Corbett and his students traveled light. They took sleeping bags, a little other gear, but no food. Carrying food into this landscape was unnecessary. Instead of food, they herded along a few goats.
Later Corbett would write a book-length (still unpublished) manuscript titled Goatwalking, an improbable gumbo of his ranching and backcountry know-how and his philosophic and political ideas. Goatwalking is a strange, intriguing document, the quiet manifesto of a man who combines in himself some of the more appealing aspects of Thoreau, Thomas Merton, and Emiliano Zapata. It is a guidebook toward revolutionary simplicity and wildland dairying. He writes in the book that “goatwalking could be explained on a single page, as a menu. How about a quart-and-a-half of [goat’s] milk, another quart of yogurt, a side dish of tumbleweed greens, some roasted mescal heart for sweets, and four or five saguaro fruits for dessert? And put some bellota [a type of desert acorn] in your shirt pockets for between-meal snacks. I’ve discovered that it’s not difficult to teach people to eat, although they may prefer starvation to tasty but taboo foods such as grubs or grasshoppers.”
But it’s really much more than a desert-survival menu. Through this concept he calls “goatwalking,” Corbett aligns himself with those nomadic pastoralists—of ancient Sinai or twentieth-century Tibet or wherever—who have come to the realization that “their livestock could provide the life-support and security associated with [planted crops] while also providing the mobility necessary to escape the state.” In Corbett’s usage, goatwalking is a potent synecdoche, representing exactly what the word says and also much more.
At the literal level it stands for the life of pastoral nomadism (tending and traveling with half-wild grazing animals), practiced on a wilderness landscape and, in Corbett’s version, outside the purview but within the physical boundaries of the modern industrial state. The goats are allowed to go feral, habituating themselves to wilderness pasturage, and the goatwalker goes feral along with them, living on milk and wild plant foods. On a political level, this goatwalking life is recommended as what Corbett calls “the cimarron alternative.” The Spanish word cimarrón has entered English with two definitions, and Corbett intends them both: Besides “feral animal,” it also means “runaway slave.”
The cimarron alternative in this sense is the act of stepping beyond societal constraints and into the wilderness of a purer moral freedom. The goatwalker is a runaway slave who knows how to live off the land. Naturally, therefore, he will feel sympathy for his fellow cimarrons—and Jim Corbett’s own goatwalking has always had that dimension. “During the Indochina War,” he says in Goatwalking, “I became a habitual criminal, frequently associated and conspired with fellow lawbreakers, and sometimes used an isolated ranch headquarters as a refuge and way-station for fugitives. Naturally enough, we occasionally speculated about the use of goatwalking as an escape technique. A small group of people who have mastered goatwalking can simply vanish, since their life-support is mobile and is also independent of the governmentally monitored commercial system.” It was no big step from that sort of speculation to Corbett’s later role in the sanctuary movement. His manuscript continues: “When a person or a group is faced with extermination, enslavement, or long-term imprisonment, going free may be a more responsible choice than attempting to resist. . . . If we are lucky, few of us will ever face political conditions that would make escape necessary for survival. . . . Maybe Latin American peasants or World War II partisans or pre-emancipation blacks might withdraw into the sierras, but the thought that anyone in today’s United States might do so is absurd, isn’t it? It is for those who don’t know how.”
Now this may all sound quixotic or woolly to you or me—but Jim Corbett happens to be the sort of stubborn Quaker moralist who turns quixotic notions into acts. Goatwalking was written in the late 1970s, several years before Corbett met his first Salvadoran refugee. Then when the need arose for a desert-smart guide who would lead terrified fugitives through wilderness and across a border, circumventing the armed minions of national policy (as distinct from law), he was decidedly ready. He knew how.
And there was one other element that seems to have figured in Jim Corbett’s readiness, closely related to his cimarron sensibility, closely related also to his reading of Exodus: the tradition, common among nomadic peoples inhabiting harsh landscapes, of radical hospitality. For the Bedouin this was dakhala. Among the tribal nomads of Tibet—whose culture was for Corbett an important paradigm—the provider of dakhala finds a striking equivalent in the protective host known as bDag Po.
