purses, sombreros, leather vests, baskets, miniature huapango guitars, gallon jugs of cheap tequila, Christmas cacti, cheeses, tortillas, and hot sauces galore.

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While my rafting companions decided whether or not to try a shot of sotol or to purchase various and sundry curios, I walked around the village until I noticed an elderly woman making something in big bowls on her porch. Thinking that she might be Isabela the Curandera, I approached her and asked if she was an herbalist. “No, I’m not her. But is it that you are interested in plants? I am using a little poisonous berry to make cheese right now.” “A berry? May I see what kind of berry?” I asked. “Sure, come on up here onto the porch. I am using the berries of trompillo . . . making a batch of queso asadero. See, the trompillo berries are in that bowl,” she said as she wiped her hands on an apron that covered her flowered cotton dress. Her gray hair was largely covered by a scarf of the same flower pattern. I stood behind her and peeked into the bowl.There were five little golden berries of trompillo, a deadly nightshade that I guessed to be Solanum eleaginifolium, which is sometimes called buffalo berry in English. It is a thorny, poisonous weed that colonizes overgrazed or recently flooded areas. “I crush two fresh berries and three old ones in a half of a cup of tepid water. See? Let them soak until the water is yellow. Like this. See? I strain out the seeds and skins of the berries,” she explained. “Then I use it to congeal the curds out of the whey.” “Is the cheese made from cow milk or goat milk?” “Our cows aren’t here no more. They’re being impounded on the other side. So this batch is from our goats. Bi-national goats,” she said with a smile. “They browse on this side of the river, then they sneak over to that side too. They are too fast and crafty for those Rinches de Tejas to catch them and put them in jail. What do you call them? Texas rangers? Park rangers?” She laughed. “Watch. I put the half cup of trompillo water in with three gallons of goat’s milk. Here, I stir it for ten seconds. I’m using one-day-old leche de agria [sour milk] for half of the mix, and fresh leche dulce [sweet milk] for the other half. I can’t tell you how long it takes—fifteen minutes?—all the milk will have begun to curdle. If I leave this batch in the sun, it will turn to curds in three hours! Later in this afternoon, that’s when I’ll separate the curds from the whey. That’s when I’ll concentrate the whey. Make into a cream cheese we call riquezón.”

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“But why do they call what they do with the curds queso asadero?” I asked, having wondered why the cheese is said to be “grilled.” “Do they say that the berries cook the cheese?” “No, it’s because we actually take the curds and melt them. We do that by kind of roasting or grilling them—haven’t you ever seen it?—by heating them on a comal griddle over a wood fire. As they begin to melt on the griddle, we pick them up. Shape them into something like a fat tortilla, you know, a gordita. We turn them over on the griddle and leave them. ’til the texture is even. Then we pick them up.We stack them, you’ve seen them that way, between wax paper in a pile. That’s how we make the true queso asadero.” Milk from bi-national goats. Berries from a deadly nightshade. Cheese tortillas that are grilled as if they were hamburger patties. I had to buy them and try them for dinner. “How much does it cost for two dozen of them?” I asked. She named her price and I complied. She went into her house and brought me out two neat stacks of queso asadero, wrapped them both in a paper sheet, then enveloped the piles within the paper sheet in a pale cotton cloth. She pulled the ends of the cloth over the cheese, then braided them together and tied the braids into a knot that also served as a carrying device. “Will I get sick if you put too many trompillo berries into the milk?” I asked as I counted out my money to pay her. “No,” she said with a straight face, “you’ll be dead! Why do you gringos worry so much about getting sick and dying? By the grace of God, it’s to happen to all of us sooner or later. Just enjoy the few days, the ones you have left with us here in this desert,” she said matter-of-factly. And then she went inside and closed her door. That was the last I saw of her. Today, Boquillas del Carmen is almost a ghost town. One reporter has recently claimed that its inhabitants have become the “most cut-off people anywhere in the Americas.” The three hundred residents there at the time of my visit in 1988 have dwindled to less than eighty. Fewer than a dozen of its houses have anyone dwelling in them year-round, and nearly all of the ones who are hanging on suffer from declining incomes. The only Mexican minstrel surviving there, Victor Valdez, must wade out into the river on the days when he wants to sing for his supper; Victor no longer attempts to touch dry ground on the U.S. side of the river for

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fear of being spotted on hidden cameras and arrested by the Border Patrol. American rafters are no longer encouraged to set foot on the Mexican side of the river, and they cannot hike up to the village to purchase queso asadero, songs, salsas, or shots of sotol from the few souls that remain in Boquillas del Carmen. When we left the village for the next series of canyons, around eleven in the morning, the sun was beating down on us, and re-radiating off the pale, glossy walls of the canyon and off the silvery surface of the river itself. The raft was blazing hot. My head was aching. Sammy suggested I cure the ache by floating in the cool water alongside the raft, so I tethered my life jacket to the back of the boat. I took the plunge, and floated along in chest-deep water, my headache quickly passing. Within a few miles, Marcos thought he had spotted a wisp of smoke around where he and Sammy had seen some candelilla cutters a few weeks before. Candelilla is a low-growing succulent with clusters of fuzzy gray pencil-like shoots that cling to the limestone walls. To gather it and extract its wax from the rest of the plant, you need a mule, some tools, some pits in the ground, some firewood, and some sulfuric acid. This nasty little process has left thousands of pits like so many pockmarks across the face of the Chihuahuan Desert. It has also allowed the poorest of the poor campesinos to stay on the land by putting a little cash in their pockets, especially during the months or years of deadly drought, when the land supports little else. We pulled the rafts onto a beach on the Mexican side of the river and came across a single empty shack, a water tank, a fifty-gallon drum, and a hose running off into a side canyon. We followed the hose up the canyon until we heard voices. Marcos went ahead of the rest of us, to confirm that it was candelilla and not marijuana that was in production. Within a couple of minutes, he came back and waved us forward, and we followed him around a curving canyon wall of limestone. There we found a motley crew of cerreros—wax makers. There were two young men working without their shirts or shoes, two elderly men guiding them, and two tenyear-olds helping out whenever they could, but otherwise sitting in the shade on the side of a 1974 stepside Dodge pickup truck. The men were congregated around some specially made pailas, or wax extraction vats, each of them two or three feet deep and four feet across,

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with rocks piled up on its lid. Each lid looked like some giant waffle iron, because it formed a cast-iron grid over each of the smaller vats, or pailadas, within it; the cast-iron lid and its attendant rocks allowed the wax makers to press the wax out of the candelilla plants being crushed underneath them. Marcos and I made small talk with the men and boys, offering them some Cokes and beers that we had brought along. They were good-natured, but at first said little to us except when asked, as if fearful that any gringos visiting their candelilla camp might try to shut them down. That initially seemed odd to me, since we were in their home territory, not ours, until I realized that they—like other arrieros who take mules out to cut and load candelilla— could easily stray across the river to find uncut patches on the U.S. side. If a park ranger or a border guard found any recently cut candelilla populations in Big Bend National Park, he would probably hassle these men and boys anytime they were seen near the river. After downing their first beers, the men grew more talkative. Our entire group of twelve huddled around them, curious about the wax-making process. So Marcos and I asked the wax makers to walk us through the whole sequence, from harvesting plants to selling their cream-colored wax, while we translated their responses. The two younger men—the arrieros, or mule skinners—had gone out with their mules at dawn each of the last three days to find, cut, and pack up about four or five cords of candelilla stems between them. They would roam ridges, each riding a mule with three more in a train behind him, until they found a relatively thick patch of candelilla that appeared as if it hadn’t been cut for years. Each of the men used knives and digging sticks to pry the plants or cut the stems from the limey earth. It took nearly five thousand pounds of the cut stems to make a cord, which yielded little more than a hundred pounds of crude wax. They loaded almost three hundred pounds of stems on each mule, so that each man’s mule train had to trail back to the wax-making camp at least twice over the three-day period. Their total harvest for the three days of cutting and trailing the mules would render maybe five hundred pounds of wax once processed. Since they could get just a dollar per pound for the wax that they delivered to the trading post in Lajitas, Texas, those six days of field work plus another two days of processing would bring in a total of five hundred dollars for them and the older men. The four men would each gross about fifty dollars a

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day. But with the costs of gas and frequently punctured tires for the pickup, grain for the mules, food, sodas and beer for the crew, and sulfuric acid for the wax extraction, their daily wages came out closer to thirty dollars a day, or three dollars an hour. Happy to get away from their mothers and sisters, the boys worked for free. It was not work for the weak, or for those with sensitive noses and stomachs. It yielded no food, only wax, and little wealth. The arms of these men and boys were blotched with stains and scars. One of them had scar tissue from a massive burn on his chest and shoulder. And yet there was a humanity to be found in this desert canyon that doubled as a sweatshop. The men sang corridos as they worked, occasionally danced with their shovels as if they were their wives, pantomiming the erotic in a place seemingly devoid of sensuality, let alone sexuality. One of the younger men quietly offered us a big bag of freshly picked hackberries to take along with us. The sweet but slightly citric orange-red fruit hit the spot. When I asked to pay him something for the berries, he laughed. “No vale nada. Son tuyos, mi cuate.” They’re not worth a thing. They’re yours, my twin brother. “This is what must happen for people in the cities to get their breath mints and waxed apples?” one of the rafters asked. Neither Marcos nor I translated that question back to the wax makers. We thanked them for their work, and shook hands with each man and boy. Before we departed, we left another six-pack of beer with them, and then made our way back to the rafts. Long after my first visit to Big Bend, when Homeland Security raised its ugly head along the border, the custom of informal trade across the border, including candelilla wax, was reduced to a trickle. By May 2002, every single unmanned crossing along the two-thousand-mile border had been sealed shut by Homeland Security. As we came back to the rafts, the contrast seemed a bit absurd. Most of our group was paying well over a hundred dollars a day for the recreational adventure of rafting the Rio Grande, while those who struggled to live here made less than a third of that, working ten hours a day with thorny cacti, waxy succulents, ornery mules, and sulfuric acid. We brought along eight coolers of canned beer, feedlot beef, pasteurized cheese, factory-made hot sauce and chips to a place where bootlegged sotol, range-fed beef, homemade queso asadero, and salsa de chile pequin had been locally produced for centuries. Our contribution to the local economy over our four days of rafting down the Rio Grande was negligible.

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And that is when we entered a dark wood of sorts, as much as the desert could offer one. The next stretch of the canyon was choked by thickets of tamarisk, shadowed by the high walls above us, plagued with boulder fields on slopes that seemed too steep to climb, and devoid of any human presence other than our own. It felt de-humanized. Everyone was silent, either too tired and sunburned to speak or too embarrassed by our own wealth, which had been juxtaposed with the stark poverty that we witnessed back at the wax-making camp. Some of the group tried to doze off and forget it; I was struck dumb, but could not let the vivid scene of that desert sweatshop leave my memory. At last I noticed that I still had a Coke bottle with some hooks and sinkers and lines tucked into a canvas bag at my feet. I baited it. Then I tied one of its lines to my life jacket, jumped overboard, dipped my entire head and body under the water, and came up for air. I leaned back and drifted. Drifted like a dead floating body. Drifted like a trunk of a cottonwood tree ripped from the riverbank by a massive flood and thrust downstream. Drifted down the U.S./Mexico border, the line between unfathomable wealth and abject poverty. I pointed my feet downstream and let the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande carry me away. And I drifted off to sleep . . . Suddenly, I heard and then felt some splashing nearby. I opened my eyes, assuming that another person from my raft had dived in to cool off. But everyone in the raft except Marcos was asleep. I looked around and saw the tethered Coke bottle bobbing, then dipping deeper into the water. As I looked at it from another angle, I realized that I must have caught not one but two Chihuahua catfish while I had been dozing. About that time, I heard Sammy calling to Marcos that he was going into the first beach past the last thicket, downstream on the left, to make our final camp. The tamarisks were behind us for a while, and a small beach opened up below the steep limestone walls of the canyon. Marcos brought our raft in behind Sammy’s, and I dog-paddled over to where I could wade in to the beach, dragging my bottle and two catfish behind me. “I can just see the headlines: ‘Desert Rat Catches Two Catfish Without Even Waking Up.’” Sammy laughed as he watched me pull the fish off their hooks and whack their heads against the lone boulder on the beach. “This really is a poor man’s fishing hole. . . . I suggest you gut and fillet those critters to make us some catfish nuggets for happy hour, and let me set up the camp kitchen by myself.”

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Before I prepared the fish, however, I went upslope to change out of my wet trunks and into a T-shirt, a baseball cap, and some jeans. As I hung my clothes on a branch of mesquite, I noticed a familiar-looking shrub growing beneath a hackberry next to it. It was a wild chile bush, loaded with brightred chile pequins, the small, slightly beaked pepper of the Chihuahuan Desert. I changed clothes, but instead of donning my baseball cap, I used it as a basket for collecting about half a cup of chiles to spice up the catfish. While I was picking more peppers I spotted another shrub on the slope above the river—a spindly, leggy bush of desert oregano, with tiny but fragrant leaves. I bruised one of them between my thumb and index finger, and it exuded the aroma of thyme. I gathered its leaves for several more minutes, tossing them into my cap atop the wild chiles, then headed back into camp. After decapitating, gutting, and filleting the Chihuahua cats, I asked Sammy if he had any cornmeal. He put some in a mixing bowl for me, and I cut the catfish filets into strips and tossed them into the bowl. Then I crushed all the dried chile pequins over the bowl, crumbled up all the oregano leaves by rubbing them between my hands, and combined these two spices with the cornmeal. I dusted each strip of catfish with the mixture and got a skillet sizzling with just a slight drizzle of oil. I then pan-seared each of the strips into a crispy nugget. After flipping them all for the last time with a wooden spatula, I melted a thin slice of queso asadero on their top side, pulled them out of the skillet, and piled them high on a platter that Marcos had offered me. We sat there on the sandy shoreline of the Rio Grande, sipping from a bottle of bootleg sotol and nibbling on blackened catfish nuggets. The sotol burnt our lips, then the food filled our mouths with desert fragrances. The Chihuahua catfish had a brief flash of chile pequin hellfire seared into it, but then the aromatic oils of the oregano and the crunchiness of the cornmeal took over the dance upon our palates. As I swallowed the last of the catfish, I was overwhelmed by the sense of pleasure rising within me. “Seek no further!” I cried out, my grito echoing off the limestone walls of Boquillas Canyon. “Heaven on earth is here, mis hijitos. I shall seek no other!” It was the first truly local feast of my entire life. The cheese had come from the “bi-national” livestock five miles upstream from us. The fish had come from the river itself, only several hundred yards upstream. The chiles and oregano had come from the canyon slopes less than fifty yards above the

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beach. I had somehow garnered enough good fortune that day to conjure up my first-ever all-local recipe: Catfish Seek-No-Further. Of course, I could not undo the absurdity of floating down a river at a hundred dollars a day through a place where the few remaining residents would make only three dollars an hour for most of their lives. My catching a couple of fish did not make the loads of store-bought groceries in the eight coolers suddenly disappear. I had been floating down the River of Inequity, and all of its blatant juxtapositions were still immediately before me. But that catfish, queso asadero, chile, and oregano gave me a way to be nourished by both sides of the river, and by the life of the river itself. I would no longer privilege one side over the other, nor let myself be fed by something utterly remote from where I actually stood. The next day, as we floated out of Big Bend National Park and arrived at our “take-out” location, one kind of journey came to a close, but another one had started. My imagination and my palate had been sown with the seeds of a Seek-No-Further sensibility that would soon germinate in the desert soil of the Southwest borderlands, where wild chiles and oreganos still grew whether we noticed them or not. But I had noticed them, and I decided to put my own roots into the same soil.

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CHAPTER FOUR

A Flour Blooms Esperanza and the Magical Mesquite Tortillas

How does the taste of a place get into the food we eat? Whenever I try to answer that question, or whenever I take a bite out of one of the golden-colored tortillas I keep in our kitchen, I close my eyes and search for the image of Esperanza’s hands that is engraved into my brain cells. Her soft but powerful palms are shaping another dough ball into a patty, and shaping that patty into a circular disk. Her nimble fingers, dusted with mesquite flour, are stretching the edges of that disk, spinning it around in her hands until it is ready to whirl onto the comal to be baked and tinted golden by the grilling. Her fingertips deftly lift the lip of the tortilla from the red-hot comal just enough so that her fingers can snatch it away from being burnt by the fire and fling it atop a stack of other such disks that are cooling down on a white cotton towel not far from the comal. Laminas were what some zoot-suited pachucos used to call the tortillas made by their mothers, sisters, and sweethearts in Tucson and East L.A. in the forties. Long-playing records, they called them. Records of their mothers’ skill, their sisters’ and girlfriends’ apprenticeships with the masters. The makers of the master disks. “Spin me another disk, Ese. . . . Play me another tune on that lamina, Tina. . . . And fill it up with frijoles. . . . Music to my ears, Ese, music to my ears . . .”

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I first met Esperanza on a street corner in La Abra, the valley to the west of Tucson where street corners hardly exist, for the roads are mostly of dirt, wide terracerías with lots of potholes. But there she was, taking turns with her father, selling her mother’s wares—delicious Sonoran-style wheat tortillas—by the dozen. At first it was just to help her folks out, for she had a job in town that paid her well and taught her skills. She was in her mid-thirties, I guessed, and she was determined, bright, vivacious, and confident speaking both Spanish and English. In those days, whenever I wasn’t gardening, foraging, or quail hunting, I was out on the prowl, trying to figure out what my neighbors grew that they would sell or trade in ways that fell outside the formal food economy. I envisioned Javier and his daughter, Esperanza, as the kind of neighbors with whom you can banter and barter. They had told me about Esperanza’s mother, about how the family was originally from Sonora, and how they lived out off Sandario Road where Camino Lucido breaks down into a dozen driveways that all flow like tributaries to a desert river whenever las equipatas rain down in the winter. And they told me that it was hard being out on a street corner in the summer, hawking tortillas, when folks drove by without even cracking open a window in their air-conditioned SUVs, and the tortillas instead of dollars went back home to Camino Lucido in the evening. And then one evening, shortly after returning from the coast of Sonora with a sack of local mesquite flour, I saw Esperanza and asked if she or her mother would mind making me some mesquite flour tortillas instead of ones from wheat. “From the péchita around here?” she asked uncomfortably, as if I were suggesting that she go out and forage mesquite pods each day on top of everything else she was trying to do. “No, no. Not exactly. That’s not what I’m proposing. What I mean is this: I’ll give you some mesquite flour each time we meet. Then the next time I see you, I mean, when you’re ready, you give me back some mesquite tortillas. You don’t need to pay for the mesquite flour really. I’ll just pay you the same per dozen as if I’m buying your typical tortillas.” “Well,” she said hesitantly, “we’ll give it a try, but I really can’t promise you anything. It may take a while to figure out how to make a mesquite tortilla. I don’t know if they can be as soft and as pliable as my mother’s other tortillas. But if she won’t try it, I will, I guess . . .”

