THE POWER OF LIFE IN A VERY HOT PLACE

A rainbow appears as a thunderstorm approaches at sunset in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The organ pipe cactus takes 150 years to reach maturity and usually grows to about 16 feet tall.

THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN A CROSSROADS AND THIS HAS LONG BEEN A BIG EMPTY BECAUSE THE RAINS HARDLY COME AND THE SUN GNAWS AT HUMAN SCHEMES.

The good country begins on the edge of the nation. We have declared a border, but life, the plants, animals and dreams, rolls out as an unbroken fabric. The place began for me in some long ago when I traveled the desert with Julian Hayden, the man who found traces of early man in the black rockto the south. He wrote the book on the archaeology of the Pinacate region across the line in Sonora. He stopped at Organ Pipe to say hello to the granddaughter of Don Alberto Celaya, and Don Alberto had as a young boy guided Carl Lumholtz, the Norwegian explorer, into the country in the first decade of the 20th century. Lumholtz became the man who wrote New Trails in Mexico, the first view of the region for most of the world. And then when Hayden showed up in the early '50s, Don Alberto as an old man taught him the country also.

For me, the place is rich with ghosts. Julian Hayden's ashes are scattered on a hillside overlooking a crater just across the line. Edward Abbey, another friend, sleeps in the desert west of Organ Pipe. And then there are the vanished people of the springs at Quitobaquito, the Sand Papago, Hia C-ed O'odham, the last true nomads of the United States. I come for the memories, and what I remember here is the world before I was born and the world before the United States was born. This dry country is the bedrock of my dreams.

Brittlebush blooms yellow high in the Ajo Mountains of Decemberber and the view stretches west and south in the heart of the Sonoran Desert. The national monument rides on the border of the United States, a place where the core flora of this tropical desert lap across our borders and bring intrusions of organ pipe cactus and senita, two signature species of the great desert itself. The bajadas are forests of saguaros mingled with cholla and creosote. Up on the mountain the creosote gives way to brittlebush and the big cactuses seem to bob in waves of the gray-leafed plant. The yellow daisy flower explodes with color against the faint rose rock of volcanic tuff.

Just to the west a road, El Camino del Diablo, snakes across the desert. Four thousand Sonorans stormed down it in the gold rush of '49, among them Joaquin Murrieta, who became in legend the Robin Hood of California. The organ pipe cactus showed up around 3,500 years ago as the land slowly warmed after the end of the Ice Age. The plant crossed the border and replaced a world of oak and juniper, probing into what is now the United States for about a hundred miles. This has always been a crossroads and this has long been a big empty because the rains hardly come and the sun gnaws at human schemes. Organ Pipe makes us face the idea of borders because the southern part of the park is the border and because everything that draws us to the park has crossed the line. Organ pipe, saguaro and senita marched up from the south. Ancient paths crisscrossed the international boundary. I once walked a prehis-toric shell trail with a friend that arced up from Cholla Bay just north of Puerto Peasco to Ajo and then on to Phoenix, a path, then as now, moving through languages and peoples.

THE DESERT SWEEPS ON AND ON AND THE SILENCE OF THE DESERT ERASES OUR EGOS.

The Hia C-ed O'odham, the people of the vast desert flowing west and south, were said to sell their dreams, a natural product if you stick around here long enough. They were the masters of this area and their lives flowed from the Ajos to the Gila River and down into the blackrock country and the Gulf of California. They knew this desert in a way I never will, and wandered it with an ease I will never attain. The place humbles us. Here people struggle to find a drop of water and yet are surrounded by trees and huge cactuses that flourish.

The large cities of the Sonoran Desert Phoenix, Tucson, Hermosillo shelter on the edge where rivers come out of the mountains and meet the hot ground. Think of them as harbors facing a burning sea. Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is out in this big empty. Here truths survive that the cities never learn. One is that the stars hum in the night sky. The second is that nothing can endure in the desert that denies the lack of rain. Another is that in the core of the summer you can hear the heat pound the land. And finally, there is the lesson that deserts have no center. Like the sea, they ignore our craving for security, boundaries and havens. The desert sweeps on and on and the silence of the desert erases our egos. We finally begin to exist as something beyond our everyday cares and worries. The border of our body vanishes and we become one with the land.I leave the road, walk out into a forest of saguaros, the ground a pavement of stone fragments. A phainopepla, a small black cardinal-like bird, lands on a palo verde. A Gila woodpecker calls. A red-tailed hawk rides past. These tiny events go away and there is the faint breeze, the green of the creosote leaves, the sun pouring down on the land. I am now at the hardest scenic point to reach: nowhere. I wander through the saguaros. I sit on the ground. And then I stop making notes. That is when I know I finally arrive. The swoosh of a raven's wing becomes an event.