The Tibetan plateau is not a true desert but, with its drastically high elevations (even the valleys are above 10,000 feet), its rocky canyons, its thin air and poor soil and sudden shifts between heat and blizzard, it is certainly a land of extremity and denial. In such a place—lacking police, lacking inns and restaurants, lacking the forms of refuge that can be bought elsewhere with money—no one goes visiting for frivolous reasons, and hospitality is limited to a high seriousness. When a bDag Po has offered shelter to a guest, he has also committed himself as a guardian and sponsor, guaranteeing against his own honor that the guest will be safe from danger and aided materially for the continued journey.
In an inclement land like Tibet or Arabia, the need for such human clemency is recognized as a sacred truth, because the need is always potentially mutual. Hospitality is understood vividly: as a matter of life and death. In the Sonoran Desert, where thirteen Salvadorans had already died, that’s exactly how Jim Corbett came to understand it.
• • •
The trial began in October of 1985 and lasted until the following May. It was a long and expensive prosecution, with its full share of complex legal technicalities, its moments of true drama and melodrama, but the proceedings as they unfolded were perhaps more notable for what did not happen than for what did.
At the very start the presiding judge, Earl H. Carroll, issued several orders barring certain types of evidence: No testimony would be accepted concerning the political conditions or dangers in any foreign country; no testimony concerning the defendants’ religious beliefs or motivations; no testimony related to the defendants’ understanding of U.S. immigration laws; no evidence of the defendants’ belief that those aliens they stood accused of helping were legitimate refugees. That list of exclusions covered nearly every defense that the defendants’ attorneys had hoped to use. Evidence about the ninety-eight percent denial rate for Salvadoran asylum applicants was inadmissible. The 1980 Refugee Act was inadmissible.
Consequently the trial’s outcome may have been virtually settled before the opening statements were made. But the trial went ahead anyway, with its other significant omissions. The chief INS investigator who had guided the undercover operation was never called by the prosecution to testify. The ninety-one tapes of supposedly conspiratorial sanctuary conversations were never (except for one half-hour set of excerpts, carefully selected by the prosecutor) played in court. The defense attorneys themselves fought for admission of the full tapes, hoping that way to show the defendants’ activities in context, but the judge supported the prosecutor’s decision to keep the jury ignorant of any such context. Three unindicted sanctuary workers and one refugee all refused to testify for the prosecution, despite subpoenas, and were therefore held in contempt, sentenced to house arrest until the trial ended. Of the refugees who did testify, seemingly under duress, the prosecutor complained that their memories were selective: They more readily recollected the deaths of their family members, the terror and violence they had fled, than whatever incriminating words had been uttered by John Fife or Darlene Nicgorski. One refugee witness, Alejandro Rodriguez, speaking of a middle-aged woman defendant, had another recollection: “She was the only person that offered me a roof over my head when I was most in need. People told me she had a good heart. I remember her with much love.”
And finally the defendants themselves did not testify. In fact they literally presented no defense at all. On a Friday morning in the nin
eteenth week of the trial, with the prosecution having rested and the sanctuary lawyers now scheduled to begin calling witnesses, each of those lawyers stood up in turn and announced that the defense, too, rested its case. This seems to have been partly an act of strategy (if the defendants were forbidden to mention refugee law or religious motivations or anything else they considered significant, what value in giving the prosecution a chance to cross-examine them?) and partly an act of sheer protest.
Insofar as it was strategy, the strategy seems to have failed. Probably, given the judge’s rulings, any strategy would have failed. On May 1 the jury came in with its verdicts.
* * *
Late one evening near the end of the trial, Reverend Fife sat in the living room of his home, exhausted from six months of courtroom tension, nursing a beer, and telling me about the large place held in his own Presbyterian heart by the spiritual traditions of the Papago Indians. It might sound as though he were digressing, but he was not.
