Yes, We Have No Saguaro

 

Soaptree yucca

My title today may give a chuckle to the few who remember the old song about bananas. I did not see the original cartoon when it came out in 1930 (not that long in the tooth!), but it replayed on 1950s television and was still amusing then. All of which has nothing to do with plants of the high desert, my topic of the day -- .

Prickly pear

cholla 

A friend back in northern Michigan asked about plants here in the high desert, speculating that we “don’t have cactus” here. Well, we have a lot of cholla (though not the full range of varieties), and there is prickly pear, too, more often on higher slopes than down on the range, and also here and there a squat barrel cactus, though these last are not as plentiful here as they are in the low desert. Along our Cochise County roadsides, soaptree yucca is ubiquitous, and down the road apiece from our ghost town are rocky foothills stuck all over like giant pincushions with sotol and century plant (the latter a kind of agave), as well as the striking ocotillo (more common around Benson and Bisbee than here in Dos Cabezas). During our first winter here, it took me a while to sort out yucca, agave, and sotol. But yes, we have no saguaro. That, along with "teddy bear" cholla, grows down in the lower elevation of Tucson, 100 miles away.

 

The life cycle of the century plant is interesting, though. It doesn’t really take 100 years to come into bloom (for the one and only time in its life), but it is a long wait. Meanwhile, however, the plant grows larger and larger, making a nice focal point for desert landscaping. 

 

When it reaches maturity, it sends up an immense, asparagus-like stalk (this plant and asparagus are in the same family), and after flowering the plant dies. 

Where did the stalks go?

But that is not the end. From the plant's seeds will come a new generation, while the impressive, sculptural dry stalk is favored by desert dwellers for a Christmas “tree.”

Also, along with cactus and other plants with spines, are many thorny deciduous plants, primarily (around Dos Cabezas) but not limited to the mesquites. One that looks a lot like a mesquite is in the same family (leguminacae, though some botanists break the family down further into subfamilies) but is a different genus. Mesquite genus is Prosopis, catclaw is Acacia. Even that can be confusing, however, as catclaw acacia or Gregg’s acacia, formerly Acacia greggii, now classified as Senegalia greggii, sometimes goes by the common name devilsclaw, but more often “devil’s claw” refers to a different plant altogether, Proboscidea arenaria, from (I kid you not) the unicorn-plant family! 

Chain of devil's claw (unicorn-plant family) pods

book showing flowers of that devil's claw

And this, as my friend Ellen would remind you, is why the Latin names of plants are so crucial to identification: What your grandmother in Ohio knew and taught you as “devil’s paintbrush” is not the “devil’s paintbrush” of the American Southwest. What I’ll remind you is that this is a reason for not relying on one plant guide but having access to several.

some of my printed resources

Back to those thorny shrubs --

mesquite leaves

catclaw acacia leaves

And back to identifying catclaw acacia. Its bipinnately compound leaves are much smaller than the leaves of mesquite, and its thorns are curved like a cat’s claws. Hence the name. Once you note the difference between the two shrubs, it’s obvious, even when they are growing all tangled up in each other, as they sometimes do. I found some catclaw pods the other day, too. They curve and twist, and while The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Plants, Western Region, authored by Elbert L. Little, calls them brown, the ones I gathered the other day are more reddish to my eye.

catclaw pods

 

Mr. Little is no fan of catclaw; nor are many hikers or others: “one of the most despised southwestern shrubs,” the Little-authored Audubon guide says of it. And yet, besides the region’s delicious catclaw honey and the plant’s useful hardwood (for fuel and tool-making), catclaw beans are a native food, ground when dry to make pinole, which now seems to be making a comeback as foodies rediscover ancient local foods. Interesting that another common name for catclaw acacia is wait-a-minute bush. Your shirt gets caught on a thorn, and you have to stop to free yourself. Get it? 

