BARREN, WILD, AND WORTHLESS: LIVING IN THE CHIHUAHUAN DESERT
Memoir/Natural History

By Susan J. Tweit

$17.95, paper
0-8165-2333-9

University of Arizona Press

The Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States is not an easy place to live in or love. The relationships between the dry and dusty land, its history, and the cultures who have made it their home come alive in these essays through the stories and histories of diverse subjects like the spadefoot toad, Organ mountain evening primrose, extinct southwestern grizzly bear, Chihuahuan Archaic culture, water, illegal aliens and the international border, and the historic invasion of "lungers." Each in their own way illuminate our ongoing struggle to be at home in the desert.

Through her stories and the stories inherent in the land, we come not only to feel this country, but to believe in its dry, bony presence as a place of miracles and wild wisdom. She reminds us of the magic of biology through her keen eyes and bright mind.
-- Terry Tempest Williams

A pilgrim's guide to high places, an unflinching book that gives dignity to the lost and disappeared, full of living tributes to the ancestors: animal, plant, and mineral. [This book] carries with it words to cool and fortify us as we stumble forward on that unsure road where we, like the spadefoot toad, are always waiting for the rain.
-- Denise Chavez

Gets my nomination for one of the greatest titles ever for this book about the Southwest. ... This collection of essays on the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States ... is as welcome as cool spring water after hiking up Tortugas Mountain in 110-degree heat.
-- Southwest Book Views

 

From the book:

THE DISAPPEARED ONES

Not long after we moved to this country, I saw a grizzly bear track. Only grizzly bears don't live here. Everyone knows that.

I had set out for Santa Fe on a clear, sunny September morning, driving an intimate two lane road . ... On impulse, I turned my car off of the pavement at the old Three Rivers store north of Tularosa, where a sign promising petroglyphs pointed up the gravel road towards the massive ridge of Sierra Blanca. ... I parked my car in a small parking lot and followed a dusty trail up a desert ridge capped with volcanic rock.

About halfway up the ridge, I spotted a squiggling line and a circle of dots etched on a dark boulder next to the trail. Nearby, a bat flapped atop another boulder. A little ways away, a larger-than-lifesize human face with almond-shaped eyes stared out over the Tularosa Basin. A coyote, ears perked forward, seemed ready to spring off of the top of another boulder. Across another dark rock swam a fat fish, its checkered sides suggesting scales. The more I looked, the more petroglyphs I saw.

Rounding one group of boulders, I looked down and sucked in my breath. There, etched in the rock, was a clear footprint of a grizzly bear, its pale outline contrasting sharply with the dark desert varnish.

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