In the unsparing terrain that is southwestern Arizona, the niche of Bedouin existence has for hundreds of years been filled by the Papago tribe. They are also known, to themselves and others, as the Desert People. The area they traditionally occupied, and within which their reservation now lies, is one of the most arid and least hospitable parts of even the Sonoran Desert—a landscape of flat valleys cobbled with wind-blown pebbles, sharp ridges that curl around confusingly like the walls of a labyrinth, arroyos and washes carved by torrential runoff and opening out blankly into dry basins, where nothing much grows except creosote bush. Drought is followed by flood, in Papago country, then again by drought; the desert blooms, briefly, then withers; the cycle of life for all living creatures entails unpredictable but ineluctable swings between extremes of abundance and dearth. Over the centuries the Papago adapted themselves to this cycle.
One of their adaptations was an ethic of radical hospitality. Under pressure of landscape, a Papago culture evolved in which great premium was placed on generosity, gift-giving of food and clothing, the sharing of surplus whenever there was any surplus. Wildly generous with each other, the Papago lived as though abundance were the rule, in a land where abundance was the exception. Today we might see them as existentialists of the desert—or perhaps just as hopelessly improvident. But in fact they were quite provident. The limitless mutual gift-giving was a survival strategy for a desert people.
That Papago ethos still informs the spirit of Southside Presbyterian Church, which was founded eighty years ago as a Papago mission in a Tucson ghetto that was then known as “Papagoville.” It also goes far to explain the presence in Tucson of John Fife himself. Twenty years ago, fresh out of a seminary in Pittsburgh, Fife came down to spend a summer on the Papago reservation, where he fell in love with the people and the desert and the strange dynamic between those two. When the pastorship of a little Papago church in Tucson came open, six years later, he jumped for it.
“I’ve heard their stories,” Fife told me. “We’ve spent a lot of time talking about traditions. I climb their sacred mountain, Baboquivari, every year. Try to get to I’itoi’s cave.” I’itoi is the chief Papago deity, believed to dwell at the moral center of Papago life and at the physical center of their lands, in a cave on the steep slope of Baboquivari. “I’ve been on that mountain when Papago folk had visions,” Fife told me. “I didn’t see anything—but they did.” As he spoke, on the wall behind his head hung a characteristic piece of Papago coiled basketry, flat and circular, woven from tan and black fibers in the design of a concentric maze. At the entrance to the maze stood a small figure, itself woven in black, recognizably human. The large silver buckle on Reverend Fife’s belt bore exactly the same pattern. The design is called I’itoi Ki:, and has strong resonance for the Papago. The pattern commemorates an episode, Fife explained, when I’itoi escaped from his enemies by leading them into such a maze.
The design is also understood allegorically. “The maze represents all the complexities and dead ends of life,” Fife said. In the course of a lifetime a person must move through all those complexities, through all those tribulations and misleading paths, toward the center point, at which waits safety, fulfillment, Baboquivari. I was intrigued by this maze. Clearly it also represents the desert.
* * *
The sentencing of Reverend Fife and the seven other convicted refugee-smugglers was held in early July 1986, the same week as that great orgy of self-congratulation by which some Americans celebrated the centennial of the Statue of Liberty. Fife was eligible for as much as fifteen years in prison, and the other defendants faced between five and twenty-five. But each of them was given a suspended sentence and a period of probation. Evidently such treatment is usual for first-offense cases under the laws in question.
Still, it all seemed a little anticlimactic after such a notorious trial—and it properly was anticlimactic, since the real drama had always lain elsewhere. The real drama had always lain in Central America, where noncombatants are still being killed, and in the deportation policies enforced by our government against refugees of some nationalities but not others. The Tucson defendants had never forgotten that, and so they were relieved at the relative leniency they received, but not jubilant. There had been no leniency and no suspension of sentence, after all, for the terrified people who face deportation.