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I gave Esperanza a five-pound bag of mesquite flour and my telephone number, and thought for a moment that it might be the last I ever saw or heard of her. What a silly thing to ask of someone, I thought to myself. Her family makes some of the best wheat-flour tortillas in the world; why would they want to change to making them with a kind of flour that hardly anyone in Tucson has even tasted? I worried that I’d been far too presumptuous, and at worst, may have insulted her with my commission. We both left the street corner going in different directions, and Esperanza’s car sailed off through the waves of dust that washed across La Abra valley during the dry season. A week or so later, I received a call, and at first couldn’t figure out who it was on the line. “Gary, I have them ready for you to try. I think they’re delicious. Pues. Well, you come and see for yourself . . .” “See what?” I asked, just as I realized that it was Esperanza’s voice coming to me over the phone. “The tortillas! I’ve made some pretty good mesquite tortillas!” I drove my pickup truck, Old Paint, as fast as I could down to Ajo Way, our street corner rendezvous. Esperanza was already there, her hair glowing in the late-afternoon sunlight, her face beaming. She opened up a white cotton towel and there inside were some gorgeous golden tortillas, still warm to the touch. She had finished the batch within the previous hour, and had called me as soon as they were done. “Well, go ahead and try one. . . . They’re all for you.” I accepted a tortilla from her hands—it was the first time that I had looked at her lovely hands—and took a bite. Its flavor was unlike that of any tortilla I’d ever eaten. A warm, rich, cinnamon fragrance rose from it, and its texture was nearly as fine as that of her mother’s flour tortillas. “They’re delicious!” I exclaimed, as if I had tasted something entirely new that had just landed on the planet. An edible flying saucer . . . a magical tortilla on tour . . . “I know, I know,” she laughed. “I’ve never had tortillas before with such a sweet flavor either.” “How long did it take you to perfect them?” I asked. Esperanza rolled her eyes at me, making a face in mock horror, and giggling.

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“Oh, you don’t even want to know. They first came out brittle, and then like cardboard, so I kept on switching the mixture of flours, and then the kinds of oil ’til I got it right. . . . I mean, I think I got it right. I bet I have some more experimenting to do. . . . What do you think?” “I think I need to pay you something for all your time and bring you some more mesquite flour.” I didn’t tell her, but I felt like framing the first one in the pile and making it look like the gold records all the rock ’n’ roll stars used to get for their million sellers. But the very next morning, having shared the others with friends who were equally impressed, I ate it instead. I bought Esperanza’s tortillas off and on for nine months more before I had to move away from the neighborhood we shared. Over that time, her tortillas somehow became even better, but so did her business skills. When I told her that mesquite was one of the healthiest foods that folks suffering from diabetes could eat, she worked up her nerve and took a batch to the health food store closest to La Abra valley. The proprietors tasted one and immediately agreed to stock them in the store. Whenever we rendezvoused, she asked me questions about the unique features of mesquite, about where the best farmers markets might be located, and about how to describe the tortillas to the uninitiated. After the 9/11 disaster sent the economy into a tailspin, Esperanza lost her day job at an emergency lighting company. Her father, Javier, encouraged her not to look for another job but to go it on her own, to show the world she could be self-sufficient. She bit the bullet, sometimes working sixteen hours a day to stretch tortillas and expand their markets. Soon she was having success selling her mesquite tortillas at far more venues than I could even recall. About that time, I disappeared for a few years from Tucson. I stayed involved in promoting mesquite, though, working with the Seri Indian community to develop a char-grilled mesquite flour project that sent its products to other parts of Mexico, across the United States, and even to Italy. It didn’t start with that scale of distribution in mind. At the beginning, there were just two dozen hungry Seri families waiting for us at our cabin in Desemboque, on the Sea of Cortés, when we awakened each June morning. They wanted rides out across the desert to harvest some mesquite, to grind its pods into flour, to eat some of it and exchange the rest for cash. We would ride Old Paint out to sandy washes and look for the biggest mesquite trees

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we could find. There, we would harvest pods beneath feathery canopies of leaves supported by thick, dark-barked trunks. Over centuries, the roots of these ancient mesquites had drilled down hundreds of feet into the ground, bringing up a host of subterranean nutrients and flavors for us to share. As we harvested their sweet and flavorful pods, we realized that mesquites fed, sheltered, and protected others as well. These trees served as nurse plants—nodrizas or madrinas—protecting dozens of kinds of cacti and shrubs beneath their canopies. We saw trees with blankets of wildflowers blooming beneath their skirts. Trees where white-winged doves, thrashers, and cactus wrens huddled together, where tree lizards climbed the trunks to hide beneath the bark from the noonday sun. Trees where rattlesnakes and desert tortoises dug in the moist sand below the trunk to survive the heat of the day. Trees around which pack rats built their nests and filled their storage cavities with pods to eat during the drier winter season. Trees that nourished and sustained us all in a sometimes inhospitable world. When it got too damned hot for even the hardiest of the Seri to pick more pods, we would drive back to the fishing village, swim in the ocean, then linger in the shade of a few old salt cedar trees. Once rested, we would sort the pods, toast them in a chile roaster, grind them in a hammer mill, and sift the flour through screens and colanders until it was free of all its debris. We’d weigh the flour in plastic bags, slap on a label, pay the harvesters, and then send batches off to places like the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. At the same time, we’d encourage the Seri families to sequester the rest of the flour for their own family use during the coming seasons. My wife, Laurie, and I would take ten pounds or so home to last us for the year, but I soon conceded that what we did with it never tasted as good as Esperanza’s tortillas. I couldn’t figure it out.Was the added flavor in the terroir of the mesquite she now used, the mix of flours and oils, or her hands? Those hands. Hands that made little circular miracles out of a food as old as any in the desert. One night about then, an ancient tree came to me in a dream, a vision, a hallucination—whatever you choose to call it. The tree was talking to me. It had lips on its trunk that moved just as surely as yours or mine move. “Look down and see that I am still rooted,” the tree said. I could see down, down, below the ground. I could see how the tree was anchored firmly in the earth, unwilling to give up its space to clearings,

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homes, or fields. Other trees, I saw, had already fled, tired of the constant invasion of their lands. But this tree had held its ground.When I looked deeper, what held it in the ground was not roots as I have seen them elsewhere, but hands spreading their fingers into the earth. A woman’s hands reaching down into the dough of the world. Esperanza’s hands? After I had come out of the dream, I realized that the magic in the tortillas had something to do with being firmly rooted in this earth. Then one Sunday I was back in Tucson with a dozen Seri women who wanted to sell their baskets, mesquite flour, and wild oregano at the local farmers market at Saint Philip’s Plaza. I had heard that Esperanza sometimes appeared there but often sold out of all her products within an hour and drove back home to be with her ailing father. I looked for her among the vendors, asking if they knew where she might be, but she was nowhere to be seen. I finally gave up trying to find her. I had begun to help the Seri women break down their tables when someone came up and hugged me just as I stood up with a basket of mesquite flour in my hands. I turned to look. “Gary! It’s Esperanza! It’s working! I’m making a living off mesquite tortillas! I’m up to three hundred dozen a week!” I listened on, amazed. Her business had grown to include two other farmers markets, several health food stores, a diabetes clinic, special orders from local customers, and even shipping some to diabetics out of state! “I myself can’t believe it. All the demand. People here really want mesquite tortillas!” She hugged me again. On my back and arms, I felt those hands. The ones that not only make magical tortillas but keep mesquite trees in their place, so that they can reach hundreds of feet down into the ground and bring back up to us flavors that we never before imagined.

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CHAPTER FIVE

From the Beeves’ Lips to Paul ’s Fears Grass-Fed Flavor

If you can taste the desert in its herbs, can you taste it in its meat? My old friend Paul and I are wandering around in the most northwestern stretch of the Chihuahuan Desert, trying to find that out. It’s a scorchinghot summer day, but rather than staying in the shade, we’re out in the open chasing cattle. We’re not chasing them on horseback for a roundup—we’re on foot, and sometimes down on our knees or bellies, trying to see just what these cows have been nibbling. Gingerly, we also check out what seeds and stems show up in their poop. Over the years that I worked as a desert ecologist, I recorded which century plants both bats and hummingbirds visit for nectar, which barrel cacti bighorn sheep have butted open with their horns to release their moisture, and which kind of ant mounds horny toads visit for crunchy snacks, but I’d never much paid attention to what my bovine neighbors eat. Now it’s time. Given that Paul and I have each eaten beef nearly every month of our lives since we were weaned, we figured it was about time that we found out what our burgers, birrias, chicken-fried steaks, carnes asadas, and Tampiqueños have been made of. If we are to continue eating beef, we might as well understand what our beeves have eaten. It’s just after dawn, and we’ve driven out to Dennis and Deb Moroney’s 47 Ranch on the edge of Sulphur Springs Valley, near McNeal, Arizona. The

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mountains of Mexico are on the southern horizon, and the Chiricahuas— on the border with New Mexico—rise high on our eastern horizon. While we’re sharing some coffee and tea with Deb—who always looks like she gets more sun than any other medical doctor in all of Arizona—Dennis drives up for a shake and howdy. He’s wearing a big straw cowboy hat and his long gray beard makes him look like a Mennonite farmer from Chihuahua. He jokes with the three of us and then leads Paul and me over to where he has two breeds of cattle grazing in the same pasture. The pasture is right off of Davis Road, a rural highway, near its intersection with a rutted dirt road. Paul ponders the name of the dirt road marked on a sign above us— Stampede Way—and wonders out loud when the last stampede happened here. Dennis detects some ambivalence from Paul, so he tries to assure him that both kinds of cattle he raises are rather docile and not prone to stampeding. Paul wonders aloud how the heck the Spanish took such cattle on a ship across the ocean if they were prone to stampeding. To keep Paul’s mind off the word stampede, Dennis offers him a few tips on how to distinguish his new herd of Criollo Corriente cattle from Chinipas, Chihuahua, from the “Arizona native” herd of mixed ancestry that he’s been line-breeding and selecting for years. (In essence, the Arizona natives are mestizos, or regionally adapted mutts.) After the brief lesson in breed identification is done, Dennis drives away—off to see whether his charco stock tanks have filled up with runoff since last week’s rains—and leaves us in the dust. Paul looks again at the two dozen beeves rapidly moving past the road sign at Stampede Way, then looks back at me. He sighs. “These Corrientes are moving too fast for me to draw. They are not like the cows I knew back in Minnesota, which just stood there while I set up an easel to paint their portraits.” We fall silent again, being left to our own devices. For Paul, that means drawing on a sketchpad and holding his miniature digital camera out in front of him, aiming it in the direction of the closest cows without intruding on their space. For me, it means sneaking up as close as I can to one cow or calf at a time and recording the forage plants they browse and the seeds that are visible in the cow pies they plop down on the ground, as well as any peculiar behavior. To tell you the truth, our behavior was probably more peculiar than theirs was.

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We simply follow the Corrientes wherever they go, watching how and what they eat. We move in right behind the Chinipas Corrientes—a category of cattle that I will explain a bit later—but we also make note of what’s happening with the Arizona natives, some of whom are standing thirty yards away, watching our every move. And we watch them back. Forget the genetic differences between the two herds for a moment; we just want to discern whether their forage preferences and feeding behaviors are any different from one another. There appear to be definite differences. While the other cattle stand still and gaze more than graze, the Corrientes tend to keep on moving, especially whenever Paul or I gets a bit too close to their rump roasts. At first it seems that they’re just plain wary of us, as if they haven’t signed the Bovine Subjects Research Review form, so they are not going to agree to be interviewed no matter how much we plead with them. And yet, as we spend more time with them, they make it clear that they simply like moving along as they forage. These are beeves on the hoof. One particular short-horned, brown-hided cow takes a step or two forward to munch on a grass or legume clump in front of her feet, then she two-steps ahead to graze or browse again. Hers is a sort of eat ‘n’ run, nibbleas-you-ramble nomadic way of life that I can well appreciate, given my Arab roots. As the sun continues to rise toward high noon, and the heat rises with it, the other cattle stop moving much at all and perch themselves beneath the shade of the only large mesquite tree within sight. Nevertheless, the Corrientes continue to amble, moving back and forth over a three-quarter-mile stretch of desert grasslands between Stampede Way and the closest stock tank whenever they feel the urge to drink. Learning what they are nibbling on is far harder to discern than I expected it would be. I had thought it would be easier to track the ground foraging of an eight-hundred-pound Bos bos than it had been for me to follow the trapline pollinations of a three-and-a-half-gram Rufous hummingbird, Selasphorous rufus. The cows simply open their mouths close to the ground surface, pull up a tuft of grama grass or a cluster of goosefoot leaves, and then quickly move on. If I don’t run up behind a particular cow quick enough to find the very place where fresh teeth marks are visible on the basal stems of the grass or herb, I find it hard to tell which of eight to ten species in the square yard around her has just been eaten.

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Nevertheless, with some practice, my list of Corriente-foraged plants begins to grow: blue grama grass, three-awn grama grass, soapweed yucca, six weeks grama grass, Lehmann’s lovegrass, net-leaf goosefoot, mesquite, hog potato, as well as the young, tender shoots of alkalai sacaton, cane beardstem, and silver-leaf nightshade. Browsing on the nightshade strikes me as odd since the mature plants are loaded with toxic alkaloids, but these cows sample it in much the same way goats do—a quick nibble of the youngest shoots, followed by a “chaser” of grass or legume forage. What strikes me most is how the Corriente cows and calves are browsing a broad diversity of herbaceous plant families in addition to their grazing on grass. Although their beef will ultimately be marketed as “grass-fed,” that description reflects a cow’s time spent consuming many kinds of wild native vegetation, and not grass alone. In fact, most of the 340-some volatile chemical compounds that give beef its distinctive flavors come from the many plant families that cattle eat in addition to the grass family, with its grama grasses, crested wheats, ryegrasses, and oats. The “grassy taste” that consumers notice in grass-fed beef is actually from the legumes such as clovers and vetches that have made their way into the bovine diet. A bite of steak might remind a seasoned beef eater of the particular fragrance of a freshly mown pasture, but it was the legume in that pasture and not the grass that offered up those particular aromas. Years ago, my friend Conrad Bahre and his colleague Robert Murphey undertook a foraging study of Corrientes in northern Mexico that was far more scientific than what Paul and I are attempting. They found that Corrientes grazed less on grass and browsed more on acacias and prickly pears than did a Northern European cattle breed and an African cattle breed put in the same Sonoran pasture with them. Paul and I had initially hoped to collect comparable data on Dennis and Deb’s breeding line of Arizona native cattle, but other than noticing some obvious grazing on gramas and browsing on mesquite, we simply watch them watching us from the shade where they also watch the Corrientes saunter away from us. Because the Moroneys have long selected and adapted all of their other cattle to desert conditions, their Arizona native stock can be just as hardy and nearly as good at foraging a broad range of native plants as the Corrientes are. Behaviorally, however, the Corrientes appear to be a far more restless lot, as they have been shown to move as much as eight miles a day to gather in

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a good mix of grass, browse, and water. That’s why Paul and I spend so much time chasing the Corrientes as they ramble around, looking for the lush spots in Dennis’s pasture. After Paul departs for his home at the end of the day, I realize that I have been chasing Corriente cattle around for several years, not merely through a single pasture but across the entire face of this earth. I have been to Morocco to see the Brown Atlas breed that was the ancient precursor of most cattle that developed in southwestern Europe. I’ve wandered the ports of Portugal and Spain where the blond-brown Galician and Minhota breeds were once found before being shipped off to the Canary Islands, from whence they became the source of most cattle sent to the New World. I’ve sent a couple of my students out to trace the trade routes through the Canary Islands themselves, where Corriente cousins known as Criolla de la Tierra or Raza Canaria cows still inhabit the Gran Canaria, as well as Tenerife, Fuerteventura, and Lanzarote. The ports of the Canaries, rather than Cádiz, the southern harbor on the Iberian Peninsula, were the prime loading points for the cattle that Cristobal Colón brought with him to Santo Domingo on his second voyage in 1493. The first livestock that ever reached the American mainland arrived in Veracruz with Cortés in 1519. It appears that the first “Criolla” cattle from the Canaries to reach North America and establish a breeding population came two years later, when Gregorio Villalobos dropped them on the banks of the Río Panuco near present-day Tampico. It seems that the first true breeding herd of Criollos was not firmly established in the present-day territory of the United States until 1690. And it was derivative of an older herd in Mexico that had been grazing south of the Rio Grande, rather than coming directly from New Mexico or Louisiana. The survivors from that hardy herd likely became the precursors of the nowfamous Texas Longhorns, but they occasionally obtained additional “blood” or genes from the Corrientes of Chihuahua. By the time I had gotten that far along in chasing Corrientes, I had to begin to distinguish the Spanish-introduced Criollos of the Canaries from their American-born offspring, which have taken on several other names. All of the Criollo-derived breeds in the Americas descended from animals that were bony, small-to-medium-horned, flat-ribbed, narrow-rumped, and multicolored, with brown-blonds, brindles, and ruddy reds becoming

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their predominant colors. If given good browse and grass, the cows could reach eight hundred to maybe a thousand pounds, and the taller, stouter bulls could weigh twelve hundred pounds.They were rangy, speedy, and with good stamina, apt to travel long distances to find water. And as my friend Ed Frederickson has observed, “They are muscled like the bovine equivalents of marathon runners.” Some of the first Criollos to reach into the western borderlands came to San Bruno, near present-day Loreto, Baja California, in 1683; they evolved into the Chinampo or Frijolillo cattle, which I first observed with a legendary veterinarian, Aurelio Martinez Balboa, at San Xavier, the oasis in Baja California Sur, in 1982. They are incredibly hardy but small, with mature cows weighing in at seven hundred fifty pounds and bulls at nine hundred pounds. They have a lower body temperature and calmer metabolic rate than most cattle breeds living in deserts. As their Frijolillo nickname suggests, some are mottled like a little pinto bean, with spots of blond or cream running every which way across their backs. Oral history has it that when faced with severe drought, Chinampos can survive on brackish water. That same lineage reached Chihuahua perhaps as early as 1640 and Sonora by 1690. It spawned the Corrientes of the Sierra Madre that have trickled into Arizona and New Mexico now for three centuries. Although slender like the Chinampos, they have longer legs and can easily put on ten to twenty percent more weight than their Baja counterparts. During rainy years that produce abundant forage in the Sierra Madre, they gain as much as two and a half pounds a day. Many of the Corrientes we currently see in the United States have been selected for longer horns to spice up their use in bulldogging and team roping at rodeos. Some cattlemen fear that selection for recreational use has diminished these Corrientes’ capacity to be good meat animals. However, steady weight-gaining, medium-horned Corrientes like those I’ve watched on the 47 Ranch still come out of the Chinipas region on the Sonora-Chihuahua border. In the early 1980s, I chased Corrientes by mule through the thorn-scrub canyons of that region as well, surprised by their capacity to climb nearly vertical cliffs in the deeper barrancas (ravines). Late one night at the Byerly homestead near Rancho El Limón on the Continental Divide, I briefly met a bilingual cattle buyer who had gone up there to purchase Corrientes for