To the west, there is no settlement until the Colorado River; to the south, a volcanic wilderness, the Pinacate reserve, parallels the park; to the north is Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. Thousands of square miles without a house or person. A dream has haunted me for decades. It came to me at the tinajas in the Pinacate where I slept in sleeping circles left by the people thousands of years ago. Sometimes, it came on night walks across the Cabeza Prieta. There were those days at Heart Tank, the nights on the west edge of Organ Pipe, the moonrise on the delta of the Colorado when a coyote howled and I faced the protected zone of the upper Gulf, a place where blue whales still prowl the sea.

There is a mosaic of life and emptiness lingering in government refuges in Northwest Sonora and Southwest Arizona, a potential national park that can one day spill across the border of two nations and lurch into being. That's my dream. For the moment, Organ Pipe is a piece of this possibility. As the world shrinks these last fragments of space and silence will grow as a dream in the minds of others and I think my dream will one day be a reality. Like all dreams, it seems impossible until it comes to be. After all, there was a time when Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument was inconceivable to most people.

Of late, this has been a place of siege. Kris Eggle, a park ranger, was murdered here in 2002 when a gunfight spilled north across the border. Migrants seeking work in the United States trashed the backcountry. Drug smugglers slashed 200 miles of new roads. Only 31 percent of the park is now open to visitors. So what is it like? Quiet and safe and empty. It is like being the private owner of a national park. Visitation has sunk from 300,000 a year in the 1990s to 30,000 a year now. The park is now shielded with car barriers on the border and stuffed with agents. It is almost certainly safer than wherever you are as you read this. Organ Pipe is the long view of life. The ironwood trees dotting the land can live 500 to a thousand years. The mayhem of our moment is just that, a moment. The park lives by a different clock.

Deserts are often described as wastelands because it is difficult to turn their beauty into towns and money. Organ Pipe was mauled by mining dreams and roads and overgrazed for much of the 20th century, all in the hope it could be beaten into submission. A handful of people, Bill and Birdie del Miller, Rube Daniels, Henry Gray, Abraham Armenta, took a stab at ranching and farming here and in the end, the land beat them all. These failed ventures often brutalized the ground. But what is striking, even in this place of low rainfall and difficult renewal, is to feel how much the ground has recovered. Buildings slowly sink back to the ground at the old Gray Ranch headquarters close by Bates Well, but what a person senses there is a small footprint of our kind being slowly devoured by the inferno of the desert. You turn your back on the scraggly buildings, look west toward the Growler Valley and think of words like infinity or deep space.

Organ Pipe, like all national parks, is an agreement between the American people and their ground. It is not an episode but an abiding promise that if we take care of this good Earth, it will in turn tend to us. Organ Pipe has been through some hard days lately but they are but a flicker in the life of this place and in our life in this place. It was created in 1937 and became part of a new kind of thinking for us as a people. In the beginning, national parks tended to be spectacular scenery. Organ Pipe was created to protect an ecosystem and its beauty became a bonus. The result is a huge slab of the Sonoran Desert featuring organ pipe cactus. And space. And silence. Almost all of it is managed as wilderness, which means a short walk can take you out of this century and into a deep well of time.

The Valley of the Ajo sweeps south. To the west, the Bates Mountains and Cipriano Hills, the latter named after a Mexican businessman and outlaw. To the east, the palisades of the Ajo Mountains, and to the south, the Puerto Blanco mountains. Along the border, the La Abra Plain and the Sonoyta Valley. A sprawl of country with Quitobaquito tucked away in the southwest corner only 200 yards from the international boundary. The springs at Quitobaquito capture both the moment now sweeping over Organ Pipe, and how brief this moment is in the history of the place. The only real water in the entire park, the springs host the endangered Quitobaquito pupfish and Sonoran mud turtle. Once, this water marked a boundary of sorts between two language groups of the Tohono O'odham, the desert people. The Spaniards found it by the late 17th century and always there have been efforts to turn the water onto fields.

The first time I saw the springs it felt like some mirage of ponds and birds and trees. Now I cannot see it at all because the road to it has been closed for security reasons. The pupfish can be seen in a small pond at the visitors center, one named after Kris Eggle, the murdered ranger. The fish in the small pool of water move at my shadow hoping for food, the males flashing blue. They are here in case things go bad at the springs since the water level is dropping there. But this closure of the road to Quitobaquito will pass, as have so many things here. The current tempest will sweep off the desert into the dust of a history book and peace will return. I stand in the shade of an ironwood that is likely older than my nation and I have the faith of a pupfish, surviving century after century in a desert. Organ Pipe is open for business and its business is to teach the power of life in a very hot place. We made a deal with the ground and the bad times cannot touch our dreams. AH