Small Wonder (9 page)

The transition has happened gradually, in daily lessons that come through patience and careful scrutiny. Don Domingo Hernández, an elder statesman in the neighboring collective of Valentín Gómez Faríaz, had a lot to tell us about that. He walked us out to his cornfield, where he was experimenting with soil-boosting cover crops, and gave us a lively lecture on the benefits
of chemical-free agriculture: healthy soil microbes, nitrogen fixation, humus, conservation of moisture. Don Domingo tipped back his weathered cowboy hat, bent to scoop up a handful of black dirt, and held it out to me in his hand as reverently as any true believer might handle a relic of his faith. “Three years in this patch,” he said, “and this is the best corn crop I've ever had. Next year will be even better.”

The prime mover behind this change was not government charity but education provided by Pronatura, a Mexican conservation group, in concert with the U.S.-based Nature Conservancy and other private organizations. Working from a thatch-roofed office just north of X'pujil—which, like its demonstration garden, is open to visitors—a handful of agronomists and engineers offer ideas and technical advice; they are enormously respected by the region's farmers. Carmen was animated about this point. “Doña Norma came out from the
consejo
office and said to us, ‘What are you wasting time for? Plant trees!' So we planted trees.” This and dozens of other projects have given families like Carmen's a sense of belonging to their land, and a reason to stay. They have dug cisterns to catch rainwater from their roofs, following the instructions of a Pronatura engineer; they have also begun new beekeeping enterprises. A course in medicinal plants offered at the
consejo
office teaches women how to collect, process, and label all the remedies their families will need for infections and minor ailments. (The medicines are stored in plastic film canisters donated by conservation groups in the city.) After Hurricane Roxana devastated the southern Yucatán, when fevers and infections were scathing the peninsula, Carmen's collective had kilos of medicine on hand to donate to the relief effort.

“It's a much better life we have now,” Carmen insists. “We were skeptical at first, and some still hold to the old ways. But really, the old way was that we ate rice and beans and drank coffee. The rice and coffee, we had to buy with cash. We have a
healthier diet now with all the things we grow, and it's nicer, more interesting. Our kids like it better—that's how you know a change is going to stick.” She gave my belly a glance, smiling at my incipient pregnancy. “For the kids, there is no going back; this is the life they will choose.”

The stalwart tropical day had slipped away into evening as we were talking, and we now stepped outside Carmen's cool thatched house to watch the full moon rise. Orchids planted in tin cans bloomed pale and fragrant in the dusk. Normally they grow in the forest canopy, unseen by human eyes; Carmen called these her
huérfanas pobrecitas,
or “poor little orphan girls,” because she'd salvaged them from trees that the men of a neighboring
ejido
had felled for lumber. Every collective includes arable fields and a parcel of forest land extending into the Calakmul Reserve, to be used as the cooperative sees fit. Some are cutting their trees, sustainably, in a managed forestry program, but increasingly, others are not cutting theirs at all. Carmen's group of women voted against clearing their twenty-five hectares for a cornfield, deciding that the parcel would be more valuable to them as it stood, since it provides flowers year-round for beekeeping as well as an inexhaustible apothecary. It's also a balm for the spirit. Carmen made us pause in our conversation to look at the moon, a perfect orange lantern cradled in the arms of a cecropia tree.

“Listen!” she commanded, her eyes bright. From the forest's edge a warm wind carried the scent of wild spices and the sweet call of a pygmy owl. Somewhere within the jungle nearby a blue-eyed jaguar crouched, searching the wind for signs of its age-old forest companion, the human animal.

 

Many kilometers from the bordering ring of villages, deep in the very heart of the reserve, the giant pyramids of the Calakmul ruins
rest in permanent peace. At each turn of our journey we'd seen more remote, unvisited ruins, but this was literally the end of the road—the very edge of North America, beyond which no human residence or enterprise was to be found for a far cry. Our new friends from the
ejido
and
consejo
office had roused us in the early-morning darkness from the small thatched house on stilts where we'd spent the night, guiding us down the long, bumpy dirt road into the forest's heart with promises of the most dramatic sunrise of our lives. Now we groped our way by flashlight up deeply weathered steps to the top of the tallest pyramid. Mayan glyphs silently held their accounts beneath the industry of foraging ants. As the limestone softly crumbles, the forest retrieves it.