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rodeos, and he was paying Guarijio Indians for them in gold coins! More recently, I found that much of what I needed to learn about Corrientes and the taste of their beef could come from one of my neighbors—that same cattle buyer, now a quarter century older—-who lives less than four miles from me down Harshaw Creek on the margins of Patagonia, Arizona. His full name is Joseph Paul Summers Brown, and he was born in the border town of Nogales in 1930. He grew up and roamed all over the Southwest, but was studying journalism at Notre Dame University in northern Indiana about the time I was born nearby in 1952. It took me several more decades to run into this J. P. S. Brown again, but once we hit it off, we’ve been known to share stories, jokes, beans, or drinks whenever an excuse comes along. Fortunately for me, my neighbor “Joe” may know more about Corrientes than any other man alive. “Those Corriente cattle from Mexico fed the whole doggoned world during and immediately after World War II. I’m telling you, every C ration and every relief package had their beef in it. That beef benefited not just our troops, if you understand me, but people all over the world who survived on relief during the reconstruction.” Joe ought to have known, because his grandfather and stepfather were personally responsible for buying most of those cattle from Mexican and Indian ranchers and for getting them up to the border. The way he reckons it, his family has been involved with Corrientes for five generations, going back to the 1850s. His stepfather, Vivian Brown, probably traded more Corrientes than any man has done before or since. The last year that Joe was in the Marines, Vivian brought more than 100,000 head across the border into Arizona, but still needed some help in getting others across by the end of the year. He tracked down his stepson while Joe was taking his last furlough before leaving the service, and coaxed him into becoming a cattle buyer. As soon as Joe was honorably discharged, he headed to the sierras of Mexico in search of Corrientes. The cattle he found would end up in feedlots in Southern California, where they would eat beet tops or other crop residues before they were slaughtered and their meat processed and canned. Those cans were sent to relief efforts in dozens of countries during and after the war: France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Egypt, Australia, the Philippines, Japan, and Korea, to name just a few. My own father probably ate canned Corriente beef while stationed

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in Austria just after the war. He continued to buy canned meat every now and then until the day he died, putting a savory gravy of chipped beef on white bread, just as he had done while still a GI, and laughingly serving it to me as “Shit on a Shingle.” Whenever Joe Brown is reminded that canned Corriente beef or lean Corriente steaks did not fare well in public opinion compared to the highly marbled beef of other breeds, he scoffs at the presumption that the beef of a Corriente is inevitably inferior to that of an Angus or a Hereford. “If you feed a Corriente right—on different kinds of forage—they’ll yield forty percent of their weight in meat and deliver cuts as fine as any that you can take from other breeds. Sure, they’ll have less of that corn-fed marbling, but the flavor will be a whole lot better. Even when the Mexican stockmen had to cull kills in Sonora during the drought years and put their purple meat out onto the market, it sure had flavor even when it didn’t have much fat. The Corrientes have something more valuable than a simple formula for putting on fat: Even in the toughest years, they taste far better than any other cattle. What’s great about Corrientes is that if they’re out with Herefords in a drought year, they’ll have higher survivability. But if there have been good rains and plenty of browse, they’ll fatten up nicely. There’s times you can’t tell much difference between the meat of the two breeds.” While Joe Brown offered his view as a minority voice in the American cattle industry for much of the past fifty years, the latest research supports his contrarian opinion. Some of that new research comes from Ed Frederickson, a tall, lanky, congenial ranch scientist based at the Jornada del Muerto Experimental Range in southern New Mexico. Over the last fifteen years, he has spent hundreds of days in the field observing Criollo cattle in Chihuahua under various range conditions. He gives the Criollo-derived Corrientes one leg up on other breeds for several reasons: “If range conditions are good, there really won’t be many differences in how various breeds feed in the same pasture. But there will be differences if they are challenged by drought or other stresses. What then happens is that Corrientes will travel twice as far to water, and to explore more types of habitat. They’re more selective in what they eat because they will seek out a greater variety of forage choices than a breed that doesn’t move around as much.” Ed then returns to his analogy between Corrientes and marathon runners. “There are other reasons you get differences in their meat composition,

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though. All of the Spanish cattle breeds are structured more like human athletes than the Northern European cattle breeds are. They have more red muscle fiber than white muscle fiber because of all the travel they do. Their meat will be higher in nutrients like iron and omega-3 fatty acids because that’s what’s laid down with the red muscle fiber. And behaviorally, Criollo cattle take less of a bite of each tuft of grass or branch or browse, but take more bites of different plants.” “So does that more diverse diet confer more flavor in the beef?” I ask Ed. “Well, that may be part of the story, but it’s a bit more complex than that,” he replies, smiling. “You see, secondary chemical compounds are the key link between soil composition, habitat disturbance, and meat flavor. Keep in mind that even lush grass has secondary compounds, but droughtstressed shrubs have a lot more. The Criollo’s capacity to be selective about what it eats is based on its energy demand at the time. If you have a rapidly growing steer, that steer will both eat and retain more secondary compounds as it goes about meeting its energy demands. But with Criollos, they may be exposed to less of any single compound—and therefore retain less of it in their meat—because of the way they sample so many kinds of vegetation. “But even that does not explain the entire picture. The trouble in understanding such a complex system is this:When you get a secondary compound through the ruminant, whether it gets set down in the meat depends on whether it is a fat-soluble or a water-soluble compound. Water-soluble compounds, for the most part, will get washed out of the system.” “Do you mean that their flavors are less likely to be embedded in the fats ingrained within the meat itself?” I ask, knowing that the flavor doesn’t necessarily reside in the marbling, or in the trim fat edging the cut of steak. Beef flavor, it turns out, emerges from the intercellular fat of the meat when it is roasted or grilled. “Exactly,” Ed says with a nod. Judging from his tone, I guess that I’ve finally passed my crash course on the chemical ecology of beefsteaks. And if my guess is wrong and I haven’t actually passed, my remedial class has been dismissed because Ed can’t teach me all the nuances of how beef gets its flavor in just one sitting. Ed’s long-term goal is to find a breed of livestock that could help him heal damage to the range that had happened with overstocking between 1880 and 1920: “I’d read of Spanish cattle that could rustle up grub better than any

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other cows. In a world of increasing energy costs and human consumption of grains, any animal that can rustle up its own grub might be just what the industry needs to help the land recover.” Betty Fussell, who may still be America’s finest literary food historian, visited Ed with me in 2007. She came back convinced that Criollo cattle could restore some real flavor to our diet. Nearly as tall and certainly as bright and as engaging as Ed, Betty later wrote about Corrientes and her vision for the future of flavorful meat in her book Raising Steaks. In that classic, Betty deftly balances ranchers’ traditional knowledge with that gleaned from scientists such as Ed. She learned from them how to match the influences of a particular environment with the specific features of each breed: “What affects beef flavor most . . . is what’s in the soil and how it got there. Old ranchers know that we are what the cow eats and the cow is what the grass eats.” That’s why something as seemingly inconsequential as the reemergence of Corrientes and dozens of other minor breeds may deeply matter to the future of flavor, both in the steak house and on the backyard grill. Again, in Betty’s words: “Perhaps as more and more beef is raised artisanally . . . we’ll learn to think of a breed of cattle as a meat varietal, which is only the beginning of the long and arduous process of turning cattle into meat. Just as we value the subtle shades of difference in a fine wine because each bottle speaks of a local place, so, perhaps, we’ll learn to taste and value steak the same way. We’ll speak of a flight of rib eyes, each of them grass-fed from the same breed but from a different terroir, or each from a different breed and a similar terroir. Just as jug wine has its place, so does commodity beef, but there’s no point in comparing an industrial product to an artisanal one [if we are to be] creating vintage beef.” Vintage beef. I love the term, for it connects the breed not only with the grass and the browse and the soil, but with history itself. Later, while birria shredded from Dennis and Deb’s Corrientes is braised in an old Dutch oven above some aromatic mesquite coals on my backyard grill, I think of the reddish, iron-rich soil on the 47 Ranch, wondering how it has enriched this meat. Those flavors will mingle with call notes of limestone and protein-laden grama grass, a light touch of snakeweed bitterness, and a steady flow of cane beardstem sweetness, not to mention the epic melody of Criollo cattle moving from Morocco to Iberia to the Canaries, from Santo Domingo and the Rio Panuco to San Bruno and Chinipas.

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I turn to Paul, who is leaning over the grill, imbibing the smoke and photographing the iron pot full of birria with an intense curiosity that I’ve never seen in him around a barbecue before. It seems that he’s gotten over his wariness of being stampeded. Instead, he appears to be deeply intrigued. And so I ask him, as I hand him a bottle of Lone Star beer, “It’s not just a bloody red mess of protein anymore, is it?” “No, it’s not,” he says. “But that’s what we would have looked like had we been stampeded.” “Tenderized?” “Well, sort of.”

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CHAPTER SIX

Pan on a Mission Capirotada Comes to Baja California

It is approximately 8,600 miles from Oman on the Arabian Peninsula to Mulegé on the Baja California peninsula of Mexico. That is but one of many indicators that most folks would place Mulegé about as far away from direct Arab influences as they could imagine. And yet, as seven of us passed through Mulegé a few hours after sunset—and just an hour after a brilliant comet lit up the skies to the west of us—I could not keep my thoughts from straying back to the Arabian Peninsula. Was there some way, I wondered, to trace some of the tastes of desert foods found here in the most remote reaches of Mexico to those found in the quintessential desert lands that were inhabited by my Arab ancestors? While not presuming that these flavors will come from exactly the same foods, are there not echoes of Arabian deserta found on the tables of Californios here on this bone-dry peninsula? And how different is the desert terroir of Arabia from that of Baja California anyway? If I had spoken those questions aloud, my companions possibly would have declared me to be crazy (again), for their own thoughts were not even remotely oriented toward the Orient at that moment. The group’s conversation had turned from the comet that astonished us over the western skies near Santa Rosalia to the mules that we were to ride for the next seven days into the barrancas of the Sierra San Francisco. I was probably the only one

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thinking about riding camels, as if I were a spice merchant or one of the Magi meandering across the desert in pursuit of some elusive star. When we came in from the coastal highway to purchase a few provisions in the sleepy oasis of Mulegé, I insisted that we check out a small roadside stand that offered fresh dates, date bread, and date-filled empanadas. As we got out of the van, we gazed at the full moon, framed by the feathery fronds of date palms—yes, the very same palm species cultivated in Arabia, roughly a third of the way around the planet. Date palms are said to be one of the oldest plants cultivated anywhere in this world. The wild relatives of this domesticated date palm range from India and Iran, across the Middle East and North Africa, all the way to Morocco and the Canary Islands. But no one knows for sure where in the deserts of the Old World the date palm was first domesticated. Now, here it was, raising its iconic silhouette in the so-called New World, shaping the entire character of another desert oasis, offering to the Californios its trunks for posts and beams, its fronds for thatch, and its fruit for food. Perhaps, I thought to myself as I paid for the date-stuffed pastries with pesos, I am not as crazy as one might think: I was hearing echoes of Arabia in the palm fronds rustling above us in the night breeze. Perhaps I was just one more peregrino—just another plant hunter or trader not unlike many of my ancestors—on a pilgrimage to taste and see what this desert might teach me about all deserts. The next morning, our group gathered at the edge of a canyon leading into the Sierra San Francisco. Two dozen mules and donkeys stood in the midst of a rancheria, yawning and bleating alongside a mountain of saddlebags, burden baskets, cacaistle (boxes made of carrizo canes and cactus ribs), knapsacks, sleeping bags, tents, pads, canteens, and coolers. Half a dozen Californio cowboys and mule skinners began to slowly match each of us up with a mule of appropriate stature and disposition. The vaqueros then loaded so many bags and boxes on the donkeys that each of them looked as though it had become an impromptu department store on the hoof. We would have to carry in nearly all our food and many gallons of water for a week of riding mules some forty miles through the northernmost volcanic range on the Baja peninsula, where barely two inches of rain falls in most years. The women of the rancheria offered us sweet, torpedo-shaped tamales stuffed with slivers of squash and potatoes, raisins, onions, chiles, and beans,

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and a few empanadas stuffed with local fruits that had been dried in the sun or made into compotes. As we ate, we observed the skill and patience displayed by the vaqueros. Most of them were descendants of a man named Buenaventura Arce, who had lived in the nearby oasis of San Ignacio between the 1830s and the 1870s. He had rekindled the settlement of the Sierra San Francisco during that time, and it was now populated with a scattering of his descendants. They formed a somewhat inbred clan, for a number of individuals carried both paternal and maternal last names of Arce. Let me discreetly suggest that Buenaventura and his wife must have had a fecund relationship, for they spawned at least half a dozen boys who were later sent off to homestead in the canyons of this sierra. Perhaps they left San Ignacio because their older brothers as well as their sisters were adding enough to the population that little breathing room remained at the oasis. And so in the late nineteenth century, la gran familia Arce set up satellite ranches in the sierras, raising more goats than cows, but making cheese from the milk of both. They tanned enough hides with the bark from the local palo blanco tree that their surplus saddles and bags and chaps could be sold back at trading posts and talabarterías in San Ignacio. They spent hours in the heat, out wandering the canyons and mesas searching for forage for their stock. In their spare time, they dug out springs, canals, and small water tanks to water orchards of fruit and nuts in the bottoms of canyons. I was eager to see just what varieties of fruits, nuts, berries, and seed crops were still being grown, hoping that I could perhaps determine where they had originated from what they tasted like. Although we could not always be sure where the seeds and trees came from, we knew that the Arce lineage itself could be traced back to Villarcayo in the province of Burgos, Spain. Burgos lies near the historic heartland of the Basques. The name Arce, in fact, was from an ancient Basque term meaning pedregal, making the Arces the People of the Stony Ground. And that they were, in their New World home as well, where steep canyon walls ascended to mesa tops strewn with miles of volcanic cobbles. But it seems that other early Californios who settled as the Arces’ neighbors in San Ignacio and the Sierra San Francisco must have emigrated from southern Iberia during the Spanish Inquisition, for Andalusian influences abound among their descendants. Perhaps it was one of the Zuñiga, Martinez,

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Higuera, Lomeli, Arballo, or Almador clans that brought the Mozarabic or Sephardic traditions to this distant peninsula after escaping the Inquisition. Their traditions may have included a peculiar means of using citrus that in Mexico is now found only in the southern half of the California peninsula. While a couple of the cowboys were busy breaking down camp one day, their in-law Maria Socorro Arce told us how to make this citrus-flavored delicacy, one reminiscent of Moorish Spain: “Well, you use the rinds of thick-skinned grapefruits, sour oranges, or lemons.You skin the fruits with a paring knife. Do it like you would do for a potato. Boil the rinds, but not too long. Then you ladle them out. Put them in a bowl of cold water. When they cool, that’s when you can squeeze the rinds between your hands—like this—wringing out their flavors . . . so they drip into the kettle full of the brown sugar syrup. You can keep it in that manner—as a liquid—or thicken it until it hardens and dries in the wedgeshaped molds. That’s why we call it panocha del gajo.” (The translation of the local use of this term might be something like “brown sugar shaped in clovelike wedges.”) Other Californio specialties—from the drink they call El Jeque—the Sheikh—to the bread-and-fruit pudding known as capirotada—also hint of Moorish, Sephardic Jewish, and Arabic influences. I wanted to learn these recipes as well, if time allowed. But for the moment I had to put my notebook away, thank Maria Socorro Arce for her culinary commentaries, and get up on the bay-colored mule, Vaya. We were ready to take the pack mules and donkeys up between cliff faces to the top of a windswept mesa where we might see the Pacific Ocean off in the distance—that is, if the fog had not yet rolled in—and from there, we might find what kinds of nearly forgotten fruits “echoed” through the canyons. I was eager to reach the oases hidden in those canyons, but my designated driver, Vaya the mule, had a thousand ways of telling me “not soooo fast.” She had a knack for slowly but deliberately walking across miles of desert pavement and cobblestone fields without ever twisting her ankle. But when we reached the steeper slopes of La Soledad mesa and began a sixty-degree ascent up a series of switchbacks, I sat there in awe of her surefootedness. We rounded hairpin turns on the edge of precipices without Vaya ever flinching. There was only one downward stretch where we all had to dismount to let the mules crawl over boulders, and it was along a steep-sided “saddle”

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between two ridges. It gave me a moment to look at just what makes the Vizcaino Desert so distinctive: towering cacti like cochal, cardón, pitahaya, and garambullo, some of which had fruits in the summer as fine as those in the cultivated oases below. Of course, there were smaller plants in the understory of these giants—candelilla, lomboy, amate, guareke, and mesquite— but it was the charismatic mega-flora that made the Vizcaino so remarkable. We landed that night on the mesa top of La Soledad amid a cavalry of cirios—the boojum trees—with their limbs all akimbo high in the sky above us. A chilly wind rose up and with it, the fog came in on big cat feet—more like those of a puma or mountain lion. We ate an early dinner, sang a few songs around the campfire, then peeled off to the shelter of our tents. It had become very clear why most of the Arces nestled their homes down below the canyon walls, where the fog seldom spreads and where the wind hardly ever roars. We woke up to phantoms in the mist—boojums backlit by the rising sun and silhouetted by the fog—with our tents soaking wet but no real rain to speak of. I put on a serape woven of wool from llamas—and pretended that it was camel hair, as if I were part of a Bedouin spice caravan. The mules and donkeys were packed up and their cinches pulled as tightly around their bellies as possible. We would be descending for the entire morning into the barrancas, hoping to reach the rancheria of San Gregorio. And so we went. Down, down, down. Turn another bend in the trail, and down, down, down. The day began to warm. Off came serapes and ponchos. Off came sweaters. Off came long-sleeved sweatshirts. We finally reached the canyon bottom, where palms and castor beans and even feral bananas grew wild and in profusion. For an all-too-brief moment, I presumed that we would meander down the canyon bottom just as a narrow stream of water was doing, but then I looked upstream—huge boulders, downed palm trunks, and narrowing canyon walls blocked the way. After three minutes of enjoying a ride across flat land, we had to ride our mules up another ridge, until we reached the hidden oasis of San Gregorio. It would be hard to overstate how the mere sight of a date palm oasis tugs on my ancestral heartstrings. Once I saw San Gregorio from the ridge above it, I was immediately smitten. It had most of the same food plants and many of the same water management features that I had surveyed at desert oases in Oman, where my ancestors had once lived. Laurie and I dismounted, took our saddles and bags off our mules, then

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carried our bags into the shade beneath a hedge of pomegranates. I pulled a still-ripe pomegranate off one of the multi-stemmed bushes, and broke its leathery husk open to reveal the dazzle of its pale, succulent, rosy-red seeds. I placed a pile of the seeds in the palm of my hand, and sucked them into my mouth: sweet, watery, refreshing—the taste of ancient Arabia, in Baja. Pomegranates were one of at least a dozen tree and vine crops introduced to Baja California’s oases between 1699 and 1756. They were imported by Jesuit missionaries, who had departed from Spain and the Canary Islands with the intent of saving the thirsty souls stranded in the godforsaken drylands of Mexico. In case their attempts at converting the natives to Catholicism failed, which often happened, the priests made sure that their heathen neighbors would at least be converted to eating luscious fruits. At every mission that the Jesuits designed—such as the one in nearby San Ignacio first built in 1728—they planted an orchard of dates, grapes, olives, pomegranates, figs, and other fruits.These would supply fresh fruits, as well as oil, altar wine, and marmalades or compotes, to the homesick priests, many of whom had been recruited from countries along the Mediterranean. But of all the fruits reaching Baja California, the migration of the pomegranate is perhaps the most memorable. Wild pomegranates grow throughout Central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and other parts of the Middle East, but the fruits were quickly cultivated in those regions, most notably in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Their cultural diffusion becomes particularly interesting around 750 BCE, after the sacking of the Umayyad palace in Damascus by the Abbasid troops. Most of the royalty either were killed or fled to North Africa, so their gorgeous gardens of fruits, fragrances, and spices were left to die, untended. Somehow, the royal pomegranates survived without any irrigation. After the young surviving Umayyad prince Abd al-Rahman relocated in Moorish Spain with his Berber relatives in 755, he made plans to reconstruct “gardens of memory” from his childhood in Damascus in a true-to-life replica outside Cordoba. He named the palace gardens Rusafa after those of his Syrian grandfather, the caliph Hisham, and had someone smuggle fruits out of the abandoned gardens in Syria so they could be brought to Andalusia. When the first few overripe fruits arrived in a pot on board a ship at the port of Málaga, he charged his finest horticulturist, Safr abd Allah, to propagate the seedlings into saplings to root all over the new Rusafa.

