Our next stop was the Lichty Center, a Nature Conservancy Owned cabin on a farm in southwestern New Mexico outside the town of Cliff. The cabin is set in a grove of maple trees next to several irrigation ditches, one well disguised as a wide stream. Sand hill cranes greeted us each morning, arriving in our field to snack on grain before heading along their way. We helped the TNC in a service project digging dirt, sand and weeds out of their irrigation ditch so it can more easily water their fields. During this project, we got to take a break and wander down toward an arm of the Gila River, an eventual tributary to the Colorado, and the only river in New Mexico that is not dammed. During our time at the center, we also got to participate in a writing workshop with author Sharman Apt Russel, best known for works Anatomy of a Rose, Hunger, and Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist. From Sharman, we learned the skill of integrating science into our writing. We also wrote a piece addressing what nature writers would be doing in fifty years. Here is mine:
Every day for eight days we rose before dawn, ate a quick breakfast of hardboiled eggs and coconut cookies, and crawled sleepily into the Land Rover. Starting the morning before the sun, we would watch dawn cast its’ light on the Rift Valley Escarpment, turning soft grey and dull tan to the brilliant green of baobab trees and rich red-brown of African soil. Each morning we would drive an hour and a half along the narrow two lane road between Mto Wa Mbu and Mswakini Juu to interview Maasai villagers about land use, agriculture and problem animals. And each morning along the road we’d see clusters of Maasai, clad red, purple and orange in brightly colored woven shukas waiting along the side of the road. They carried, sat on, and leaned against large blue and yellow five gallon containers they would carry to and from their bomas on the tops of their heads to wait for the government trucks carrying hundreds of gallons of water.
We traveled on foot between the communities of the Kwakuchinja Corridor, interviewing the patriarch of each boma and interacting briefly with their families. Sometimes they’d offer us spicy homemade chai, grey-brown in a dirty tin cup. I remember watching one young boy play a game to entertain himself while the rest of his family was preoccupied with us wazungus. He sat down in the dirt outside the door and licked his palm. I cringed, thinking about the cleanliness of my own palms, washed only several hours earlier, but coated already in grime. I looked again and watched as he placed his moistened palm in the dirt. Picking his palm up, he gazed admiringly at the miniature mud flat he’d created. I expected him to smear his hands together, or at the very least, rub the mud on his face. Instead, he again licked his palm, covering his tongue in a green-brown muck which didn’t appear to phase his taste buds. He continued licking, pressing, admiring and licking again throughout our conversation with his family. Every few minutes he’d spit out a mouthful of the mess. I remember thinking, “This family lives 25 miles off the highway. Who knows the next time they’ll see water? This boy will have the remnants of that dirt in his mouth and on his hands for days.” A few days later we came upon a little boy who was very sick, vomiting over the shoulder of his tired looking mother and I wondered if this was the fate of the dirt eating boy.
Traveling in
Water availability is an issue of world-wide concern. It’s not just rural Africans that lack ready access to clean water, but the disenfranchised everywhere who feel the effects of environmental justice. I saw this again on a visit to the Navajo Indian Reservation in the Four Corners Area. We stayed at the Dooda’ Desert Rock camp, a small plywood shack with a wood burning stove, no electricity and no water. Many Navajo on the reservation get their water from coin operated dispensing systems that fail nearly as often as they function. These dispensers are placed in major towns and communities, typically miles away from the homes of those who require their use, and often involve hours of waiting in line in the blistering heat of summer or the raging ice storms of winter. Electric and water pipelines are not built to reach isolated family habitations on a landscape where neighbors can be twenty miles, not twenty feet, away from each other. This, in our own country.
After my time with the Maasai, and after two months in the water warring West, I have learned that most people don’t live the way we live. We’re living outside our means, glorying in the half an hour shower and irrigating fields at high noon in the desert where, in other parts of the world, people have limited access to any clean water. I wonder if this is what it takes for people to see the face of water shortages and lack of infrastructure worldwide. These things I’ve seen are burned into my memory – a little boy gets sick from bacteria living in the dirt, his mother’s shame at not being able to properly welcome her visitors, the shabby lean-to in which Elouise lives. In the next fifty years, our world must become increasingly compassionate to these issues if we are to accomplish our 2015, 2020 and 2050 environmental goals. We are not a world of separate nations, but a world together, inextricably linked by the one thing that sets us apart from the rest of life on earth: our humanity. Fifty years from now, I hope our nature writers will be writing of the things they write of today, I hope these things still exist. Only this time, I hope it is with a status quo of common good, of common access to our shared resources, and of common understanding.
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