Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | J | Journal of the Southwest

Learning nothing, forgetting nothing: on the trail of Carl Lumholtz.

Article Excerpt
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It was a great pleasure to be with these natural people. I sang to them my newly acquired Papago song, 'The Frog Doctor,' ... and ingratiated myself in their favor ....

"Frog Doctor, Frog Doctor Continually sits, sings. Yonder spring forth winds And make me wet...."

--CARL LUMHOLTZ, New Trails in Mexico

The man under the ironwood tree beckons, his fingers pointing down to the ground and flapping toward him. This is Sonora and the gesture means come over.

The fire crackles under a sheet of tin and the coffee pot bubbles, the blue metal blackened by the smoke. Six campesinos huddle in the chill of a January day. The brown hands show work and the smiles reveal a tooth missing here and there. I reach for the offered cup, gray with a blue lip. Leaves swirl inside, pieces perhaps of ephedra, Mormon tea, the poor man's brew of the desert. I swallow and feel the warm rush of tequila and smile and the men smile back.

They sit on little folding chairs before the hut, a shack of sticks, cardboard, scavenged wood, tin. This is Ejido Cerro Colorado, and the men say it has prospered on the Rio Sonoyta since 1960. They carry two chairs over and motion us to sit but we politely refuse and stand there sipping tequila with sixty pounds apiece of backpacking gear hanging from our shoulders. This is the third day and we have adjusted to being minor events as we walk down the desert river.

The stream trickles along a sand bed and at times disappears and then bubbles back again. Great blue herons and killdeer rise before us and swirl. The banks bristle with tamarisk, and the green and brown water flashes with the darting of Sonoran pupfish, a minnow-like creature that has made this skin of water a world.

I sip the liquor and watch the sun blaze through the clear bottle resting by the fire. We are at the start of a two hundred-mile walk through ground that the twentieth century calls wilderness, what Mexicans consider a despoblado--ground innocent of people. In 1909, a Norwegian naturalist named Carl Lumholtz came this way, and we follow his trail, a kind of excuse to justify our wandering. We have a map of his journey, the land white, sea blue, mountains gray and black outlines, and a red line going everywhere and labeled "author's route." We follow that red line like bloodhounds on a rank scent. Of course, the trail is cold, three-quarters of a century stale, but this does not hinder us and as the days pile up, this wall decades thick seems barely a detail. For us, the red line is still flesh and Lumholtz spoor wafts across our senses in the heat of the afternoons and the night thoughts just before dawn.

I have just quit my job. My friend, Bill Broyles, is on a year's holiday from high school teaching. We are middle-aged men acting out the life of boys, instant juveniles free of jobs, responsibilities, and plans for the future. And we are standing with six peasants before a hut on a desert river and sharing their liquor and the good time of their afternoon. My backpack costs more than their homes but this does not seem to matter to any of us at the moment. Mexico can be like that at times, strangely forgiving of the canyons between the rich and the poor. We began in Sonoyta, a town of 15,000 upstream on the river, where the local Indians in the mid-eighteenth century crushed the priest's head with a rock and sacked the church. Our first night we slept by the ruins of the old mission, the mud walls almost completely swallowed again by the desert. Through the dark hours, trucks rumbled into the cotton gin next door and no one in the town bothered our slumbers or mentioned the strangeness of white men sleeping on ground covered with broken beer bottles while the night touched the mid-twenties.

At dawn we walked the riverbank past small adobe houses, the yards bright with fresh wash on the line and outlined by rows of prickly pear. Here and there the cactus pads had been whacked off and eaten by the residents. A small brown dog curls in the sun, his anus a raw red pulp of sores made by worms.

Breakfast is at a cafe amid tables of truckers, vaqueros, and rich Mexicans. We wear shorts and carry these packs, and no one here comprehends or asks why we voluntarily become beasts of burden. A woman walks in with her children. She wears woolen warm-up leggings--a figment of Flashdance--and her full body...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!