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Imagine the Prince’s delight when flavors known from of his childhood spilled across his lips and over his tongue in Andalusia! Safr’s seedling tree offered thousands of cuttings for propagation in Cordoba, Málaga, and Granada, and later out to the Canary Islands and beyond. In fact, it is the granada (the Spanish word for pomegranate) that gave both grenadine and the city below the Alhambra their names. The variety became known as Safari. At the San Gregorio oasis, Francisco Arce’s huerta (orchard-garden) was barely a hundred yards long and twenty yards wide, but it harbored more than seventy-five fruit trees and vines. They included Spanish-introduced crops like pomegranates, date palms, Mission olives, Mission figs, and Mission grapes, as well as peaches, plums, and apricots. Nearly all of these varieties are from the Mediterranean and the Middle East and could have been found in Spain or the Canary Islands centuries ago under other names. Francisco had also propagated oranges, limes, lemons, and grapefruit—species that originated in Indonesia—as well as mangos, which originated in Hindustan. But his huerta also had avocados, tecomate calabash-trees, guajes (leguminous trees), and guayabas (guavas) that hailed from Central America. Bananas and castor beans now regenerated on their own in this little canyon. I was beginning to realize that the fruits in Francisco’s orchard-garden carried echoes not only of Arabia and Andalusia, but of many other reaches of the world as well. Many of these fruits (with the exception of olives, castor beans, and maybe citrus) were often combined into a single dessert that has become one of the signature dishes of holidays and religious fiestas in Baja California. It was called capirotada here, as it is in many other parts of the Spanish-speaking world. The word itself may have originally meant a “layered casserole,” but has generally come to connote any jumbled-up mixture of fruits and nuts put into a dessert, or more broadly and metaphorically, any mélange of seemingly dissimilar items that find some cohesion and complementarity. Each set of Arce descendants, for instance, may add or subtract a few ingredients to their own capirotada, so that the clan’s notion of this confection keeps on evolving. For some it is merely a mix of stale bread (toasted or baked), fresh goat cheese, and some clabbered cow’s milk, with chunks of dates, raisins, figs, prunes, cinnamon, and anise with brown sugar wedges (panocha del gajo) mixed in. Others add peanuts, almonds, bananas, dried apples, fresh plums,

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and guavas. Some put in several different cheeses; others season it with additional spices. Several of the Arce women I spoke with would roughly list four or five fruits and nuts, and then note, “Of course, you may add whatever fruit you wish. Whatever is in season at the time, or any you have dried and stored for a special occasion. It is at your discretion.” A capirotada may in fact be made from nearly all of the flavors that have accumulated in an Arce family orchard, combined with the cheeses coagulated from the milk expressed from the family’s dairy cows, goats, and sheep. Francisco Arce may have unconsciously selected the fruits and nuts to grow in his huerta on the basis of some culinary scripture—an orally transmitted formula far more indelible than any written recipe—that was passed down through one side or another of his family. In fact, the roots of capirotada go back far beyond the Arces, and well before even the missions that brought the ingredients to this country. I’ve had exquisite desserts in Alexandria, Egypt, that may be among the precursors of capirotadas. Today, they are called Om Ali in Cairene Arabic, but Berber and Bedouin cooks may have their own names and variants of this dish. In Egypt, it is made with unleavened bread or filo dough. In medieval and Moorish Spain, capirotadas were among the favorite desserts of kings and queens, and were especially popular during religious fasts for Moslems and Sephardic Jews. So when the Spanish Inquisition began, guess what food was formally banned from consumption on the Iberian Peninsula, according to a royal decree dated 1540? Capirotada, of course. And yet, after capirotada went underground (or under water) in Spain, it reappeared in mainland Mexico and even present-day Texas and New Mexico within just a few decades. By the eighteenth century, capirotada had arrived in the canyons of Baja California, thousands of miles from its point of origin. Capirotadas are sometimes made by Catholic and even Evangelical families in various parts of Mexico, but they seem to have particularly rich significance in places to which “crypto-Jews” and “crypto-Moslems” fled to escape the Inquisition. Their descendants may not necessarily be conscious of Sephardic or Mozarabic echoes in their culinary traditions, but when they ready themselves for a fiesta, they may butcher animals in a particular manner that is reminiscent of halal or kosher laws. And, in addition, they may bake pan de semita or capirotada much like their bis-bis-bis-bis-abuelas once did.

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We spent another two days in San Gregorio. One afternoon, when most of the group had set off on mules to visit pictographs, I stayed behind, wandering downstream to where Francisco’s brother Juan had tended two additional huertas, one of them nearly eighty years old. I loved the way that Juan and his sons had brought irrigation water to them from artesian springs upstream in the canyon bottom. Juan used a variety of metal piping, PVC plastic, and palm trunks hung along the canyon walls to move freshwater above the levels that muddy, turbulent floods typically reach. His various irrigation tubes curved and zigzagged across the canyon like some umbilical cord in the womb.They all coalesced at a cementlined basin at the top of his first huerta. From there, the water could be released on demand, spilling into broad acequias that dispersed it to secondary and tertiary ditches. Seeing Juan’s huerta, I was immediately taken back to a visit I made to the mother village of the Nabhan clan—the Banu Nebhani—up on a high, dry plateau called Jebel al-Akhdar within the Omani interior of the Arabian Peninsula. After a long haul in a four-wheel drive up a meandering road through the canyon, we had topped out on a dry, stony, deceptively “barren” plateau, and I wondered how anyone could survive there for even the shortest of stretches, let alone for the fourteen hundred years my ancestors had been living there. But then, after a few more miles of crossing a mesa-like expanse, we dipped down into a small village nestled against the edge of the plateau. There, below the stone houses and mosque, were dozens of terraced gardens fed by the storm runoff and artesian springs on the plateau, which was funneled into a horizontal well called a falaj. The water was stored in the tunnel-like falaj after storms, and then it was slowly released to zigzag down thousands of yards of canals that irrigated lush gardens for half a mile below us. What crops were they growing? I wondered. Even though it was blasted hot, we decided to descend the trails from the village until we reached the terrace gardens, hoping to identify the fruits of my fatherland. Oddly, the first crop I found there was prickly pear, one of American rather than Arabian origin! But looking down across the terraces, I spotted figs and dates, apricots and olives, pomegranates and peaches, which looked very much like the varieties I had seen in Baja California. Between the trees grew watermelons and taro, mints and corianders. There were Arab varieties

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of purslanes and roses, garlics and bunching onions much like those grown in northern Mexican deserts today. Of course, prickly pears were not the only garden crop of American origin that I could find growing in these Omani gardens: chile peppers and pumpkins, century plants and tomatoes also adorned the terraces. As we left Jebel al-Akhdar, I realized that nearly the same suite of crops had somehow made its way to Juan’s huerta as well, even though there had been virtually no agriculture on the Baja California peninsula until after the 1690s. Juan also had a unique set of little edible gems sprinkled like stars in the understory of his tallest trees: Mexican capulin cherries, Tabasco-like chiles, elderberries, mandarins, pummelos, and citrons. Two of his herbaceous crops in particular transported me not to Oman but to the Mediterranean, as if I were in southern Spain, Sicily, Crete, or Morocco. First there was ruda or rue, for its curative powers as a vermifuge and tranquilizer to control spasms. Then there were habas or favas, the broad beans used in soups and stews during periods when one fasts from eating meat. Walking back from Juan’s huerta at sunset, I looked up at the canyon walls all lit up with aspen-glow and realized that the total area of all the orchard-gardens in the Sierra San Francisco of Baja California was probably less than that of a botanical garden or college campus in Alta California. A plane flying over the Vizcaino Desert would likely miss seeing them altogether, or else assume that such minuscule patches were of little consequence in the larger scheme of things. And yet there were important lessons to be learned in this place: how over three hundred years people figured out how to cultivate a great diversity of food plants in a limited, rather vertical space; and how, as water supplies dry up, it’s still possible to get the great good out of each drop of water. If these orchard-gardens could thrive here at the bottom of a canyon, why couldn’t similar gardens thrive in a plaza wedged between two skyscrapers in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Juárez, or El Paso? We rode our mules out of San Gregorio, slept atop the mesa another night, crossed Mesa de la Soledad once more, and then spent three hours making the steep descent into Santa Teresa Canyon, where we would encounter the finest of the ancient rock art sites in all of the Vizcaino Desert. The art reminded us that the predecessors of the Arces were hunter-gatherers, not farmers, ranchers, or orchard keepers. Their imaginations made

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room for images of bighorn sheep, mule deer, jackrabbits, leatherback sea turtles, and manta rays, all traditional prey that physically and psychically nourished people for centuries. Of course, the rock art was meant to depict the mythic beasts and not the menus of prehistoric times; there were giant snakes, mountain lions, and coyotes represented in the pictographs as well. But they made me realize something about the Baja California diet—and perhaps that of the entire desert borderlands—which had been nagging me since Juan’s huerta stirred up memories of Oman. Of the many families I had visited in the rural areas of the border states—from Baja California clear to Texas—most of them ate a set of plant and animal foods more like what my Arab ancestors ate in the Middle East five thousand years ago than what was eaten in these American deserts during the same era, or even five hundred years ago, when Mostafa al-Azemmouri became perhaps the first Arab to sample the North American desert’s flavors. Wild game has diminished, but cattle, sheep, and goats have taken its place. Corn is still present, of course, in tamales and tortillas, but more of it is consumed as high-fructose corn syrup in drinks. Wheat, in breads, pan de semita, capirotada, and tortillas, is now far more common than corn on tables in the north of Mexico and the U.S. Southwest. Fava beans, lentils, garbanzos, and peas are just as common as beans such as pintos, azufrados, or teparies. Citrus, apricots, figs, and dates have all but replaced saguaro and prickly pear cactus fruits, capulin cherries, hackberries, and wolfberries in the rural dietary. Quelites (amaranths) and verdolagas (purslanes) are still seasonally savored as wild greens in a few spots, but cabbage, onions, cilantro, and lettuce have largely taken their place. Fewer and fewer folks drink corn-based tesguinos, tepaches, or mescal every day, but rely on beer from Old World grains and wine from grapes to get their daily buzz. And yet, folk knowledge of more ancient American foods and herbal medicines has somehow been sustained among the Californios, five hundred years after the so-called Columbian Exchange. If it gets too dry to irrigate all the trees in the huerta as regularly as needed and their yields dip, the more reliable cactus fruit are harvested from the wild. If it is too far and costly to run into town for more beer, mescal can still be made. If someone needs a good aphrodisiac and can’t afford Viagra, the local native herb called damiana is infused into the powerfully libidinous drink El Jeque (the Sheikh).

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When we left the rock art behind at Cueva de las Flechas along the pockmarked rock walls of Cacarrizo, we meandered farther down Santa Teresa Canyon until we arrived at the last orchard-gardens of Santa Teresita. It was a small ranchería—just two or three buildings to speak of—but it had a wonderful huerta full of all kinds of surprises for me: lemongrass, spearmint, rosemary, and chamomile from the Old World, as well as epazote, chaya, henequen, and tequila-like agaves from the New. But as I wandered around the waffle-garden plots placed between the rows of fruit trees, I spotted an herb that brought me back to some of my earliest childhood memories. There, reaching a couple of hand spans above the dry desert soil were the seed heads of yerbanis, what many of my Arab-speaking relatives in the Old Country call yansoon. It is the true anise of the Middle East, not the fennel in southern Europe nor the Texas tarragon or Mexican marigold of the New. I have seen it grown in Moorish Spain and in Morocco as well. Its threadlike leaflets and umbrella of drying seeds were easily identifiable, but even more so, as I walked through a patch of it and bruised some of its leaves, I recognized its fragrance immediately. It was one of the characteristic aromas that emanated from one of my Lebanese grandfathers, whom I knew only until I was six or so. Najim or Benjamin Nabhan was a sheepherder and fruit harvester before he emigrated from the Beqa Valley on what is now the Lebanon-Syria border, but he became a bootlegger during Prohibition, and then a fruit vendor and meat butcher afterward. Although most bootleggers gave up their craft after Prohibition was terminated, he continued to make bathtub-size volumes of mashed and fermented grapes mixed with anise seeds for the rest of his life. Whenever he and his brother and cousins would get homesick for the Lebanese anisette called araq—an ouzo-like distillate that they drank in their youth—they would buy a truckload of grapes, then have their sons and daughters mash them with their feet in the family’s bathtubs. They had an old copper coil brought from the Old Country that they used in a makeshift still that I remember well from my adolescence—it was a sort of touchstone for all the males in my family. My family has always been very particular about where their anise seeds come from—their araq could simply not be made with any yansoon bought on the street corner—so I doubt that my grandfather and grand-uncles ever used American anise. Instead, they continued to use wild anise imported

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from Mount Hermon (Jabal al-Shaykh) in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains on the border of Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. That, they said, was where the Banu Nebhani clan settled among the Druse when they arrived centuries before, through Syria or Jordan, from Oman. And so that is how they knew that the best anise came from the wild canyon bottoms of that mountain range. One of my second cousins who still lives in Lebanon once told me that they had tried to sow the anise seeds from Mount Hermon in the agricultural soils of the Beqa Valley, but the seeds didn’t much take to the valley soil, and the few that germinated, grew, flowered, and fruited didn’t produce seeds that tasted the same. So the family continued to negotiate with Bedouin anise-seed gatherers in the Mount Hermon area to get the real deal. Now, eight thousand miles or so from Mount Hermon, I was chewing on anise seeds, just as my grandfather Najim used to do when I was a boy. They would clear his palate, or, as he would claim: “It takes the bad taste from my mouth in the morning. Try some, habibi, you’ll like the flavor. . . . They will make your day go better.” North of Mulegé, Mexico, in a canyon bottom within the remote reaches of the Sierra San Francisco, I finally tasted with pleasure the flavor of anise that my grandfather had alerted me to some forty-five years earlier. I kept a few seeds in my cheek all morning long, as a culinary talisman that reminded me just how small but flavorful this dry world can be.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Camel Chorizo A Missing Link

Is it possible to consider tastes peculiar to the desert without taking into account the taste of the desert’s most iconic animal? You can guess which animal I am referring to, although most people don’t associate it with North American deserts. In fact, the progenitors of modern camels evolved in North America some five hundred thousand years ago. In the late Pleistocene some of them crossed the Beringian land bridge to enter Asian terrain for the first time. There, between five thousand and thirty-five hundred years ago, two kinds of camels—the Bactrian and the dromedary—were domesticated, first for their meat, their milk, their hides, and their wool, and later to serve as beasts of burden. Still, today you’d be hard-pressed to find an uncaged camel—not to mention camel meat—anywhere west of Morocco. Yet camel meat and camel milk remain common items in marketplaces in these animals’ adopted homelands in central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and North Africa. A couple of years before this writing, I myself saw camel meat being marketed in the most peculiar way. Walking down the sinuous streets in the ancient souk of Fez, Morocco, I spied the head of a camel poking out of the front of a butcher shop. I simply assumed that the rest of the beast was hidden from view, and in a way, it was—in refrigerated bins containing freshly butchered meat for kabobs. The

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untouched head, however, was hanging from a hook, and its mouth had been stuffed full of fresh parsley as a means of enticing customers into the meat market. Although many American consumers might flee from such a sight, it was a bracing reminder that one man’s mania is another man’s meat. That moment of revelation prompted me to ask what we know about camels beyond their iconic and somewhat hackneyed status as emblems of the exotic, the “Eastern,” and the nomadic way of life. What if we got beyond the kitsch and came to know the camel as a sentient being, as a four-legged form of transport, as a source of camel hair for weaving, and at last, as a source of milk and meat? As a desert-dwelling Arab American, I found the call impossible to ignore. That set me off on a journey, one that ended up back in the desert borderlands of the U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico, but first flung me farther into worlds that I could not have initially imagined. The journey began in the ancient port town of Izmir,Turkey, a place called Smyrna up until a century ago. The local folk who live near Izmir’s principal souk proudly presented me with some of their traditional recipes for preparing camel meat. They explained how older camels are used to make the spicy sujuq sausage grilled at festivals along the Aegean Sea. It’s a dry salami-style sausage that is peppered with ground sumac seeds, cumin, garlic, salt, and the celebrated chile powder called Urfa biber. As I soon learned from the Turks, one’s willingness to be nourished by the meat and milk of camels is an expression of faith among Moslems. According to the Prophet Mohammed, “A man who does not eat my camels is not one of my people.” I later bought some camel sausage at Istanbul’s most ancient bazaar, the Misir Carsisi, which has been providing spices, fruits, and meats to Turks and Arabs since 1660. There, in a small meat shop not far from the spice souk, a Turkish butcher offered me pressed camel meat as döner kebab, chopped chunks of camel flesh as bastirma or sujuq, which he sliced as thin as pastrami. My first impression, as I tasted the sample of the latter that the butcher offered me across the counter, was of dryness—it was a cured meat that captured the desert’s aridity. But then its flavors began to bloom in my mouth, like the dormant seeds of wildflowers being exposed to rain. The oils of the meat, and a certain smokiness, the cracked peppercorns and medley of powdered spices—cumin and coriander and Allah-only-knows-what-else—came bursting up into my consciousness. I paid for the pound of sliced sausage and

