Thank you very much, Dick.
We're trying out some new satellite sound system here.
Is the sound good all the way?
Great.
It really is an honor to be here reading in this series,
and I do thank Dick and my other colleagues for insisting.
Even though it's rather embarrassing
to be sponsoring myself here.
I'm going to read excerpts from three
of the chapters of this new book,
and then we'll see how the time goes.
If there's time, I may read two new poems.
This book is set in a number of fairly remote places, most
of them in the American West, also the Hawaiian islands,
and in the Sea of Cortés, and in Southern Mexico.
All places where that one can really
experience that very painful abrasion of progress
with the natural world and older cultures from which I still hope
we have the capacity to learn.
From which I hope we have the capacity to learn.
So the first excerpt I'm going to read is from chapter five.
It's from an essay called "In the Territory of Birds,"
and it's set down in the--
down in Seri Indian country on the west coast of Sonora.
Punta Chueca is a dry and hungry village,
a clutter of cement block houses, ocotillo-ribbed fences,
hairless black dogs, and mangy chickens.
And a few hundred Seri Indians, who
have made a more or less permanent encampment
on a bleached little crook of sand
protruding into the infernal southern reaches of the Sonoran
desert in the Sea of Cortés.
Nomadic people accustomed for centuries
to moving when water grew scarce,
the Seris are pretty new to the idea of staying put.
Their parched homeground led them never
to camp for more than a month or two in one place.
As recently as the 1950s, their homes
were built of brush and sea turtle bones.
Their weight on the land, slight and brief.
But now, they have the heavy goods of civilization.
Cement, electricity, convenience store, and satellite dish.
I went there to meet a friend who'd been visiting
the village for 25 years.
His friendship among the Seris helped
to soften the feeling that my presence there was something
hard.
He had arranged for us to camp on Isla Tiburón
with a local guide and a small group of American students
interested in learning how the loss of Native language
was eroding the Seris' natural history
knowledge about Indigenous plants and animals.
What is this animal's name?
Where does it live?
What does it use to build its nest?
What does it eat?
Does it lay eggs?
When?
How many?
What stories do you know about this animal?
When is the plant harvested?
Is it used for food or medicine?
They ask the children in Spanish, the elders in the Seri
language.
Every animal, some plants, used to have a song.
They taught us a few.
One about the horned lizard who'd gone out to gather
firewood, loading it on his back as he
climbed into the ironwood tree.
Come here, come here, the people in the village called.
Bring us that firewood.
But ants had begun to crawl up his legs and bite him.
With all that wood on his back, he could not get them off,
lost his balance, and fell out of the tree.
Every time someone sang this song, the Seris lit up,
shaking their heads and muttering with affection,
pobrecito, pobrecito.
Poor little one.
The lizard, it seemed, carried their burdens along
with his own.
He shared humanity with them.
They shared animality with the lizard.
A woman told us about a mushroom that looks like a penis
but refused to say more, explaining: I am a Christian.
Then an older woman sang its song.
The others laughed so loud, we never caught the words,
but the woman was too modest to sing it again.
She would only say that it was very dirty.
It was in this place that I found
myself an accidental tourist in a territory of birds.
I did not plan for this to happen, nor did I regret it.
We set out across the Infiernillo Channel
for Isla Tiburón, five visitors in all,
in the care of Ernesto Molina, our Seri guide.
He ferried us in his panga over the great chop
to the island's long bajada where
we stepped onto 20 stark miles of cardón, mesquite and creosote
bush with the rosy Sierra Kunkaak rising
along the island's spine, its shark fin summit cutting
into the bare sky.
We set up our tents and hung a blue plastic tarp
over arched ocotillo ribs at an ancient encampment
site on the beach.
Clamshells and clay shards littered the mealy sand.
Some thick-walled fragments lipped at the top,
and some delicate egg shells from the large ollas
made for carrying water from the mountain.
We found a few discarded metates and manos
made of black volcanic stone not native to the place, remnants
of a time when eel grass and mesquite
seeds were milled into flour near the place
they had been harvested.
Osprey and pelicans dove offshore for fish.