On a small platform atop a pyramid that was probably used for just such dramatic ceremonies in antiquity, our little group waited for the sunrise. I stood up, a little dizzy from the height—we were way above the treetops—and out of breath from the steep climb. I put my hand on my belly, where I carried the daughter whose name and gender I didn't yet know, and I whispered to my child internally:
Remember this with me. Once upon a time we were here, at the center of the world.
As far as I could see in every direction, a dark green sea of untouched forest rolled out to the whole, encircling horizon. In a lifetime—mine, anyway—one is given this blessing only rarely: the chance to stand on high ground, turn in every direction, and see absolutely not one single sign of visible humanity. This is how the world once was, without our outsize dreams and dominion. Nothing surrounded us but the dark embrace of trees, except where the predawn light touched the eroded stone face of another pyramid rising above the canopy. Our friends pointed out a bump on the southern horizon that they said was the pyramid of Mirador, on the Guatemalan border. From here to there, when the sun was just right, a person could flash signals with a mirror; and from Mirador, someone else could signal farther south to Tikal, and so on, to the edge of the Mayan
world. We stood at its very center. Then, between one held breath and the next, the sun appeared to us, scarlet and full-skirted on the horizon.

Very suddenly we found ourselves surrounded not by eerie silence but by a wilderness of wake-up calls. A troop of howler monkeys began to stir in the treetops just below us, letting loose a loud, primordial bellow. Emerald battalions of parrots darted past in formation, flashing in the whitewashed light.

Then came the chachalacas, the chickenlike birds we'd seen the previous day, whose call, I had been promised, I would never forget.
“Shh…!”
our friends said,
“Escuche,”
and we listened, but I didn't hear it at all. And then I did: a barely audible chorus in the far distance, Cha-
chalac?
Quietly, distantly, their neighbors answered back,
Cha-
chalac! The more I listened, the more plainly I could hear how they followed the call-and-response rhythm of a gospel choir: cha-
chalac? Cha
-chalac! They stirred one another to voice in increasing numbers to announce their revelation. This forest, I began to understand with a chill, was entirely filled with chachalacas. The birds themselves don't move, but their song does as they awaken one another each morning, their dawn chorale moving through the whole jungle in a vast oratory wave. The rising tide of their gospel song raced toward us, growing louder, louder and faster: Cha-
Chalac? CHA
-CHALAC! CHA-CHALAC!
Glory hallelujah!
The song came from everywhere at once, a musical roar like water, and then like water it divided, passing around us as a rush of singing, and then it receded and fell away—
Cha-chalac!
—toward the southern horizon. Finally it faded out of earshot.

None of us spoke. I imagined this wave of hallelujah traveling all the way to Guatemala and beyond, on down to the southern edge of the jungle, where the trees once again gave way to roads and cornfields, billboards and gas stations. But we were still deep inside a green, crowded world where parrots and monkeys were
not isolated survivors but citizens of a population. It was a city of animals here, as surely as each mute temple stood for a city of people who had once carved their reverence for animals in stone and climbed up to greet the dawn.

Of course, they aren't gone, the Mayans. On carved slabs of stone they left us clear pictures of their world, with man and beast facing off nose to nose in a thousand configurations: warrior and monkey; jaguar and emperor. The Mayans' ways and reverences have endured like stone, altered through seasons of sun and rain. Now in our latter days, iguanas scowl at tourists, and farmers may raise up great clouds of death on the vermin, but sometimes another story can root itself and take hold. In some quarters, farmers named Carmen and Don Domingo rule, in a reign that allows no poison and holds its breath for the moon and smiles at the sweet nightsong of an owl. Human and beast together may persist in this place, as they have always done, since the days when God was a feather-headed serpent.

Written with Steven Hopp

T
he spring of 1998 was the Halley's Comet of desert wildflower years. While nearly everyone else on the planet was cursing the soggy consequences of El Niño's downpours, here in southern Arizona we were cheering for the show: Our desert hills and valleys were colorized in wild schemes of maroon, indigo, tangerine, and some hues that Crayola hasn't named yet. Our mountains wore mantles of yellow brittlebush on their rocky shoulders, as fully transformed as eastern forests in their colorful
autumn foliage. Abandoned cotton fields—flat, salinized ground long since left for dead—rose again, wearing brocade. Even highway medians were so crowded with lupines and poppies that they looked like the seed-packet promises come true: that every one came up. For weeks, each day's walk to the mailbox became a botanical treasure hunt, as our attention caught first on new colors, then on whole new species in this terrain we thought we had already cataloged.

The first warm days of March appear to call out a kind of miracle here: the explosion of nearly half our desert's flowering species, all stirred suddenly into a brief cycle of bloom and death. Actually, though, the call begins subtly, much earlier, with winter rains and gradually climbing temperatures. The intensity of the floral outcome varies a great deal from one spring to another; that much is obvious to anyone who ventures outdoors at the right time of year and pays attention. But even couch potatoes could not have missed the fact that 1998 was special: Full-color wildflower photos made the front page of every major newspaper in the Southwest.