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took it back to my little room near the Blue Mosque, where I consumed it with raki, olives, and dried figs over the following three days. Nevertheless, one butcher back in Izmir had cautioned me against thinking camels were primarily raised with the intent of making sausage from them. In fact, he said, younger camels are far too valuable to grind down into meat, especially after they had reached “wrestling age.” “Wrestling age?” I asked. He seemed surprised to have to explain, but then continued: “You see, here we have festivals in wintertime where camels wrestle one another in front of thousands of people. If you have a good camel, you make big money. You need that because to take care of a camel and to dress it for wrestling is very expensive.” I momentarily pondered the attraction of camel wrestling as a spectator sport. Two male camels dressed in fancy regalia are placed before a lovely female. She bats her famously long eyelashes as each male tries to nudge and knock the other out of the way, and out of contention as her possible mate. I, for one, would not want to get anywhere near two pugnacious camels. If you have ever ridden a camel, as I have done on occasion, you sooner or later stand (or sit) in awe of the immensity of that beast. When a camel gets even a bit grumpy, it is easy to fear for your life, and that’s if the one you are sitting on does not happen to be a professional wrestler. Let me put this into a culinary perspective: This is a tough animal, and there is a lot of it. Butchering a camel is not like butchering a kid goat or a suckling pig, both of which I have done. It is more like trying to process a desert leviathan. Even if you have the guts to try, it makes you wonder whether the toil is worth the trouble. I had decided to begin my camel research in Izmir, however, not because of its camel recipes but because a camel-eating, camel-riding, camel-whispering hero of mine was born there. He later migrated to be part of modern America, the part of Arizona near the Mexican border, where I now live. In fact, he once lived less than ten miles away from my house and frequented the same four-block-long main drag of Patagonia that I call “downtown” today. This man seemed the ideal (imaginary) guide for my explorations into camel culture and cuisine. This man, the first and most famous of the camel drovers reaching the American deserts, was born into the world as Filippou Teodora. He was born

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in or near Smyrna, Turkey, around 1828. At that time, the port of Smyrna was still the terminus for spices, silks, skins, and precious gems that had traveled by camel via the Persian Royal Road. Smyrna’s merchant community was spiced with the likes of Sephardic Jews and Armenian, Arab, and Greek traders. His baptismal name was given to him in Greek. Filippou means “the lover of horses.” Teodors or Teodora means “a gift of God.” Filippou’s father was Syrian, the full-blooded Arab of the family. His mother was reputed to have been a young Greek woman who had been captured, then released, by marauding Arabs. As a multiethnic couple, with each spouse from a different faith, the Teodoras found Smyrna a safe place for them to reside at the time, and they learned to speak the multiple languages in use there. Although their Smyrna-born boy spelled his surname as Tedro when he became a naturalized citizen of the United States some three decades later, Teodora was definitely his original surname, and that surname remains in use in coastal Turkey to this day. Boys like Filippou and his cousin Mico grew up watching camel wrestling in Smyrna. Any boy who had a knack for handling animals and a weakness for gambling would try his hand at training a camel to wrestle. If Mico and Filippou lived near the Kemeralti Bazaar, which had been built on Smyrna’s waterfront by 1670, they would have regularly witnessed both dromedary and Bactrian camels sauntering into town.These camels would routinely trail in from the 1,800-mile segment of the Silk Road known as the Persian Royal Route. There, next to the bazaar, merchants and drovers would unload their camels and take a rest in the caravanserai known as the Kizlaragasi Han. This camel resting station stands to this day, well-preserved in downtown Izmir. It was built in 1744 by a merchant known as Haci Bes¸ir Aga. Aga wanted to promote the Kemeralti Bazaar in Smyrna’s harbor as the final way station in Asia Minor for spices and silk from China, before they were sent off by ship to Athens, Algiers, or Alexandria. No doubt the port was also the transfer point for camel sausage and camel-hair robes that came in by land and left by ship to Greece, Italy, and parts unknown. Filippou and Mico likely grew up observing, if not helping to unload and handle, camels at Kizlaragasi Han. They may have also worked with camels at one of the twenty other smaller caravanserais that were built on the edges on the Smyrna spice bazaar that overlooked the Aegean Sea. And if any of

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the camels broke down on their way into Smyrna, the boys probably helped older men with the butchering, and carried the camel parts off to a shop where they could be made into sujuq sausage. Camels yielded far too much meat for most of it to be eaten fresh. It needed to be dried as jerky or cured as sujuq. Not many other clues remain that give us much insight into Filippou Teodora’s early life in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The trail has grown cold over the last century, except for three curious notices. Before he reached twenty-five years of age, Filippou converted from the Orthodox Christian faith to Islam, making a hadj, or sacred pilgrimage, to Mecca on the Arabian Peninsula. It is entirely probable that there he not only rode camels but drank their milk and ate their meat. To commemorate the importance of this hadj to his very identity, he assumed the name Hadji Ali. Within the few years just before or after his conversion, he also served as a Turkish liaison with the French Foreign Legion in Algiers. There he worked in the capacity of purchasing supplies, including camels, for the military. Algiers at that time was a protectorate of the Ottoman Empire. One of the caravanserais in Smyrna was called the Han of Algiers, because it specialized in shipping the prizes of the Silk Road off to Algiers. Many of Smyrna’s residents became engaged in trade with the Algerians during the Ottoman era. It is likely that Hadji Ali was one of them. Perhaps it was during this service that the young man became adept at procuring and managing the military use, care, and feeding of camels. In any case, camels soon took the place of horses in shaping Hadji Ali’s destiny, for the “lover of horses” became a lover of dromedaries. After serving in Algiers, Hadji Ali made it back to his home port, Smyrna, by 1855. He arrived just in time to meet a scout for the American military named Gwin Heap. Heap had come in advance of the USS Supply, looking for both camels and their drovers to participate in a proposed experiment back in the deserts of North America. Hadji Ali and Mico agreed to go overseas with Heap and tend the camels. On February 15, 1856, they set sail with thirty-three camels standing side to side on the flat bottom of the ship, with their backs just clearing the deck. Hadji Ali and his companions left Turkey for America, never to return. We have no idea what the humans ate during the next three months of transcontinental voyage, but we do know what the camels ate, and when.

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Each animal was given a gallon of oats or mixed oats and peas at three o’clock every afternoon. Their hayracks were filled in front of them with as much as ten pounds of dried grass. Each animal was also allowed three gallons of water per day to wash their feed down. When gales rose up and the ship was tossed around by the swales, the camels went down on their knees and haunches, and ate kneeling, as if taking communion. A few of the males nibbled whitewash off the beams and deck during the rutting season, but they survived even that. One female died while calving, and six calves were born, but four of these died along the way. It is not recorded whether any of the deceased camels were eaten. Thirty-four camels were still on board when the USS Supply reached the Gulf Coast of Texas in the spring of 1856. They were perhaps the first mammals of the camel ilk to have trod on American ground since a meteor shower or some other environmental change ended the reign of Camelops around the end of the last ice age. It must have taken all the patience and skill that Hadji Ali could muster to drive those pent-up camels the three miles along the floodplain upriver to Indianola, where he herded them into a stable erected especially for them by the quartermaster. At last the camels and their Middle Eastern drovers had reported for duty with the U.S. Army Cavalry. And so it fell to Hadji Ali to create order out of the chaos of the motley herd that Gwin Heap had assembled. Whatever Hadji Ali may have initially lacked in camel-training and people-calming skills, he apparently made up for with patience and perspicacity. The first problem he needed to solve was not with the camels themselves but with their critics. Some Texas cowboysturned-cavalrymen began to express their revulsion at the camels. One thing was clear to them: Camels did not look or act at all like horses. They could not be trained to cut calves from the mother cows. They were not that easy to mount. Worse yet, they did not help these cowboys reinforce their image of being the regal riders of the range, or jinetes, a term that had ironically reached Texas from ancient Arabian roots. Nevertheless, the cowboys began to treat the camels and their drovers with scorn. The harassment of the camels by the cowboys suddenly ended one day, and for a good reason. The commanding officer brought Hadji Ali up with one of the camels and brought a Texas cowboy up with a horse and then ordered both of them to load the animals to maximum capacity. A crowd

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gathered. The Texan did as he had done many times with his own mount, belting down a number of saddlebags and wooden boxes over the horse’s rump until he had a few hundred pounds of supplies piled on the animal. Hadji Ali waited for the cowboy to finish. Then, with his cousin’s help, he loaded the camel with more than a dozen hundred-pound bags and boxes until the weight it carried dwarfed anything the cowboy could do with his steed. The other cowboys walked away, amazed, humbled. By Thanksgiving of 1856, the entire troop was on the trail together, bound for California. They traveled through dry country that I have come to know well, for I have hiked much of it, rafted some of its diminutive rivers, and ridden horses or mules across other stretches. The landscape of the desert borderlands does not smell exactly like that of the Middle East, but it does have its own resinous pinyon pines, its spicy sages and aromatic mints. If a dry wind is not blowing, the landscape is often open enough to see for fifty miles in any direction. I can hear the animals moving through the desert, the men calling out to one another, the dry breeze blowing, the camel bags rubbing against the rumps of those massive beasts of burden. It was the second great hadj taken by Hadji Ali over his lifetime, for the desert crossing to California surely tested his faith. But when the camels at last crossed into California, and the Mojave Indians saw them on the banks of the Colorado, they knew they must commemorate this apparition. They made a large drawing of them that scraped back the dark volcanic pebbles to make a more pale, tawny outline in the sand beneath the stones. This intaglio–like scratchboard sketch of the first camels can still be seen by airplane pilots flying over the volcanic ridges on either side of the river. It may be the first and most enduring image of a camel drawn in the New World. Having crossed the river with their cargo intact, the camels under Hadji Ali’s watch reached Fort Tejon in southern California around November of 1857. Their feet were the worse for wear from the wounds they had suffered in New Mexico’s lava fields, but they had survived for months on free-range foraging—and they were stronger and heavier than when they had left Texas. They were range-fed camels by then, but their meat could not have been marketed as “grass-fed,” as an increasing portion of borderlands beef is marketed today. That’s because there was not that much grass out in the desert, notwithstanding a few exceptional patches of tobosa, galleta, and sacaton.

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The camel meat, if sampled at all during that first Camel Corps expedition, would have taken on the resinous tastes of the aromatic oils in the greasy and spicy shrubs that the camels had nibbled upon as they paused along their desert trails. Their meat would have been higher in omega-3 fats than it had been when they were eating oats, peas, and hay aboard the USS Supply. The camel meat would have made a tasty sausage, sort of a cross between a Turkish-style sukuq and Mexican chorizo. Even if suitable for sausage, the camels did not impress everyone with their performance to the extent that they impressed Hadji Ali. The army regulars who accompanied the camels from Texas to California were still cowboys. They had begrudgingly gained a modicum of respect for the camels, but they were never as fond of them as they were of the horses and mules that had drowned crossing the Colorado. Despite its initial success, the Camel Corps began to wither on the vine, for there were no more congressional appropriations forthcoming by which to sustain the camel experiment. The Camel Corps went down on its knees and collapsed. Released from his initial military service in 1857, Hadji Ali had suddenly achieved status as a naturalized citizen of the United States, and he began to deliver shipments across the desert for the U.S. Postal Service by mule or camel. He gradually gained a reputation as an affable neighbor, an outrageous storyteller, and the keeper of the “jackass mail.” He became known to a few as the Traveling Turk and the Jackass Mailman. Hadji Ali spent much of his time working the routes between mines near Yuma and Quartzite. He later went over to Gila Bend, and then south to Tucson, where he got himself a family—a Sonoran wife and two daughters. And yet the marriage didn’t take, for domestic life didn’t suit him. Hadji Ali, like his camels, could not stay anyplace for very long without feeling the urge to roam. He began prospecting, this time with mules, since he had released most of his camels by the time his girls were born. He would occasionally encounter a feral camel that had been abandoned by an unskilled drover. He realized that most had been badly abused and were no longer in good enough condition for the kind of work he needed them to do. Eventually, Hadji Ali stayed away from his wife and daughters for longer and longer periods of time. He worked for the mines around my present home of Patagonia, supplying the prospectors and grubstakers up on Red Mountain above town, sleeping over at Washington Camp. At last, he made

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a second home for himself far out in the desert at Tyson’s Well, Arizona. It is near the present-day town of Quartzite, but he would even stray away from that hovel every time someone alerted him to the possibility that one of his original camels from Turkey might still be alive and on the loose. And so it came to be that whenever anyone would spot one of his feral camels roaming in the desert, they would fetch Hadji Ali to track it down and tame it. In 1889, at the age of sixty-one, he went looking for two camels down near Ajo, but he never caught up with them. We now know why that was the case. The first clues to solving this puzzle came from two elderly women whom I met when I lived near Ajo. Ajo is not exactly the camel capital of the world today, and yet the women I met knew something of camels. Both of them descended from nomadic tribesmen known in their own language as the In-the-Sand People, for they were from the last clans to wander the high dunes and sandy swales of the desert borderlands to the west of Ajo. That was where they had once run into a camel by chance. They had been walking with their kin through the dunes and washes of the Gran Desierto when they began to notice tracks made by some unknown form of large herbivore. The men eventually stopped to take a good look at the prints in the sand and determined that they were quite fresh. But soon the men began to argue among themselves. One man thought they were made by a bighorn sheep, while another thought that they belonged to an antelope, the Sonoran pronghorn. Finally, one of the women present became impatient and apparently blurted out something to this effect: “I don’t care what it is exactly, as long as it is big, because I’m hungry. If the footprints are fresh, and the animal is still nearby, let’s just hunt it down and eat it.” That evening, a nomadic group of Sand People savored the meat from one of the last camels ever to roam in the desert borderlands between the United States and Mexico. It was eaten around a smoky campfire of mesquite coals, thousands of miles from the camel’s original home. While looking for that very camel not far from Ajo, Hadji Ali was invited into a camp of Sand People and stayed for several weeks, happily exchanging stories with these other nomads, who had a number of earlier camel sightings to report to him. Remarkably, the last reported glimpse of a feral camel in the North American deserts came out of the arid stretches of Baja California in 1956.

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A camel seldom lives past fifty years of age, so that sighting must have been a grandchild of the camels brought over to the Sonoran Desert by Hadji Ali. In America, few desert dwellers other than the Sand People ever ate camel meat. When I asked them for details about how the camel meat was prepared, they had all but forgotten. Their nonchalant answer was simply, “Like we do all other meat.” What this actually meant might be one of three or four techniques, judging from other meals I have had with their kin. They may have simply cut thin strips of backstrap and flank steak and grilled them as carne asada right on the coals of a campfire made from kindling gathered from ironwood and mesquite trees. The light smokiness of mesquite wood charcoal may have imparted a richer flavor to the camel meat. On the other hand, they may have simply hung a string or rope above the campfire and dried the meat into something akin to Mexican charqui, a term from which American cowboys got their word jerky. It would have been dried in the sun for several days until leathery and somewhat brittle, then reserved for later use. The third possible culinary preparation that might have been used for the camel meat is the Mexican meat broth known as birria, which is not unlike the neseqqud soup shared among Arabs and Berbers in North Africa, where Hadji Ali may have tasted it during his time with the French Foreign Legion. The meat is grilled or boiled, jerked off the bone and shredded, then with onions, water, lemon juice, and spices added, simmered into a savory but rather thin meat stew. Tortillas are dipped into birria in the desert borderlands of America much like emjerdig flatbreads are dipped into neseqqud stews by Berbers and Bedouins in the Sahara. Lemon or lime juice both softens the meat and heightens the flavors of the spices. These dishes are excellent ways for nomads to quench their thirst and restore their strength after a hard day of desert travel. I have encountered neseqqud in Saharan oases near the LibyaEgypt border, and it is a savory stew that my Berber hosts spoke of with great affection. Why did camels fail to achieve the culinary, cultural, or economic importance in the Great American Desert that they have had for millennia in the Middle East? They appear to have been as adaptable as figs, pomegranates, olives, and other foods that made a successful transition to this terroir. Was it somehow the fault of Hadji Ali, their first friend in America? In failing to promote them to others, did he inadvertently seal their fate in the New World?