A single curlew waded in the shallows, a gull and crow
picking their way across the mudflats.
Three of our group walked a mile up the beach
and found the clean, meatless skeleton of a dolphin stranded
above the tide line, its ribs like pairs of stylized doll arms
embracing nothing.
Three teeth lay bedded in their sockets.
We loosened them, stroked the soft ivory,
then slipped them in our pockets, one for each of us
to take home as talisman of our good fortune in discovery.
It did not matter that our discovery was of death.
Being human, we found joy in the new,
even if the new was grotesque or played
at the timbre of elemental fears.
Perhaps with those dead teeth in our pockets, we felt,
we had stolen a little of death's power.
The Seris have lived in the region for over 2,000 years,
and Isla Tiburón has been significant to them
for its clean mountain springs, wild game, and plants
gathered for food, medicine, baskets, and dyes.
They have 13 names for mesquite, seven of which
are for growth stages of the seed pod.
The names for eelgrass, another important food plant,
signifies stages of its lifecycle.
When it first sprouts, when it grows
above the surface of water, when it detaches and floats up,
when it piles into windrows on the beach.
These are the last hunter-gatherers
in Mexico and quite possibly the poorest people in the nation.
There were once six groups speaking three dialects
scattered around the region.
According to Richard Felger, the prominent anthropologist
of the culture, the remaining Seris
are an amalgamation of survivors from these regions.
Their longevity on the west coast of Sonora
has been established by carbon dating of eelgrass found
in an ancient burial site.
Ernesto wanted to take us to a spring
in the mountains, a place where the Seris had
gathered water for centuries.
We hiked inland toward the crinkled heights, Ernesto
marching purposefully through the scrub
as if there were a path, his blue satin baseball jacket
a beacon ahead while we picked our way, sweaty and leery
of rattlesnakes, through the thorns and brush.
I guess there was a path in his mind,
for he never hesitated unless to explain
how the creosote bush provided a decongestant and nerve tonic.
The staff of torote blanco served as a cure for cataracts.
The roots of ratany were woven into baskets,
and blue dye made from ground-up snails mixed with four or five
of these plants.
One of our group told him, you ought to become a biologist.
I already am a biologist, he answered.
As a community leader, Ernesto had
received training in Mexico City in ecotourism.
The government hopes that the industry
will help to support poor, Indigenous communities that
are less able to live by traditional means because
of shrinking and degraded habitats.
The Seris have a reputation for being opportunistic.
When the Spanish settled in Mexico in the 17th century,
the nomadic Seris made good use of new resources
by moving and hustling cattle to augment their hunting.
In the 20th century, they expanded their subsistence
fishing to serve the growing commercial market.
But in the Sea of Cortés, as elsewhere, wild resources
are strained.
There is not much left to fish for except tourists.
Ernesto was not naive about the impact of outsiders.
He told us about a rich Mexican who'd settled on Seri land
and killed off plants by the thousands in order
to build his enormous house.
We got rid of him, Ernesto said, even though this guy threatened
to kill us if we did.
We used to fight with guns.
Now, we fight with knowledge.
He was studying the Mexican Constitution,
and though he had his reservations
about the negative impact of tourists
on Seri land and culture, the options being negligible,
he was willing to give it a try.
As we walked farther into the heat of the day,
our pace lagged, and our eyes wandered
to the ground at our feet with more longings
than to the heights that lay an hour ahead.
We stopped to rest.
Someone found a bleached deer rack.
Ernesto said before the Seris had guns,
his grandfather had hunted with the whole head of a deer,
wearing it on his head, hiding behind a bush,
moving gradually closer to the herd.
The deer thought the interloper was one of their kind,
and little by little would approach until one got so close
that the men could jump it.
In his lifetime, Ernesto had [AUDIO OUT] guy do it.
And he said that the movements were incredible.
It's dangerous, he cautioned.
If you screw up, the animals are right on top of you.
He said little about other aspects of his grandfather's
history except that the place where we were headed
was called the place where we go when the enemy chases us.