Our friends from other climes couldn't quite make out what the fuss was about. Many people aren't aware that the desert blooms at all, even in a normal year, and few would guess how much effort we devote to waiting and prognosticating. “Is this something like Punxsutawney Phil on Groundhog Day?” asked a friend from the East.

“Something like that. Or the fall color in New England. All winter the experts take measurements and make forecasts. This year they predicted gold, but it's already gone platinum. In a spot where you'd expect a hundred flowers, we've got a thousand. More kinds than anybody alive has ever seen at once.”

“But these are annual flowers?”

“Right.”

“Well, then….” Our nonbiologist friend struggled to frame
her question: “If they weren't there
last
year, and this year they
are,
then who planted them?”

One of us blurted, “
God
planted them!”

We glanced at each other nervously: A picturesque response indeed, from scientifically trained types like ourselves. Yet it seemed more compelling than any pedestrian lecture on life cycles and latency periods. Where
had
they all come from? Had these seeds just been lying around in the dirt for decades? And how was it that, at the behest of some higher power than the calendar, all at once there came a crowd?

The answers to these questions tell a tale as complex as a Beethoven symphony. Before a concert, you could look at a lot of sheet music and try to prepare yourself mentally for the piece it inscribed, but you'd still be knocked out when you heard it performed. With wildflowers, as in a concert, the magic is in the timing, the subtle combinations—and, most important, the extent of the preparations.

For a species, the bloom is just the means to an end. The flower show is really about making seeds, and the object of the game is persistence through hell or high water, both of which are features of the Sonoran Desert. In winter, when snow is falling on much of North America, we get slow, drizzly rains that can last for days and soak the whole region to its core. The Navajo call these female rains, as opposed to the “male rains” of late summer—those rowdy thunderstorms that briefly disrupt the hot afternoons, drenching one small plot of ground while the next hill over remains parched. It's the female rains that affect spring flowering, and in some years, such as 1998, the benefaction trails steadily from winter on into spring. In others, after a lick and a promise, the weather dries up for good.

Challenging conditions for an ephemeral, these are. If a little seed begins to grow at the first promise of rain, and that promise gets broken, that right there is the end of its little life. If the same
thing happened to every seed in the bank, it would mean the end of the species. But it
doesn't
happen that way. Desert wildflowers have had millennia in which to come to terms with their inconstant mother. Once the plant has rushed through growth and flowering, its seeds wait in the soil—and not just until the next time conditions permit germination, but often longer. In any given year, a subset of a species's seeds don't germinate, because they're programmed for a longer dormancy. This seed bank is the plant's protection against a beckoning rain followed by drought. If any kind of wildflower ever existed whose seeds all sprouted and died before following through to seed-set, then that species perished long ago. This is what natural selection is about. The species that have made it this far have encoded genetic smarts enough to outwit every peril. They produce seeds with different latency periods: Some germinate quickly, and some lie in wait, not just loitering there but loading the soil with many separate futures.

Scientists at the University of Arizona have spent years examining the intricacies of seed banks. Desert ephemerals, they've learned, use a surprising variety of strategies to fine-tune their own cycles to a climate whose cycles are not predictable—or at least, not predictable given the relatively short span of human observation. Even in a year as wet as 1998, when photo-ops and seed production exploded, the natives were not just seizing the moment; they were stashing away future seasons of success by varying, among and within species, their genetic schedules for germination, flowering, and seed-set. This variation reduces the intense competition that would result if every seed germinated at once. Some species even vary seed size: Larger seeds make more resilient sprouts, and smaller ones are less costly to produce; either morph may be programmed for delayed germination, depending on the particular strategy of the species. As a consequence of these sophisticated adaptations, desert natives can often hold their own against potential invasion by annual plants intro
duced from greener, more predictable pastures. You have to get up awfully early in the morning to outwit a native on its home turf.

The scientific term for these remarkable plants, “ephemeral annuals,” suggests something that's as fragile as a poppy petal, a captive to the calendar. That is our misapprehension, along with our notion of this floral magic show—now you see it, now you don't—as a thing we can predict and possess like a garden. In spite of our determination to contain what we see in neat, annual packages, the blazing field of blues and golds is neither a beginning nor an end. It's just a blink, or maybe a smile, in the long life of a species whose blueprint for perseverance must outdistance all our record books. The flowers will go on mystifying us, answering to a clock that ticks so slowly we won't live long enough to hear it.