I did not intend this to be an idle rumination on the ecology and anthropology of arid lands. The moral ecology of the United States is what concerns me. As more and more Salvadorans and Guatemalans are deported, under the pretense that they are “economic migrants,” more and more innocent people, America’s rejects, may be abducted and tortured and murdered. Of course each of us will share responsibility with our government for those deportations. Some will try to believe that this country, with its poor sad stumbling economy, cannot afford any more refugees. Others will simply not want to be reminded about another group of abused, needy people. Most of us would prefer to forget the whole subject. The thing that we all need to remember is the same thing that John Fife and Jim Corbett have each learned: that sometimes hospitality is a matter of life and death. The desert, in this essay, is just a mnemonic device.
V
CHAMBERS OF MEMORY
THE MIRACLE OF THE GEESE
A Bizarre Sexual Strategy Among Steadfast Birds
Listen: uh-whongk, uh-whongk, uh-whongk, uh-whongk, and then you are wide awake, and you smile up at the ceiling as the calls fade off to the north and already now they are gone. Silence again, 3 A.M., the hiss of March winds. A thought crosses your mind before you roll over and, contentedly, resume sleeping. The thought is: “Thank God I live here, right here exactly, in their path. Thank God for those birds.” The honk of wild Canada geese passing overhead in the night is a sound to freshen the human soul. The question is why.
What makes the voice of that species so stirring, so mysteriously authoritative, to the ears of our own species?
It is more than a matter of beauty. It is more than the majesty of unspoiled nature. Listen again, to America’s wisest poet:
Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.
I could not see them, there being no moon
and the stars sparse. I heard them.
I did not know what was happening in my heart
It was the season before the elderberry blooms,
Therefore they were going north.
The boy in Kentucky, seventy years ago, was Robert Penn Warren. The lines are from Audubon: A Vision, Warren’s great meditative poem on John James Audubon, the American wilderness, and the nature of love and knowledge. What was happening that evening in young Warren’s heart? What is it that happens in yours or in mine when we hear the same sound today? Presumptuously, I propose a theory.
Wild geese, not angels, are the images of humanity’s own highest self. They show us the apogee of our own potential. They live by the same principles that we, t
oo often, only espouse. They embody liberty, grace, and devotion, combining those three contradictory virtues with a seamless elegance that leaves us shamed and inspired. When they pass overhead, honking so musically, we are treated to (and accused by) a glimpse of the same sort of sublime creaturehood that we want badly to see in ourselves.
The particularities that support this notion are many, and you can find them in any study of the animal’s biology and behavior. Here I want to consider just one. Geese mate monogamously, and for life.
• • •
Some thinkers would have us believe that monogamy and (still more extreme) fidelity are masochistic inventions of human culture, artificial limitations inspired by superstition and religion, and running counter to all natural imperatives of biology. Doesn’t biology dictate that males of any given species should try to perpetrate their sperm as broadly as possible upon the female population? Doesn’t evolution require that a female advance her own genes by selecting the strongest and smartest mate available when she is first ready to breed, and by then selecting another, if possible even stronger and smarter, the next time around in her cycle? Doesn’t the Darwinian dynamic—the relentless competition for reproductive success and survival—entail an equally relentless flirtatiousness among all animal species, an unending lookout for the prospect of a new and better mate? Well, no, not always. The evolutionary struggle, it turns out, is somewhat more complicated than a singles’ bar. Among geese, there is an ecological mandate for fidelity.
Geese live a lofty but difficult life, facing the problems of starvation and predation in forms that are acutely particular to them, traveling long distances each year between their wintering ranges and their breeding grounds, struggling each summer to hatch and raise and educate a brood of goslings. Amid these travails, they just can’t afford to philander. They need one another there on the scene, male and female, each its chosen mate, at all times. They have committed themselves, by physiology and anatomy, to a life of mutual reliance in permanent twosomes.
The Flight of the Iguana Page 22
