Araivapa Canyon

Once, years before, I had glimpsed a mountain lion in this

canyon, following me through the twilight. It was the only

mountain lion I had ever seen, so far, in the wild. I stopped,

the big cat stopped, we peered at each other through the gloom.

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5 Mutual curiosity: I felt more wonder than fear. After a minute, or

perhaps it was five minutes, I made a move to turn. The lion leaped

up into the rocks and melted away.

We see no mountain lions this evening. Nor any of the local

deer, either Sonoran whitetail or the desert mule deer, although the

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10 little heart-shaped tracks of the former are apparent in the sand.

Javelina, or peccary, too, reside in this area; piglike animals with

tusks, oversized heads, and tapering bodies, they roam the slopes

and gulches in family bands, living on roots, tubers, and innards

of barrel cactus, on grubs, insects, and carrion. Omnivorous, like

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15 us, and equally playful, if not so dangerous. Any desert canyon

with permanent water, like Aravaipa, will be as full of life as it 

is beautiful.

We stumble homeward over the stones and through the

anklebone-chilling water. The winter day seems alarmingly

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20 short; it is.

We reach the mouth of the canyon and the old trail uphill

to the roadhead in time to see the first stars come out. Barely

in time. Nightfall is quick in this arid climate and the air feels

already cold. But we have earned enough memories, stored

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25 enough mental-emotional images in our heads, from one brief

day in Aravaipa Canyon, to enrich the urban days to come. As

Thoreau found a universe in the woods around Concord, any

person whose senses are alive can make a world of any natural

place, however limited it might seem, on this subtle planet of

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30 ours.

“The world is big but it is comprehensible,” says

R. Buckminster Fuller. But it seems to me that the world is not

nearly big enough and that any portion of its surface, left unpaved

and alive, is infinitely rich in details and relationships, in wonder,

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35 beauty, mystery, comprehensible only in part. The very existence

of existence is itself suggestive of the unknown—not a problem

but a mystery.

We will never get to the end of it, never plumb the bottom of

it, never know the whole of even so small and trivial and useless

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40 and precious a place as Aravaipa. Therein lies our redemption.

 —Down the River, 1982