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Given the North American reluctance to eat most beasts of burden, such as horses, perhaps camels never really had a chance. For eating something can sanctify it, and ironically, that gesture alone may ensure its survival. Maybe Hadji Ali should have slaughtered his camels and held a feast—or at least a wrestling match, in which the loser was ground up into sausage—rather than simply letting them go. I do not have any way to ultimately answer these questions for you, or perhaps even for myself, but I keep an old kilim-style camel bag above my desk, a dried-up skin of camel sausage, and two of the surviving photos of Hadji Ali in my study. These talismans prompt me to consider the connections between culinary traditions in the Old World and the New. They remind me that camels evolved in North America, left it for Asia and Africa, and then came back thousands of years later to delight, nourish, and haunt a few of my predecessors in the desert borderlands. They also remind me that the terroir of a food, like the camel itself, shifts through time, incorporating elements from one influence after another, evolving in ways we can seldom foresee in advance, if at all.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

My First (and Last) Rodeo Catching Corvina in the Sea of Cortés

I remember the moment when I realized that the distinctive tastes of a particular place might not be around forever. It occurred not exactly while I was in the desert, but in a desert of a sea—the Sea of Cortés, a hypersaline jog of the Pacific surrounded on three sides by Sonoran Desert. Oddly, it was during an unanticipated rainstorm that I eventually realized what could be at risk in such a rain-poor region. The memory emerged as some raindrops began to pelt down on me, first in a scatter, then in sheets. I noticed that my right hand had begun to cramp and twitch. It was as if a muscle between the base of my thumb and my index finger was throbbing from some kind of overuse, from the change in humidity, or some injury that had gone unnoticed. I tried to shake the cramping out, but as soon as I loosened the fingers of that hand, their muscles reinitiated some phantom action that they remembered from long ago, bending both my thumb and my index finger together as if by some magnetic force. As I became a bit irritable with the hunch that I was suddenly afflicted by an altogether new malady in the middle of a downpour, I realized that it was not new. I had suffered from such hand cramps one other time—thirtyseven years before—while trying to sleep in a fishing camp on Isla Tiburón in the Sea of Cortés, some six hours south of the U.S./Mexico border. Twothirds of my life had passed since then, without my ever suffering from that

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affliction again—until now. My body was remembering something that my mind and heart had tried to forget: the gutting of thousands of fish, and in another way, the gutting of a desert sea. I was suddenly sent back to when I first tasted hints of the desert itself in the fisheries that it fueled off its shore, when I realized that the chance to taste the flavors of certain fish might not endure beyond my own lifetime. I closed my eyes and remembered that day. I heard the crashing of waves on the beach. I was weary, but I began to see in my mind the fish camp at Ensenada del Perro Triste, the Bay of the Grieving Dog. It was there that my hand first throbbed with pain, repeating an action it had performed over and over again earlier that day: the gutting of fish. My hand muscles had become like scratched records, unable to escape from a particular groove, or to move on to another. And then, as I found shelter from the storm and drifted off to sleep, it began to happen again: My hand was dreaming it was once again gutting a thousand orangemouth corvina, a fish that seldom arrives in that quantity at Ensenada del Perro Triste anymore. December of 1973 had brought a stretch of cold, stormy weather to the Sea of Cortés, forcing its fishermen to stay in, mending nets by day and drinking in the cantinas by night. I met many of the fishermen who worked out of Kino Viejo, a Sonoran village, in El Oasis, the most popular cantina in the village. I was living in the cantina at the time—not because I was a drunk, but because the bottle room behind the bar was the only vacant room in town that could be rented for twenty-five dollars a week. I kept my sleeping bag, rucksack, a little dried food, and a copy of Steinbeck and Ricketts’ Log from the Sea of Cortez back behind the cardboard boxes of beer bottles. I drank beer there only when I found a fisherman who seemed to have a story to tell; I’d buy him a dark Noche Buena bock beer, and settle for a lighter Tecate to get myself through the cold, windy evening. I’d watch the fishermen to see who among them commanded the most respect; it appeared to be two brothers in ball caps who seldom stayed in the bar for very long; despite the rough weather, they were out on the water as much as possible. The names on their baptismal records were Perrón and Francisco, but everyone called the latter one Chapo. Together they were Los Hermanos Gaxiola. When I spotted them down at the beach one morning, they had just brought in their catch from Isla Tiburón, some thirty miles away. I simply

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walked up to where they were unloading their panga—a fiberglass boat shaped somewhat like a whaling dory. I began unloading the fish with them, transferring them to a huge plastic bin of ice in the back of Chapo’s ne’erdo-well pickup truck. As we worked and talked, I learned that two of their younger sons who had camped with them on Tiburón had immediately gone back home, for they were suffering from the flu. The other sons, all wearing cowboy hats and smoking, were still working but were coughing a lot. They had such high fevers that it was unclear which of them would be able to go out and work the next day. I volunteered to sub for anyone who stayed home. Perrón paused for a moment, stood up straight, thin and tall, and looked at me. He was slightly balding, with a thick mustache and an unshaven face. “We’ve never taken a little gringo out with us, because we don’t do sports fishing, but if you’ll work as hard as you’re doing now, we may take you up on your offer. Be ready to go by five a.m. and we’ll come by the cantina to get you if the boys are still sick.” At twilight the next day, I was jolted out of sleep by a cock crowing in the next yard. “Hijo de la Madre!” I swore in my best gutter Spanish; it was 5:15 a.m. already, and I had probably missed the fishing trip! I pulled on a sweatshirt and a heavy flannel-lined jacket and swung my pack over my shoulder. I ran first to the beach where Perrón and Chapo kept their pangas. Fortunately, both of the boats were still there. Then I jogged over to the gas station, and there was the pickup, waiting in line to get four large garrafones of gasoline and eight cans of mariner’s motor oil. Chapo looked up from filling the gas cans as he heard me coming. He was shorter than his brother, and more compactly built. His face was broad and sunbaked, and the blood veins around his eyes stood out from his brown skin. “It is fine that you are here. One of the boys is still sick with the influenza, so we’ll need you to help toss the nets.” He explained to me the basic plan. There would be one man and three boys in each panga. Perrón and Chapo would run the Yamaha engines out to the island, but then let their oldest boys guide the boats, while each of the men stood on the prow searching for schools of fish. The other two of us in each boat would release the cotton-meshed gill nets when Perrón and Chapo signaled us to do so. When we got back to the beach, Chapo killed the engine on the truck, got out and let some air out of the tires. The boats were anchored just offshore,

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so the older boys pulled them in. One of the younger boys and I pulled a garrafon of gas out of the truck bed, plopped it onto the sand, then each of us grabbed a handle. With our other hands we steadied our arms against the other’s shoulder and lifted the plastic gas container, then shuttled it down to the boats. While we were doing this, the older boys were helping their fathers carry the Yamaha 150 outboard engines to the boats. They went back, got the propellers and tools, assembled the engines and locked them into their mounts at the back of the boats, then added gas and oil in some ratio that escaped my understanding. We loaded all the rest of the gear and supplies into the boats as they bobbed in knee-high water. One of the older boys—Chapo’s son Martín—then drove the pickup truck home, and came running back with two dozen tortillas and a bag of oranges. “The women demanded that we eat these oranges. They say so we don’t catch the flu. They just heard about two babies. Died last night. They say the flu is so bad in the village . . .” “To hell with la gripa! It’s all around us already, anyway—some damn oranges aren’t going to protect us from that,” Perrón growled. “Let me tell you—the only thing that will keep us well? Getting out to the island before the pinché influenza catches us. At least we’ll be away from all the coughing kids.” With that, we took off our shoes, waded the boats out to deeper water, hopped up on their sides, and settled down on benches slimy with fish guts while Chapo and Perrón toyed with the engines. They siphoned gas into a plastic tube by sucking on it until the gas flushed up toward their mouths, then they spit the gas out and placed their ends of the tubes in the gas tanks of the Yamahas. The smell of gas permeated the pangas, and I realized that I was already getting queasy. This was not a good omen. I had heard the fishermen in the cantina laugh about taking gringos sportfishing, only to have them get seasick and puke all over their boats. I swore to myself that however sick I got, I would not retch in front of these fishermen, or in their boats. But I had no idea just how rough the water would be that day. While I had been daydreaming and worrying about my stomach, Perrón and Chapo had gotten the engines running. Suddenly we were moving out from shore. We aimed for Isla Alcatraz, about a mile out in Kino Bay, and

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just for fun, crept around to the rocky side of the islet to see if any sea lions were there. Sure enough, a dozen or two were bobbing upside down in the subtidal zone near some outlying rocks, while another dozen were trying to warm or dry themselves atop some boulders. I also noticed that a batch of Heermann’s gulls and Elegant terns followed us wherever we went, hoping to pick up any fish that escaped our hands. When I noticed that we had more gaviotas following us than any other pangas, I wondered whether they could actually recognize our pangas as ones that reliably brought in large catches. I watched them off and on all day, and could pretty soon identify particular birds by their daring thefts and their other antics. If I could do that, why couldn’t they differentiate our boats from the others? From Isla Alcatraz we headed west past the beaches on the mainland side of Sonora, although it felt like we were going northward. We passed an old beachcomber’s bar called La Caverna del Seri, then left the sandy shores behind for a while and motored past some rocky tide pools where pelicans and cormorants congregated. From there we boated past Windy Point, then angled away from the coast and out into deeper water, straight toward the eastern corner of Isla Tiburón. That’s when the wind began to pick up and the waves grew choppier. The men wanted to fish in the trough between Isla Tiburón and the more distant Isla San Esteban, but as we looked out that way, all we could see was huge swells edged with whitecaps. Even the route over to the beach camp they wished to use on the south side of Tiburón looked too treacherous to maneuver, so the men scrapped their original plan and headed toward the leeward side of the island near Ensenada del Perro Triste. It was good that they did, because I was quietly turning green as the panga rolled and pitched and rode the swell up and then dived back down into the trench behind it. My head was splitting, my nose was filled with the smell of burning oil and gas, and I was getting drenched on top of that. Fortunately, the men decided to drop our gear off on the beach before we did any fishing, and so I was put out of my misery by ten that morning. While the Gaxiola boys brought all the gear, extra gas, and water onto the beach at the fish camp, I told them that I was headed inland to relieve myself in the desert. As soon as I was out of sight and out of earshot, I retched up my breakfast beneath an ironwood tree, buried it, washed my mouth out with my canteen

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water, and headed back into camp as if nothing had happened. I felt immediately better, although I wasn’t necessarily inclined to get back into the panga at that very minute. But neither were the fishermen. They too were enjoying being out of the boats, away from the women, and were basking in the winter sun, reading comic books and looking at soft porn magazines. They were passing around the first dozen tortillas, which were still hot. I decided that they might settle my stomach, so I took one. “Take two or three,” Chapo told me, looking up from his magazine. “They’ll calm your stomach so that you won’t get sick again.” They did indeed settle my stomach. After forty minutes or so, the wind had died down, the sun was out, and Perrón had decided that we should take off again, this time to fish. Chapo told the boys what gear he wanted back in the boats, and I helped him place items in ours as he explained to me how we would be fishing. We were going to do a kind of small-scale seining called rodeo or encierra (enclosure). A rodeo ring was made with a twelve-foot-deep hand-knotted cotton net that encircled a school of fish; if stretched out straight, it might span a hundred and fifty yards or so in length. It was neatly folded on the floor of the panga, but I wasn’t quite sure how we would get it out in a circle on the water. As we set off from the shore, Chapo’s oldest son, Martín, told me to sit on the windward side of the bench facing the leeward side and gripping the bottom of the net in both hands. It spread over my lap, and that of his younger brother, Victor, like a woven blanket. Chapo was up front, standing with a gaff as a prop to steady himself should the waves kick up, or should Martín take a sudden turn. And yet it was clear that Chapo had sea legs, for he hardly needed such a prop; he used the gaff to point more often than he used it to anchor himself. Meanwhile, Perrón’s panga ran a route parallel to ours, up the shore of Isla Tiburón—an island that technically belonged to the nearby Seri tribe. Now, this was a technicality that most non-Indian men of the Sonoran coast haughtily ignored until a few years later, when three pangas full of Seri men confiscated an intruder’s boat, distributed its catch among themselves, and left the mestizo men high and dry on the island in the middle of the summer. I didn’t understand it at the time, but we were fishing on the edge of

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Seri territorial waters, and were managing to do so only because Perrón and Chapo were passing a kickback to the Seri tribal governor, whose daughter was dating another of their younger brothers. The men talked casually about such things, as if kickbacks, or mordidas, were so commonplace that no one could fish in the best waters without paying someone else off. For them, it was simply a cost of doing business, and they saw themselves as linked to the Seri by the compradazgo tradition of being godfathers of one another’s children, rather than as competitors with them. Chapo was bug-eyed, scanning the waters in front and to the sides of us for schools of fish, holding one finger up in the air as if he were a conductor ready to prompt an orchestra to strike the first notes of a symphony. He was so intent on finding fish in the shoals along the island’s shores that he apparently didn’t sense the cold, for he had stripped off his denim jacket and was wearing only a sweat-stained T-shirt with holes under his arms. His pant legs were rolled up to his calves, and he stood barefooted on the prow. Occasionally Perrón would yell to Chapo, alerting him that something— a school or perhaps a single large fish—was coming Chapo’s way. But it appeared as though Chapo had the better eyesight or instinct, for he was the first to spot a school of corvina off the bow. The first thing I noticed was how the blood veins around Chapo’s eyes popped up as he strained to see the school under the turbid water. He pointed to the right, then simply snapped his fingers and yelled: “Mucha corvina! Enciérrelas! (Round ’em up!) Tírale! (Throw it!) Échale! (Do it!) Chíngales! (Screw them!)” We started tossing the net over the side of the boat while Martín whipped the panga around, making a quick circle about forty to fifty yards across. The cotton net flew out over the side of the boat as fast as Victor, the younger son, and I could unfold it. When we came back near the spot where we had made the first toss, Martín killed the motor. We then reached over the side of the panga and pulled the front end of the net so that it overlapped with the last length of it that we had thrown overboard. Martín used some short rope lengths to cinch them together, so that the entire net became a complete circular enclosure down to the sandy floor of the shoal. It was then that Chapo started to jump up and down with jubilation: “Look, Perrón corralled another part of the school in his rodeo. . . . Un chingón de corvina! We’ve struck it rich!”

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Instantly, he and Martín grabbed the oars and started to beat them against the boat’s hull, scaring the fish into the nets. Chapo danced in a circle, stomping his feet on the prow as he pounded his oar. I grabbed the gaff and pounded it too. Our noise-making attracted pelicans and gulls, which dived for the fish, the gulls shrieking like banshees. This racket created mayhem among the corvina, making them jump high into the air and drive their bodies like torpedoes into the webbing of the trap we had set for them. Soon dolphins and ospreys had gathered as well, circling the trap and hoping to capture any escapees. When I finally looked up from the frenzy of fish, there must have been a dozen ospreys circling over Perrón’s panga. After a few more minutes of watching in wonder and congratulating Chapo for having located a school of corvina within our first twenty minutes of fishing, both boatloads of fishermen set to work on retrieving the net and hauling in the catch. It took all four of us in our boat—Chapo, Martín, Victor, and me—to hoist the net up over the side of the panga, it was so thick with fish. By now, gulls, terns, boobies, and cormorants were all diving into the corralled waters where the bulk of the school was trapped, taking away the smaller fry, while the ospreys sought out some of the larger corvina. The shrieking and rasping and calling were so loud that we could hardly hear the men call from the other panga. They pantomimed to us every once in a while, or simply held up a spectacularly large fish. “Mirale.” Chapo pointed as we turned away from our work and toward the other panga. “They netted a totoaba in their rodeo. I haven’t seen one for months. We’ll get a good price for that one!” Totoaba? I tried to make sense of this, for I thought I had heard that this giant-sized kin of the corvina was all but extinct all the way up to the Colorado River delta. Some friends of mine at the time guessed totoaba populations had suffered dramatic declines since dams were put in on the lower Colorado River, causing the cessation of freshwater and nutrients flowing from the river delta into the northern Gulf. Could they still be sold even if they were on some endangered species list? I tried to frame a question in Spanish to Chapo, but he was working too hard to give me any substantive answer. “Don’t worry,” he said, as he pulled an eighteen-inch corvina out of the net and dumped it in the hull. “Perrón can find a market for nearly everything we catch.”

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Seeing the lanky body of Perrón wobble while trying to hold up the chubby, hundred-pound body of the lone totoaba that fatally swam within our reach that day, I could not have known that it was the first and the last of its species that I would ever see. I was too busy learning the ropes from the fishermen of Kino Bay to even understand that I was in one of the last rodeos of the Wild West, one that mined fish and gutted the sea just as others mined gold, copper, gas, grass, or water, and gutted the land. I was an unwitting accomplice in that mining. But I was so focused on gaining some competence in rodeo-style fishing that I could not fathom that this kind of fishing would soon be gone. Of course, I suppose that any of us who have ever eaten fish tacos from Sonora and Baja California have also been culinary accomplices in the gutting of the sea. What I understood at the time was that which was immediately in front of my nose: the smell of fish, salt, and blood. The four of us in Chapo’s panga would pull up two to three feet of net at a time, being careful to fold the cotton webbing so that the flopping fish wouldn’t get retangled in the folded net at our feet. As a half dozen to a dozen fish came up in each swath of netting rising over the side of the panga, we’d try to get enough purchase on their bodies to quickly and cleanly pull them out of the mesh. But that was easier said than done. As we grabbed the fish behind their fins, they would squirm and struggle to get free from our hands, scraping their scales against the cotton mesh and leaving their slime and scale fragments all over our fingers and wrists. I’d liberate a fish from the net, whack its head against the other side of the boat, and dump it in the hold, a basin full of ice that was built into the floor of the hull. I’d wipe the scales and slime off on my jeans and take a deep breath. I’d see how fast Chapo was accomplishing the same task, and then I’d begin again. Even with someone as experienced as Chapo, a fish would sometimes lunge and get loose, and its fins or the mesh of the net would slice into the hands that held fast to its body. Soon it was hard to tell which blood belonged to the fish and which had been liberated from our own grips. Within a half hour of starting this chore, the triangle of skin between my thumb and index finger was cut in several places and stinging with sea salt. The cuts bled onto my jeans, turning them a dull red, while the splashing and flopping of fish stained the rest of them white with salt. No one sought out Band-Aids from a first-aid kit, nor did any of us take the time to wash the blood and slime off our hands. It was simply part of the job.

