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Preface
WINTER COUNT
I log my life by winter counts, in the fashion of Plains Indians who etched significant events on the inner side of a buffalo hide. This might be a battle, a treaty, an encounter with a dangerous creature or finding a spirit animal and possibly a winter so cold the cottonwood trees split apart. Though the Indigenous Tribes tended to mark each year, not every year of my life was worthy of a winter count. Some counts could come bundled in decades with only the rivulets of spring runoff and the emergence of bears to mark their passage.
So it was with me. I started a new count in 1968. There was my life before the war that prepared me for a life in the wilderness: a good life full of swamps, rivers, woods, deserts and mountains. From 1965 to 1968, I worked as a Special Forces medic who attended too much collateral damage—that cowardly phrase they applied to the pile of dismembered small bodies after a botched air attack. After March 1968, I applied that anger and wounding to defense of wild things, dimly realizing that that the fate of the earth and her inhabitants depended on an uncompromising protection of the wilderness homeland and wild creatures. My war experiences, good and bad, prepared me for the fight; it was a gift. I learned to love grizzly bears but as a slow learner, this took a while.
I also fell in love with the Lower Sonoran Desert, a romance of the sixties, broken by the separation of the war: Space, endless, clean vistas unbroken by the forests I so cherished up north. By late 1968, I had two polar mistresses: grizzly bears in the Northern Rockies and the desert. When the bears hibernated, I high tailed it south. ***
It’s winter now and I sit in a sun-filled desert wash; a few ground flowers are blooming and the stalks of brittlebush show a rare yellow blossom. I sit several days walk from where Ed Abbey is buried. This Lower Sonoran Desert country is still considered a wilderness and I miss my buddies with whom I shared those wild adventures: Ed Abbey, Peter Matthiessen, Doug Tompkins and Jim Harrison, though camps with Jim were on a decidedly tamer scale. Stories, even common ones, have endings and I always dreaded the loss of wild country, so much I cared not to live without it. Now another plague, far worse than the current industrial trashing of the land, has edged into the sky, and every creature on earth bigger than a field mouse is of risk of decimation or extinction.
And there it is. Back to Abbey’s ancient quandary: What to do, what to do? Duty textured in the joy of living fully and loving the earth. Except for a pledge to fight to the literal end I never quite solved this problem. Everyone’s mortality is in the lens now and it’s not necessarily a telephoto shot.
So I’ve spliced together some stories to fill the spaces between the infrequent books I’ve written. I’ve omitted writing about the eight epic walks I took in this vast desert wilderness stretching before me. It’s the huge roadless country between Ajo and Yuma, Arizona. Or more precisely, between places like Welton, AZ and Quitobaquito Springs in Organ Pipe National Monument. The core of the area is the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge. I made seven of these walks from end to end and another from the I-8 freeway south to the Mexican border. They take 10 days and cover around 130 miles, depending on the different routes I chose, never the same. I seldom if ever saw a human track on any of these walks. All were solo and I carried my own water, though you also had to find wild water in the high tanks every three days or so. You have to know where the water is out there or you die.
These solitary walks were the greatest currency Ed Abbey and I ever shared. Ed finished one and attempted another even after he had begun to die. So, with three friends, I buried him out there.
Solitude is as deep a well as I have encountered in this life and I found most of it either down here in the desert or up in grizzly country. Introspection arrives easily, blowing off the two-needle pines or on the desert breeze. It’s also a human luxury, best indulged in before your children are born. My long west to east walks were often taken during the holidays and I had to give them up cold turkey once my kids were old enough to know what Christmas was.
But what trips they were! Looking across a creosote bajada to a distant mountain range 40 impossible miles away and then just walking there. Startling bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, javelina, deer and crossing mountain lion tracks in the uninhabited, seemingly endless expanse of arid terrain: Finding broken pottery ollas of prehistoric Yuma and Pima people. Sitting on a memorial hill fasting and meditating for the entire day.
There’s more recent human sign out there too, most of it graves of the 1849 gold rush hordes and signs of a few miners from the turn of the 19 century. Of course, since the border wall and desperate immigrants, many unmarked and recent graves have been added.
The one name I have run across out there is “John Moore.” I’ve stumbled across it four times, etched on boulders in some of the most rugged and remote parts of the Cabeza Prieta: twice in the Cabeza Prieta Mountains, once in the Sierra Pinta and another rock scratching in the Growler Range. The dates range from 1906 to 1909. Twice the name John Moore is punctuated by a startling phrase: This was very rough country in the early 1900s. Sometimes the water tanks ran dry and the temperatures soared to 130 Fahrenheit.
The closest wild water west of where I sit is in the mountains, up 700 feet over treacherous scree and ankle-breaking basaltic boulders. Prehistoric people visited this natural tank. A boulder not far from the water is etched with a name and that enigmatic inscription:
"John Moore 1909 Was it worth it?"