We had read about the battles with the Mexican army fought
on that ground, the slaughter of women and children
who had run to a cave in the mountains to hide.
At certain points along the way, Ernesto
murmured under his breath,
pobrecitos, pobrecitos,
and we sensed that he knew just what terrible thing had
occurred in that spot.
Even now, the Mexican marines maintained a small base
on the island, though a government decree
had designated the place to be under Seri jurisdiction.
Some of the people worried that what had happened
in Chiapas last year, the official government slaughter
of Indigenous rebels, might happen here next.
I wondered if leading groups of foreigners
over ground hallowed by his ancestors' sufferings
might feel to Ernesto like a sacrilege.
I knew that it must be so, and also
that for the Seris to survive on their home ground,
such tours were one of their best bets.
There were six in our party, three men and three women.
Perhaps the cause was the heat of high afternoon.
Perhaps the fact that several of us
already had begun to suffer from an unfriendly intestinal
colonization.
You've been there, right?
Perhaps the sadness and complexity of history
had crept into our idle mood, but whatever the cause, after we
stopped in the shade to snack and sip from our canteens,
the women decided we were too tired to go on.
The men continued up the slope, hoping
to reach the mountain spring.
We lay in the sparse shade of palo verde and ocotillo
to nap and talk about the troubles women save for one
another's listening.
Mostly, it was the subject of men
that occupied our conversation, wondering
what makes it work or not work between a woman and a man.
One told of meeting the man she loves
during an outdoor leadership program.
After a month in the wilderness, they
were covered with grime and the stink of their bodies.
That's when they fell in love.
It was pheromones, she said.
I'm sure of it.
Another told of her lingering break
from a brilliant and charming man who
refused during the last year together to touch her.
I told of infidelity suffered, and the attraction I could not
resist for someone new, though I saw in the man
the same tendencies that had wounded me before.
We lounged in the sweet togetherness
of women in which our hopes for love thrive.
While we talked, cactus wrens trilled,
a gila woodpecker worked the cardones,
and high in the perfect sky, a black vulture circled.
Lying on our backs, we watched it absently
as we might have watched a small, fair-weather cloud, never
considering that its presence had anything to do with us.
But while the other birds flitted in and out of our view,
the vultures stayed directly overhead, circling and circling.
I began to think it was homing on some rank thing that
lay near us, or on a creature close to dying
that would make a fresh meal.
I knew, or thought I knew, that the presence of a vulture
means death.
I do not know what draws such a predator to its table,
whether sight, or smell, or a synesthetic
sense that humans will never know.
The Seris have a story that explains the vultures' gift.
They say that in the beginning of the world,
the fly invented fire.
They say that now when a fly lands on a dead animal,
it makes fire by rubbing its front legs together
and sends smoke signals telling the vulture where on the desert
the carcass lies.
We heard the men coming a long while before they arrived,
men we all love in friendship, and we knew
they would play a joke on us.
You've been there, too.
The crunch of gravel slowed, then quieted.
A set of antlers rose from behind a bush.
We weren't surprised and did not pretend we were.
Still, everyone got a good laugh.
One guy asked us if we had seen the vultures circling us.
Yes, we answered.
He joked that after camping out, we smelled so bad,
the vulture thought he might have found something to eat.
We all had another good laugh except Ernesto, who looked
sober, and shook his head.
No, no, he said to the other men.
That's not it at all.
The vulture was guarding them because they are beautiful.
We were puzzled.
The gap between our way of seeing and his,
filling up with awkward silence.
Then he explained that if the men had gotten lost
and not returned, anyone from the village a mile
across the water would have seen the vulture
and known where to find us.
It was our turn to look sober, for what was black suddenly
looked white.
What was harbinger had become protective.
We started back to camp.
As we started back to camp, the quiet
stayed with us, each holding fast to Ernesto's way of seeing.
It was not our way, and we knew it.
That's what made it stick in our imaginations
like a puffy, airborne seed lodged in thorns.
The world looked then both kinder and more dangerous
than it had before.
We fanned out in search of dead wood for our campfire,
hefting bleached, gray branches and root burls
onto our backs and shoulders.
Thanks.