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As we moved around the circle, pulling the cotton net up into the panga and releasing fish from the net, I began to see that we had caught more than a homogeneous school of corvina. There were several colors and size classes of corvina mixed together in the catch, and some were nearly a yard long from snout to tail. Whether they were the different species whose ranges overlap in that stretch of the Gulf—orangemouth, shortfin, and golfina—I did not know at the time, nor can I reconstruct from what I know today. But there were also beautifully sleek and silvery-blue mackerel, a small school of Mexican barracudita, some mullet or lisa, and the flatter, rounder fish they call a cochito or piglet-fish. By the time we had curved around to the last thirty yards of the circle, the panga was so full of fish that they had overflowed the hold and brought the lip of the boat within a few inches of the splash line of the waves.We were literally up to our hips in dead fish, all of which were caught within twenty minutes of leaving the camp. Fortunately, Perrón’s catch was not as big, so his crew finished up before ours, drove to camp to dump their harvest on the beach, and then came back to transfer half of ours. As we returned to camp, Chapo revved up theYamaha and drove it up out of the surf and onto the sand, where it glided another ten or fifteen feet onto the beach.We landed close to high-tide level and hopped out of the boat onto the sand. Martín ran a rope from the bow to a stump of an ironwood tree thirty yards away, tied it off, and then waved his baseball cap to us, grinning. “Ya llegamos . . . con un chingón de corvina y macarela!” Perrón opened a cooler that he kept in his panga and brought out a sixpack of Tecate. He took one for himself, then handed the rest to Chapo, who gave everyone except the two youngest boys a beer. Perrón gulped his down, threw the can on the beach, and then announced, “Drink yours up quick. Lots of work to do. Less than three hours of light to do it in. Let’s sort out the mackerel and cochito from the corvina—keep that totoaba on ice in the hold—then start in with the gutting. Gut the mackerel first. I’ll take the first three and whip up a fish salad for us. Whenever you get hungry, just go over, put some of the mackerel salad in a tortilla, then come back and begin again. No flojitos. Everyone better keep working until dark. So get to work.” The beer cans went flying onto the beach or into the water, and we spread out to start our various tasks. I first worked with Victor on the pile of fish heaped up on the beach from Perrón’s catch. We sorted out the mackerel and set them over near where Perrón had made the campfire. We threw the

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cochito back into the water, but only a few swam away while most floated dead on their sides. We sorted the corvina to size, but more or less left them in place, just above the waterline. Chapo came over at that point, carrying a longer slender filleting knife, and taught me what to do next. “I’ll slit their bellies open and unhinge their heads—I’m fastest at that— then you and Victor take the fish and rip out their guts—like this—put your index finger in the bottom of the slit and move up the spine. Pull everything along until you reach the gills. Then pinch your finger and thumb together like this. Grab the gills, flick your wrist, rip everything out all at once—air bladder, guts, organs, gills, teeth as well.” He demonstrated, flipping the entrails and organs into the water right next to us. A gull swept in and carried it all away. Victor stood next to me and did the same. I got into the same position that Victor was in, pulled the guts and organs up, then hesitated. I repositioned my fingers and ripped. It all sprayed out and stuck to my jeans. I flicked it off into the water. Chapo laughed. “You’ll get the hang of it, gringito. And if you don’t, you’ll end up with so much fish crap on your pants and smell so bad that no woman will ever want to date you. . . . So that’s your choice—learn how to do it right or you’ll stink so much you’ll never get any action with the ladies.” Chapo walked away, while all the boys broke into laughter, hooting. Since the island had no women at all on it at that moment, and the nearest possibly eligible female was more than twenty miles away by boat, how any of us males smelled at that moment seemed like a hilariously moot point to them. But I was the new kid on the block, and a clumsy one at that, so I bore the brunt of most of the jokes for the next three hours. Or was it four hours? We’d begun the gutting by three in the afternoon, and it must have been at least seven when we quit. For most of those hours, I stood in the same place and did exactly the same thing: bend over and reach into a pile of freshly slit corvina, grab one, grip it with one hand and rip the guts out with the other, tossing them to the screaming seagulls. My hands were bloody, covered with fish scales, and coated with salt and slime. As the afternoon wore on and we executed the same motions hundreds of times, my hand began to ache and cramp, and then the cramps spread to my arm, and then to my entire body. I saw that the other boys occasionally tried to shake the crampy feeling out of their hands, but it was to no avail. Our hand muscles

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had passed the point of muscular fatigue, and the cuts in our skin and the salt in the wounds only heightened the pain. We kept on keeping on, repeating the same pulls with the fingers and flicks of the wrists until Chapo told us to call it quits. It was well past dark when we finished throwing the last fish guts into the sea, and yet we hadn’t cleaned even half of the fish we’d hauled in that day. The totoaba, the sixty mackerel, and the largest corvina were all packed in ice in the hold of Perrón’s boat. Another batch had nearly filled the hold of Chapo’s panga, and the rest—the ones yet to be gutted and cleaned—were under a tarp not far from the bedrolls, in case coyotes came in to scavenge. I was dead tired from the bending, hauling, and gutting, especially since I’d hardly had five hours of sleep the night before. Even Chapo and Perrón displayed their weariness, abruptly leaving the gutting a half hour before the rest of us in order to organize our makeshift camp and get the fire going for some food. I was looking forward to a bowl full of ceviche made with just lime juice and chunks of fish, or a nice fat filet on the grill. When I settled into a place by the fire, I was surprised that Perrón was grilling not fish but carne asada! Chapo was passing around the tortillas and the remains of the afternoon’s salad of mackerel, celery, onions, cilantro, mayonnaise, salsa, and lime juice. By this time, it tasted more like mayo than mackerel. Nevertheless, the boys were polishing off the leftovers and drinking can after can of beer. When I saw no one preparing any more fish, I protested: “We caught hundreds of corvina. Aren’t we going to at least make some ceviche?” Martín, who was sitting in the sand next to me, tipped back his cowboy hat, gulped down some beer, belched, and gave me a little lecture. “Fíjate, gringito, us fishermen get tired of eating fish day after frickin’ day. And corvina, that’s almost at the level of trash fish, like lisa and cochito. So when we sold our load of fish the day before yesterday, what did we do? Well, we went out and bought beer and beef. Beer and beef and flour tortillas—that’s what makes us Sonorans. That’s what makes us different from Chilangos andYucatecos, who drink their pulque, pat their corn tortillas, and eat their bacalao, anchovetas, or puerco pibil. Sonora, this is ranch country, cow country, con carne asada y corridos Norteños.” He yodeled out a grito, then began to sing an old cowboy ballad about a horse race, “El Moro de Cumpas.”

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Perrón winked at me. “We need the remaining limones for our beer, so ceviche is out. But tell you what: I’ll grill you up one filete de corvina, just so you can taste it a la parilla. But the boys will be eating their beef. Surrounded by all of this salt and sand and fish slime, do you think they want this life? Hell. So they believe that they’re destined to become cowboys and then ranchers, even though there isn’t a damn cow that’s worth a shit within fifty miles of here. . . . We have all the ocean we need for free. All the fish we can catch for the price of a panga. But what do they dream about? Blowing all their money to buy a little patch of worthless desert and call it a ranch. If I ever willed one of my sons this panga and engine that it took me years to pay off, he’d screw me in the grave by selling them and buying a pickup truck, a horse trailer, a stallion, and two calves.” The boys pulled their cowboy hats down over their eyes and tried to ignore what the old man said. But then Chapo looked me straight in the eye. He stated simply, “You know it’s true.” I was stunned. First by the fact that the Gaxiola boys didn’t seem to like fish much—least of all corvina—and because they didn’t really want to be fishermen. Fish were simply their temporary currency, their means to get some fast cash in order to get as far from the sea as they could. As I was pondering the significance of this odd realization, Perrón handed me a tin plate covered with a huge filet of corvina that had been grilled and topped with butter, a single lime, chopped cilantro, and a few mashed leaves of epazote. I squeezed the lime over the filet. Then, as I took my first bite, I closed my eyes. I took flight, so to speak, catapulted into a dreamy state by the smoke, the oils, and the flaky texture of the mesquite-grilled filet. The oily flesh had absorbed the lime juice and butter well, so well that it felt as if it were melting in my mouth. The cilantro jibed well with the lime juice, but the epazote gave the entire dish an additional, unpredictable kick. I slowly savored each bite, chasing it with a sip of beer. I became so engaged with the intermingling flavors that I was launched into a reverie made ever more vivid by the crashing of waves, the fragrant breeze wafting in from the desert interior, and a sky that was pulsing with the light of ten thousand stars. I now understand that with each bite of that corvina, I was tasting more than the flesh of a single predatory fish, known in English as a croaker or drum; I was ingesting the end product of a food chain that stretched back

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to the desert’s ephemeral washes and intermittent rivers that sporadically flooded into the Sea of Cortés. The desert’s floods carried mesquite leaf debris and insect carapaces as well as rabbit and rodent pellets along with them. And with the flows of freshwater, this influx of nutrients fueled an algal bloom and spread of sea grass beds out beyond the Colorado River delta, in the bays and lagoons along the Sonoran coast of the sea. Bits of this greenery in turn nourished sand crabs, clams, polychaete worms, and other invertebrates, as well as the anchovies that the corvina preyed upon. It was as if I were tasting the very meeting of desert and sea, the culinary merging of flavors from the driest of lands and the saltiest stretches of ocean. I soon dozed off sitting up, letting my beer can fall from my hand and crash onto my tin plate, beer foaming and spewing everywhere. The boys all laughed so hard that they startled me back into momentary wakefulness. “You’d better get some sleep,” Chapo suggested. “Stay on this side of the fish in case the coyotes come—I may have to throw some rocks or shoot off my pistol if they start to scavenge our fish.” I dutifully placed my tarp and sleeping bag where he had suggested I should put them, kicked off my shoes and soaking-wet jeans, then pulled the flannel-lined bag up around my neck. I looked at the stars for a while, but my earlier sleepiness began to return. Just before I dozed off for the night, I felt my right hand twitch, then cramp up in a way that pulled together my thumb and index finger as if they were magnets attracted to one another. The cramp then released some, and my fingers relaxed, but then they suddenly cramped up again. I realized that they were repeating the same pinch, pull, and release that they had done hundreds of times during the late afternoon while I was gutting the corvina. With this fleeting recognition, I fell off to sleep, but my hands kept gutting more imaginary fish all night long. In the morning, before the sun had come up over the coastal mountains on the mainland, I heard Perrón quietly cursing in Spanish. “Sonababichis! The little sons of bitches. Even after Chapo shot at them, those coyotes had the nerve to sneak back and drag a few fish away from the pile. That’s why I like to camp over near Arroyo Vaporeto rather than on this side. There aren’t as many frickin’ coyotes over there.” “Perrón,” I asked, “why do they call this place Ensenada del Perro Triste? You know, even though there are no dogs here, only coyotes?”

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He walked over to where I was sitting in the sand pulling on my jeans and shoes. He glanced around. The rest of the crew was sleeping. “I don’t like to talk about it. I’ve never even told the boys. But the Seri girl who is dating our other brother, this is what she told me. In the old days, the old Seri Indians who lived on this island had lots of dogs. Not like pets. They slept on their feet and next to the children to keep them warm on cold winter nights. This is back when the Seri were still considered savages. You know all that mierda? The crap about Seri being cannibals? Well, shit, the Mexican government wanted to exterminate all of them. One of their bands on the mainland had robbed one of the haciendas and killed one of its prize bulls for beef. The Seri out on this island had nothing to do with the incident. Shit. Probably weren’t even aware that it happened. They were just camping on this beach, when some Mexican soldiers arrived in boats and gunned down every one of them in the camp. Just because of a damn bull. Men, women, children, crippled elders, everyone. Later that same week, when some Seri or their Cachanilla kin who had been elsewhere at the time came back, they heard the crying, the wailing of dogs. Only the dogs had survived, but they were brokenhearted. That’s why it’s called the Bay or the Cove of the Grieving Dogs.” I stayed silent, a bit shaken by that history. “So what do you want for breakfast, mackerel or corvina?” While I ate more fish later that morning, the rest ate canned Hormel wienies with their fried eggs and beans. After a night of rest and some breakfast, we found that gutting the other half of the catch didn’t take as long as the first half did the day before. The cramping in my hand had somewhat lifted, and I kept up with the others. It also appeared that there were fewer birds to scare away. We rotated the newly cleaned fish into the ice within the hold, but the air was still cool enough to keep any spoilage from happening. In a little more than two hours, we were done. There were enough cleaned fish that we couldn’t risk going out for another rodeo’s worth of harvesting. Chapo and Perrón decided to hightail it for Kino, so that we could sell the fish while they were still in good shape.We broke camp and crossed much calmer waters than we had crossed the day before. It was a balmy day, I had no trouble with seasickness, and we all watched the dolphins play alongside the boats on the way back to the mainland.

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When we arrived at Kino Viejo, Chapo and Perrón gunned the engines so that the boats rode a crest all the way into the beach, hotdogging it right up onto the sand. We ended up beached not all that far from the trucks of the fish buyers. Perrón immediately signaled to one of the buyers and showed him the totoaba. While several of us took the gear and engines up the beach, Martín ran home and returned with his father’s pickup truck. Meantime, Perrón and Chapo haggled with the buyers. Since so few fishermen had been out on the water that week, our catch apparently garnered some pretty good prices. Two of the buyers drove their trucks right up to the pangas and we began unloading the mackerel into one and the corvina and lone totoaba into the other. In a matter of a half hour, all of the fish were gone, except for a couple of two-foot-long corvina that Chapo had reserved for me to take back for eating at El Oasis cantina. The gear and supplies were all back in Chapo’s pickup truck bed. The pangas were back to their ordinary slimy selves. I looked at myself, and at the other boys. Our jeans were white with salt at the leg bottoms, slimy with scales around the thighs, and red with blood just below our belts. We were not a pretty sight, but at that moment we smelled more like campfire smoke than fish guts. “Why don’t you clean yourself up at El Oasis, then come over to my place for lunch?” Chapo offered. “Pati and Myra will make us all some good hot food, enchiladas and bifstek ranchero, or something like that.” I did have lunch with them that afternoon, but that night I shared the two corvina prepared as ceviche with the El Oasis bartender and some other friends. Since then, over the last three decades, I’ve seen members of the Gaxiola family only occasionally.While two other members of their clan have become buyers and sellers of frozen crab, fish, lobster, and sole, all of them abandoned the life of the pescador as fishing stocks began to crash and the competition became too great. Over the last few decades, roughly 27 percent of the world’s fisheries have collapsed economically, including those of totoaba, orangemouth, and shortfin corvina. Nine out of every ten fish species caught in the Sea of Cortés at the time of my trip to Tiburón with the Gaxiolas in 1972 have since been overfished. But we cannot blame the declines of fish like the totoaba and the various corvinas merely on the fishermen, or even on those who consume their

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catch. The Sea of Cortés has also been impoverished by dams upstream on the Rio Colorado, Rio Sonora, RioYaqui, and Rio Mayo, which formerly sent millions of tons of freshwater and nutrients into the sea, generating much of its former productivity. And, perhaps, much of its distinctive flavors as well. Flavor? For sure, since seawater is not the only ingredient needed for producing good-tasting fish. The Colorado River—the main artery feeding the heart of the Sea of Cortés—runs through 1,500 miles of shales and basalts, granites and limestones, sandstones and gypsum domes. It formerly flushed tons of their eroded sediments and “sweet water” out over the delta, so that they spilled into the Sea of Cortés, enriching it with the calcium, iron, magnesium, and manganese, as well as the plant and animal debris required to build big, flavorful fish. Now those sweeter waters, their sedimentary bedloads, their nutrients and flavors, hardly ever reach the sea but are caught by dams, gradually filling up the reservoirs known as Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Marine ecologist Kirsten Rowell has found that before the dams began to eliminate virtually all freshwater flows into the sea, totoaba grew twice as fast and matured in half the time they do today. We now have a poorer sea, with fewer and smaller fish.The fish like totoaba and corvina have fewer, less diverse prey, and perhaps because of that, they are less flavorful. And so, the populations of golfina corvina remain in a precarious position despite a minor surge in reproduction now and then, while the totoaba has never left Mexico’s most endangered species list. They are no longer served in restaurants and only rarely show up in fish camps. Given such trends, it is no surprise that the number of boats fishing out of Kino Viejo has declined precipitously. Boys like those I fished with have taken on other professions inland, but few if any of them have become working cowboys for very long, or made it up the economic ladder to become ranchers. Many of those who try cowboying get badly injured within the first few years and move on to safer professions. And ranching requires a lot of capital; it seems like only narcos have enough cash to buy ranches away from the Sonoran families that have been raising livestock for decades or centuries. Instead, the men who once helped their fathers fish out of Bahia Kino now run mechanics’ shops or corner convenience stores, or do yard maintenance and other chores for the wealthy Americans who purchase beach homes on Kino Bay. They still love their beef and beer, and they still wear

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their cowboy hats, jeans, and boots. They continue to sing some corridos Norteño-style, and though a few of those ballads have been composed about fishermen and their struggles to stay alive, most are about horse races, narco chases, and women who love to dance. But hip-hop, Banda Sinaloense, and rock fill the ears of the grandchildren of Chapo and Perrón. Now aging men, the ones I fished with, listen to música romántica, love songs about taking risks and winning. But they know that fishing is a risk you just can’t take anymore. Not in the Sea of Cortés, not if you want to win. Not only are the fish and the fishermen almost gone, but the kind of fishing we did that day is largely a thing of the past. Hardly anyone uses cotton nets, for they have been replaced with the cheaper but less durable mesh of monofilaments, the ones that easily become ghost nets and drift away during storms to capture and kill countless species. What’s more, the small-scale, rodeo-style of fishing has all but been abandoned, except up near the Colorado River delta, where it is still sometimes used at night when a certain marine bioluminescence brightens the scene. Perhaps I should pardon myself for any guilt regarding my insignificant part in the now sad state of the Sea of Cortés. The dams had already been built, and the fish we harvested and gutted those days would have been caught by someone else if we had not encountered them first. And yet, roughly four decades after gutting fish with Chapo, Perrón, and their boys, my right hand still has memories of ripping the innards out of hundreds of corvina. Yes, memory lodges in our bodies, in our muscles and nerves, not just in our brains. Different muscles remember different things. My hand remembers gutting corvina. My heart remembers gutting the sea, and losing its many flavors.

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CHAPTER NINE

A Desert Communion

I When I was about three years old, I began to see how many lives are engaged in a food chain, in bringing the peculiar tastes of a plant or animal down the earth’s cascade of energy on its way to the taster. I would sit underneath a lone peach tree atop a small sand dune that overlooked a tiny, cattailchoked marsh. From that elevated vantage point, I would daydream while watching the birds and insects feed all day long. From dragonflies to jays to woodpeckers, these beings filled my senses as they feasted upon the world. Late one autumn afternoon, I sat in rapture as I watched two jays bring acorns, other nuts, and even peach pits back to a hollow tree just on the other side of the cattail patch. They would land up in an old cottonwood that had been struck by lightning, and drop acorns down a hollow in the trunk. Soon, a squirrel became alert to their cache, and I could watch him as he crawled down to the base of the cottonwood trunk to steal away with some of the nuts. The jays caught on to his game, and began shrieking, I thought, with laughter. This animated the squirrel enough to make him run up and down the trunk of the tree, which made the jays shriek even louder. As I watched them, I began to find my own acorns in the sand beneath a bur oak, and I piled them on little plates I made with chunks of clay I found beneath the sand.

