The Last Word On Nothing

Hands go up for questions at the end of a talk and someone asks, “What gives you hope?”

I say the usual, believing the future to be long, all sorts of twists and turns in the plot. 

No, not that. Too weak. Too…hopeless. I’ve got to go home and think about this.

So, here’s what gives me hope. Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southern Arizona shares 30 miles of border with Sonora, Mexico. All wilderness and monument regulations have been waved by Congress so that construction of the border wall will not be impeded. Sacred hilltops, sites of native O’odham history and legend, are being bladed and blasted. Saguaros hundreds of years old have been photographed toppled as the wall nears Organ Pipe. A bunch of bad news, but wait for it.

In the near-border town of Ajo, Arizona, with its colonial plaza and rings of palm trees, I was recently keynote speaker for the 6th Annual Tri-National Sonoran Desert Symposium*. While there, I shared dinner with a few biological interns from Organ Pipe who said that for three months they’d been working almost frantically ahead of bulldozers transplanting every cactus, from towering saguaros to tiny pin cushions, for 30 miles. What they couldn’t move, they reduced to cuttings which they took back to the monument nursery. They collected bags of seeds from grasses and devil’s claw, a ground hugging hook plant. One rare milkweed was found, its single seed pod gathered. As the wall comes, they are saving everything they can.

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On November 6, 2015, when this was originally published, I had just arrived back from the most bizarre trip my work has ever taken me on–and I’ve been on some pretty weird reporting expeditions. It was my first (and probably last) experience of being a royal guest in a place where royalty really runs the show. It was a week of berobed body guards with the hard stare of special forces, and hypermodern Beduin chic. But in the midst of it all were the 30 seconds described here:

I let the children have a go first and then reach out a recently hennaed hand, palm up, to accept the flannel armband from Mounir. The whole thing suddenly seems a little flimsy. Are birds supposed to wobble?

I’m a lot taller than those children, and my arm is accordingly further from the ground than the distance one would want a bird to fall. Do birds fall? Not generally, except as chicks from the nest, but this one is blindfolded, did I mention?

Because otherwise it would peck at my approaching hand with that beak I’ve just watched tearing through a plucked but still boned pigeon. Would a blindfolded falcon flap its wings if it lost its footing at dusk in the desert outside Abu Dhabi if there were a leather thingy covering its eyes?

Hang on, this isn’t a wobble, this is a lean. Those birdy legs are at an 80° angle to my arm, and the beak is correspondingly nearer to my shoulder, slash, head. Now it’s more like 75°. What’s happening, Mounir? This didn’t happen to the children. Get it off, I feel, but no, I think, I’ve been looking forward to this.

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 A merry heart goes all the day,

Your sad tires in a mile.

-Shakespeare, The Winters Tale

I still am learning how to behave during a pandemic. Some things are simple: I know that I should wash my hands frequently with soap for at least 20 seconds. I know that I should cancel my social engagements for the foreseeable future. In hindsight, I now realize that it was wrong — badly done, indeed! — to go see Emma with my mom earlier this month, even though the costumes were gorgeous.

Other lessons are more painful. Last week, I’m afraid I had to be reminded that knowing all of the very latest COVID-19 news isn’t the same as doing good. Blindingly obvious as this is, it took two uncomfortable interactions to remind me that the ability to gather and transmit accurate information is not the only skill that’s needed right now.

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