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When the last afternoon light began to fade toward dusk, my mother remembered that I was still back in the sands behind our home. She came out onto the back porch to call me in for my nightly bath. “What are you still doing out there? You need to come inside—it’s nearly dark!!” “Nooo, we’re all still gathering acorns for our dinner together!” “What are you talking about? Get right in here before I give you a little spanking!” She gestured with her hand just like my Lebanese grandpa did when he threatened in Arabic to kick my little butt. Just then, the two jays flew over me, shrieking at the sight of me having a pile of acorns just like the squirrel had gathered from them. They made such a racket that it stopped my mother in her tracks. “See, even the jays want me to stay. They’re mad at you for wanting to take me away from our feast!” I may have been putting words into the jays’ mouths and anthropomorphizing them a bit, but over the years, I’ve held fast to my basic tenet: The best feasts and feeding frenzies I’ve ever participated in were not limited to just one species. They were communions for all creatures. Within two years’ time of that incident, I was on my way to becoming expert at locating hollow trunks in the dunes that were filled with acorns, or other edible nuts. Finding such trees meant that I might also stumble upon a wild feast. My explorations of hollow trees occurred during a time when kids could wander several hundred yards away from their homes along trails in the dunes without ever fearing any encounter except other, older, bossier children. I would take my first girlfriend, Georgina, into the woods a block down from our houses, and stay back on the trails for an hour or two at a time. We would look for hollow trees and then when we spotted one from a distance, crawl up to it on our bellies in case we could catch an animal coming out of it. Sometimes there was no animal, no cache, but a fragrant pool of green water in a moss-covered trunk. Other times there were woody bracken fungi or tender toadstools inside the hollow. We always hoped for bear cubs and honeycombs abandoned by colonies of bees, but these, we guessed, were found only near larger dunes, with deeper, darker forests on their slopes. The message that Georgina and I learned from our excursions in the dunes was clear: The world was full of secret caches that nourished not just

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one species but many. Finding them became a long-term pastime of mine, and the occasional discovery of a new kind of cache became a cause for celebration, a way to delight in the fecundity of the natural world. II Years later, after I had grown up and was married, I came upon an ironic coincidence. When some of my father’s clan first emigrated from Lebanon, they landed in New York and became pinyon nut vendors on the streets of Brooklyn.They had once foraged for another kind of pine nut in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains that rose up between their village and the Syrian border, and then they found that salted pine nuts roasted over coals were a favorite treat for NewYorkers during the colder months. They would purchase raw pinyon nuts that had come by train from the Southwest, clean them, salt them, and roast them on small aluminum-sided grills mounted on pushcarts. Sahadi’s Spice Company still sells hundreds of pounds of pinyon nuts to Arab immigrants each year, not far from where my uncles once hawked their wares along Atlantic Avenue. But that is only half of the coincidence. The nuts were reaching Brooklyn by way of Kelly-Gross Mercantile of New Mexico, owned by my wife’s uncles in Santa Fe. The Kellys and Grosses had a string of trading posts across northern New Mexico and regularly traded Native American and Hispanic families some dry goods for the pinyon nuts, sheepskins, chiles, and herbs they brought into the trading posts. Each fall, they would send tons of pinyon nuts by railroad back east to Brooklyn. But one particular year, the harvest of pinyon nuts they had purchased was rejected by buyers at the railroad yards in New York, for it was found to be loaded with rodent feces. When one of the Kellys finally got around to asking some of their Navajo harvesters how so much rodent feces could have gotten mixed into their gunnysacks of nuts, one Navajo family gave him a straightforward answer. His family had not harvested the pinyon nuts directly from the trees, but had waited until the rodents had harvested and cached dozens of pounds of nuts in some caves near their hogan. He then sent his sons out to borrow some nuts from the rodents, and leave some cornmeal for them in exchange for the work they had done. There were not enough Navajos in the world to collect enough pinyon nuts to fill entire railroad cars year after year. The bounty of nuts being sent off to New York each fall was largely due to the diligence of the Mouse

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People, the Navajo family explained. And so what is wrong with a little rodent dung in each bag? It was simply the calling cards of the real reapers of the desert’s bounty. III A few years later, I experienced a moment in my life that made me realize that while I could not wholeheartedly embrace the Catholic faith, I could embrace a truly catholic sense of communion and celebration. I had taken my daughter’s namesake and godmother, Laura Kerman, back to her desert village down by the border, and I stayed the night on a cot outside her old adobe home. When I awakened just before dawn, my comadre Laura had already fixed me a cup of coffee and was restless to get on with the morning. She asked that I drive her over toward the Catholic churchyard, where a feast day celebration was about to begin. As I parked my pickup truck and helped the old lady get out of the cab, I could see dozens of her relatives milling around, preparing for the coming of the sun. But it also became clear that they were gathered there for something to eat together. The sun’s rays had not yet spilled over the jagged horizon, but two-legged, four-legged, and winged eaters were already present, waiting in anticipation for the Feast of Saint Francis to begin. There were cowboys, farmers, basket weavers, cooks, woodcutters, and water fetchers, along with one young long-haired priest and one old medicine man who wore a huge cowboy hat that came down over his ears. I watched that medicine man for a while, his face dried and wrinkled and darkened like a desert prune. I realized that his sight was impaired, but I sensed that his vision was still very strong. Not very far behind him, there were horses standing still, dogs milling around, and one restless steer. In the giant cactus closest to this crowd, there were perched a few turkey vultures, some black vultures, and one caracara, the so-called Mexican eagle. From afar, it appeared as though they were huddled together in the embrace of the saguaro’s giant arms. The cowboys mounted their horses and went off to lasso a Corriente steer, to drag him over to the assembly, and to bring him down to the dry, barren ground. It took some doing. When the steer finally fell onto his side and stopped kicking, most of the folks moved in closer. They watched the blind old medicine man turn until

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he felt the rays of the rising sun warm the side of his face. He turned directly toward the sun to greet it in the east while the young priest sang a song of praise. It was in Latin, and while no one present understood its words, they tried to feel what it meant being sung at dawn. The priest swept his hand in the sign of a cross over the steer’s head. The medicine man brushed a branch of pungent creosote bush through a clay bowl of water, lifted it above his head, and whipped the wet branch until it shed its moisture as a blessing, splashing the beleaguered steer. Next, the young priest flicked the hair back from his eyes and sprinkled holy water on the steer as well. An old bowlegged farmer ambled up to the steer, and as three cowboys held it down, ropes strung tight around them, the farmer cut its throat. Blood spurted onto the ground. The steer quivered and kicked, until enough life had drained out of it that it could rest in peace. One elderly woman watched the whole thing, and then tossed a sprig of creosote bush onto the quieting body; she crossed herself, then walked over to the outdoor kitchen and put on an apron. Within twenty minutes, the steer’s hide had been cut off it like a blanket. Its blood had been drained away. Its entrails and other innards had been heaped up on the hide. Two butchers began to carve off the tenderloins, reduce them to thin strips, and send them over to the fire for immediate grilling. The wizened medicine man and the young long-haired priest were served first, followed by all the women, Laura and the other elderly ladies being brought to the head of the line. They all watched as three young cowboys dragged the hide and its pile of innards some hundred yards or so across the dusty earth, to deposit them just below the giant cactus where the birds remained perched. As soon as the cowboys dropped the hide and turned their backs to resume the butchering, first the turkey vultures, then the blacks and the lone caracara dropped down to inspect the offering that had been left for them. They hopped about, probing various organs with their beaks, positioning themselves to drag select pieces out of the heap. As more of the tenderloin strips were being grilled over the glowing coals of mesquite wood—fat dripping into the flames, crackling, sending up a smoky aroma that permeated the air—the scavengers began to eat. They occasionally glanced over to where the butchers still worked, but seemed rather unconcerned about their proximity to the human kind. Meanwhile,

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the dogs were tossed pieces of fat, or charred pieces of meat too burnt to eat. The dogs watched the people eat, as the people watched the vultures and the caracara. That evening, I saw them again, circling around us, as more than a thousand Indians, Mexicans, and Anglos assembled for the Feast of Saint Francis at that small desert rancheria. After the Mass, a thousand human mouths tasted the flesh of the same steer that the caracara and vultures had feasted upon. To prepare for the feast over the previous week, no money had been exchanged. One ranching family had agreed to donate the beef more than a year ago. Two families of farmers had gifted their recently harvested beans and chiles and squash. Several woodcutters had brought cords of firewood for the grilling, and for warming the dancers on their occasional breaks between sunset and dawn. Two dozen elderly women diligently grilled the meat, stirred the ingredients into cauldrons of red chile stew, boiled the beans, and fried the squash. Others brewed the coffee, delivered tortillas and cakes, washed dishes and pots, and found plates and cups and dinnerware enough for every person who had arrived. Deer dancers and various musicians—fiddlers, waterdrummers, flute players—arrived to perform, but they too did not expect to be paid, other than to partake of the smoke-imbued food with everyone else. The feast continued on toward dawn. Hardly anyone noticed the coyotes that came in to lick the hide clean of the last of the innards from the carcass. Instead, they all watched as the carved wooden body of Saint Francis was carried around the clearing by four old men, with women and children and dogs following behind them. The light from the campfire glinted off the polished wooden face of the desert saint, making it look as though he was smiling, crying, or filling his eyes full of stars. IV How many more years did it take me to realize that such sharing among species was not peculiar but has been the norm in the desert for hundreds of years? Just last year I stumbled across this brief passage in the journals of Padre Miguel del Barco, who penned a Relación in 1757 on the natural history of Baja California:

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Turkey vultures, with their extremely sensitive smell, are soon aware that something is dead, and many of them gather around, flying in circles high above the cadaver that they intend to devour. Indians use this signal sometimes to locate a deer [or bighorn] killed by some puma and so to claim the meat.

Now my wife and I live on the edge of the desert, where pinyon, oak, and juniper mingle with mesquite and cactus. We live above a small pond where wildlife come to drink, feed, and breed nearly every day of the year, and we have watched such things from the edge of our orchard. From that vantage point, we can comfortably observe all the swapping and stealing, killing and sharing, that goes on down by the pond. A young calf was once killed there, and just before dark, the ravens and owls arrived. Within two hours’ time, two coyotes and a gray fox joined them in the eating. By dawn, all the meat had been shared, and the bones and hide were all that was left. We have watched these acts of communion with the emotionally detached eyes of scientists and property owners, but we’re still drawn to the smell of roasting meat, smoked fish, or boiled mesquite beans. So we’re disturbed by rumors of people coming from far away who do not eat what owls, ravens, vultures, and pumas eat. We have heard it said that they never leave the other-than-human beings any cornmeal or fish. If they don’t even do that, how in the world do they expect to be fed the next season? What other animals will bother to gather food for humans, if we don’t share our harvests in return? Who of the other animals will be generous enough with their gatherings, gleanings, and killings to offer something up for the pregnant women, the sick children, and the skinny old ladies? Who will remember that we all must commune on the flesh and blood of this earthly body if our kind and other kinds are to endure? It just doesn’t make any sense to us, to eat without sharing, without even giving back. Why do such people want the rest of the world to stay so poor? Won’t they themselves become poor and hungry if there is no communion?

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Epilogue

I am out in the orchard on the ridge behind my home, getting ready to plant some of the very same fruit tree and vine varieties I have seen and tasted in Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Andalusia, Lebanon, and Oman. I’ll be placing them where the south-facing slope of terra rossa soil is baking in the desert sun. I am digging holes in the hard-packed clay and building rammed-earth terrace walls that run the contours of the slope. Although it is hot and dry, I am wet with sweat, for the late-summer sun is baking me as well. I’ve spent countless hours preparing the soil here for the planting of thirty Mission olives that have been brought in from the desert of West Texas. I have composted it, laced it with earthworms, microbes, or charcoal, mulched it with mesquite bark and wood chips. As I look up from where I am kneeling on the earth, adding more mulch, I can see other fruit and nut trees that I have planted over the last six months: Texas Mission almonds; pale-fleshed pomegranates from Magdalena, Sonora; Black Sphinx dates from Phoenix; Mission figs from Tucson; Mission grapes from the Californias; spineless prickly pears from the barrios of Tucson; and quinces from the San Rafael Valley down on the Sonora-Arizona border. As I labor with shovel and stone, I ponder some words recently written by my friend Rowan Jacobsen in his lovely book American Terroir:

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When most of us were more or less responsible for getting our own food, whether farming or foraging, reading the landscape was essential to our survival. Understanding how it worked, and how to work with it, was no elitist activity. At the core, our interest in terroir is an enduring desire to partner with the landscape, survive on it, and live well.

Most of the fruits and nuts I’ve planted are as desert-adapted as any domesticated horticultural selection can be, but my orchard lies high above the upper limits of neighboring Sonoran Desert habitats, at a lofty four thousand feet in elevation. In fact, my orchard resembles plains grasslands and oak savannas rather than true desert vegetation. Why, then, am I planting the fruits of the desert, rather than fruits that have long been cultivated on my home ground? My answer is painfully simple: I am anticipating that climate change will accelerate over the rest of my life span and perhaps change the taste of this place. It is likely that the true fruits of the desert will fare far better here than most of the particular apple and pear varieties that have been planted at this elevation over the last century. On the desert plateaus of Oman, where my Banu Nebhani ancestors began growing fruits more than a thousand years ago, long-cultivated trees bearing apricots, peaches, and grapes are no longer producing fruit like they used to. Over the last quarter century of global warming, they have lost a third of the winter chill hours that they require for flowering and fruiting in the warm season. Places in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California have suffered comparable warming trends. I have also spoken with orchard keepers from around the planet—from the semiarid motherland of apricots and apples in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan to Mexico—who now fear that they may be facing fruitless falls. And so I have chosen to enter into a strange betting game with Mother Nature. I am bringing up seedstock and rootstock from more southerly locales and from lower elevations, hoping that they will have a better chance of long-term survival on my four-thousand-foot perch above the Sonoran Desert in the Patagonia hills. Their fruits may not taste exactly the same as they have when grown in other locales over the last three hundred years, but perhaps the flavor makeover will be wonderful. Perhaps my fruits will not only survive but thrive in their newfound home, just as they did when

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Spanish and Italian missionaries first brought them to the deserts of West Texas, southern New Mexico, Sonora, Arizona, and Baja California. It may not be a question of which tastes better or worse, the grapes placed in the old wineskins of their original locales or in the new. It may be more of a riddle about learning to taste the difference between the two. To learn to taste anew. And that’s why I’ve planned one more trip down to the desert oases of Baja California as soon as my Mission olive trees are in the ground and I’m waiting for them to produce their very first fruits. I want to go down to the peninsular port town of Loreto, where some of the early Jesuit padres—Kino, Eguiarte, and Salvatierra—first introduced dates, figs, pomegranates, and grapes. I want to go out to the oldest Spanish missions nearby—San Javier and San Jose de Comondú—and walk once more in the spring-fed orchards there, below the canopies of three-hundredyear-old trees.Yes, there are still Mission olive trees from the very first planting on the peninsula. They are tall and twisted, their trunks tortured into gnarly spirals as if someone had turned them with a giant corkscrew over many decades. Their trunks are so thick that it once took six of us with our arms outstretched to reach around the base of just one of these elders in order to offer it a full-body hug. Un abrazo, mi anciano. Que le vaya bién. An embrace for you, my Elder. That your life will go well. As I kneel next to the hole in the ground where I will soon plant a threefoot olive sapling, I close my eyes and try to recall the stature of its threehundred-year-old madrina down at Mission San Javier, a tree so tall that it made my friend Jesús García look like an infant druid when he climbed up into its crown. What a pitiful little gesture I’m making, I admitted to myself, planting something so vulnerable at the onset of the fiercest bout of climate change that this earth has witnessed since the end of the last ice age. It will be many years before I get to taste its fruits, to discern how its terroir differs from its ancestor’s, now in decline down at Mission San Javier. I may be as decrepit as that ancient aceituna before this little sapling produces enough olives to press even one gallon of oil. My memory of fragrances and flavors may be so hampered by then that I may not even be able to compare the terroir of San Javier’s Mission olives with that of the ones in my own backyard.

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And yet I think of those adolescent olive trees trying to get a foothold in my own terraced orchard—their wispy, pencil-thin trunks, their slender but hopeful grayish-green leaves . . . What do I have to lose by preparing the earth for them? What stories might they tell if given the chance? The time to cultivate a new sense of desert terroir is right here before us. There has never been a better moment to open our mouths to savor the taste of this earth. As the poet Galway Kinnell once urged us to do, “Kiss the mouth which tells you, here, here is the world.”

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Literature Cited

Prologue Jacobsen, Rowan. 2010. American terroir: Savoring the flavors of our woods, waters, and fields. New York: Bloomsbury USA. Trubek, Amy B. 2008. The taste of place: A cultural journey into terroir. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chapter One: The Verve in the Herb Linhart, Yan B., and J. D. Thompson. 1999. Thyme is of the essence: Biochemical variability and multi-species deterrence. Evolutionary Ecology Research 1:151–171. Nabhan, Gary Paul. 2007. Stalking oregano in the wilds of Mexico. Edible Phoenix, Summer, 16–17. ———. 2011. Listening for the ancient tones, watching for sign, tasting for the mountain thyme. In Colors of nature, ed. Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy, 178–183. St. Paul, MN: Milkweed Editions. Thompson, J. D., Perrine Gauthier, Justin Amiot, Bodil K. Ehlers, Violeta Barrios, Francois Arnaud-Miramont, Ken Keefover-Ring, andYan B. Linhart. 2007. Ongoing adaptation to Mediterranean climate extremes in a chemically polymorphic plant. Ecological Monographs 77 (3): 421–439. Chapter Two. Hungry for Home Adorno, Rolena, and Patrick Charles Pautz. 1999. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His account, his life, and the expedition of Panfilo Narvaez. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Agah, Nouhou, quoted in Donald Webster. 1999. “Journey into the heart of the Sahara.” National Geographic 195 (3).

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Goodwin, Robert. 2008. Crossing the continent, 1527–1540: The story of the first AfricanAmerican explorer of the American South. New York: HarperCollins. Kreiger, Alex D. 2002. We came naked and barefoot: The journey of Cabeza de Vaca across North America. Austin: University of Texas Press. Reséndez, Andrés. 2007. A land so strange:The epic journey of Cabeza deVaca. New York: Basic Books/Perseus Group. Thoms, Alston P., and Philip Dering. n.d. Learning from Cabeza de Vaca. Rediscovering heirloom cookery: Roots of South Texas foodways. Texas Beyond History. University of Texas College of Liberal Arts, Austin. www.texasbeyondhistory.net. Thoms, Alston P. 2009. “Rock of ages: Propagation of hot-rock cookery in western North America.” Journal of Archaeological Sciences 36 (3): 573–591. Chapter Three. Seek-No-Further Burnett, John. 2007. Rio Grande town fights for survival. All Things Considered, November 23. www.npr.org. Ludden, Jennifer. 2002. Rural Towns suffer as border crossings tighten. Weekend Edition, December 7. www.npr.org. Tunnell, Curtis. 1981. Wax, men, and money: A historical and archeological study of candelilla wax camps along the Rio Grande border of Texas. Office of the State Archeologist. Report 32, Texas Historical Commission, Austin. Chapter Four. A Flour Blooms Arevalo, Esperanza. 2010. Mesquite tortilla/Tortilleria Arevalo. www.mesquitetor tilla.com. Desert Harvesters. 2010. Eat mesquite cookbook. Tucson, AZ: Desert Harvesters. Nabhan, Gary Paul, and Paul Mirocha. 1985. Gathering the desert. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Olivares-Giles, Nathan. 2007. Mesquite tortillas a healthful hit. Arizona Daily Star, August 30. www.azstarnet.com. Chapter Five. From the Beeves’ Lips to Paul’s Fears Anonymous. 2008. Old breed of small Spanish cattle could help U.S. ranchers. Las Cruces Appeal-Democrat (Associated Press), January 27. Brown, J. P. S. 1970. Jim Kane. Lincoln, NE: Authors Guild Back in Print. Fredrickson, E. 2005. Criollo cattle: An examination of the past with an eye to the future. Lecture presented at the annual meeting of the New Mexico Branch of the American Association of Laboratory Animal Science (AALAS). Fussell, Betty. 2008. Raising steaks: The life and times of American beef. New York: Harcourt Books.

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