 

Whether thorns grab your clothes or you have, as I do, the perfect thorn-shedding jacket, it’s always worth stopping to look more closely at what the high desert has to offer. Coyote gourds are not considered edible (except by wildlife) but were used by Native Americans to make soap.

And here in December, when the morning sun comes through mesquite draped with dry vines of the summer’s vanished morning glories, don’t they look like strings of Christmas lights? Look at them with your imagination turned on.

Postscript 12/11/21: A friend's comment about this post being "comprehensive" made me think of all that I had left out -- and I'm not going to try to put everything here, but it seemed wrong to have left out the netleaf hackberry trees, so numerous in the wash and still holding onto their green leaves this December. Though when we first met (one January in maybe 2015?), I was not terribly impressed, I have since then become very fond of this species. Like a U.P. Finn, it has sisu. 

Adventures Close to Home: Cactus Hill

Adventure? Sarah is ready!

Sheltering in place in a ghost town allows for a great deal of fresh air and exercise. “We’re so lucky to live where we live!” my friend, neighbor, and hiking partner Therese says often of our lives here in Dos Cabezas. She was saying it before the coronavirus came along and says it now in heartfelt tones. I agree wholeheartedly! We are indeed lucky to be able to get outdoors to explore the mountains with our dogs!

Comforting neighbors

Therese and I also agree (and the Artist does, as well) that having cows for neighbors is very comforting. Calm bovine demeanor is contagious in the very best way. Cattle are not oblivious to our presence — and their alert looks hold a certain wariness when they see our dogs — but our little high desert pack is under control, and we pass by without the slightest molestation of livestock taking place. Not a single teasing bark! Good dogs!

See the little one?

Once again we followed the old mine road back, back where it becomes hidden from view from our cabin, making it difficult to explain to the Artist where we've been. Here (below) I’ll make the picture clearer by borrowing a photograph from our last adventure. That day we looked from our hillside ramble across the mine road to what would be our destination today, the place my friend calls Cactus Hill. In the following cropped image, I have zeroed in on the rocky hilltop.

Remember this view?

Our destination today

Here is the pack again, too: Mollie, Sarah, Buddy. The fourth dark object is not an additional dog but the jacket I removed and left down by the road as not needed for our sunny climb.

Being right up close, within touching distance, of rocky outcrops so like the highest peaks is exciting!

And I loved the raking morning light across the opposite slope, the one we’d explored earlier in the week.

Cactus Hill holds far more and larger prickly pear plants than we have down in the ghost town itself, and the higher we climbed, the thicker together the prickly pear, and the more challenging to duck around or squeeze between cacti.

Mollie was intrepid! She was like a mountain goat!

Sarah kept up pretty well, though, for a girl so old I’d almost left her home, knowing we would be climbing Cactus Hill. Then, no — I just couldn’t leave her behind, when she knew I was going out with the pack! And what a wise old girl she is: she was better than usual about drinking water when I offered it to her, and a couple of times she took advantage of large rocks to rest in the shade for a few minutes. 

Ferns! Astonishing!

For me, the hardest part was not climbing the slope or getting down on the ground to photograph plants but standing up again. No matter. It was worth it. I certainly had not expected to find ferns up there among the prickly pear, ocotillo, sotol, and agave. And then to see ferns and cactus right next to each other — that was even more astonishing! 

Ferns & cactus

Here is the view, looking down to the east, with the road continuing toward the old mine site.

Therese took my picture as we started down. The breeze was picking up by then and felt delicious.

Therese and dogs paused in their descent so I could catch up. I kind of hated to “return to earth” so soon but looked back long enough to take this shot illustrating where we had been. See those rocks on the right? Yes!!!

We were up there on the right!

Sarah and I were pretty tired by the time we said good-by to our friends and covered the last quarter-mile to our own winter home. Somehow, though, I have no feeling of “anticlimax” in the wake of one of these mountain adventures. Happy, satisfied, ready for an early lunch — but still open enough to the small and beautiful sights along the way, such as this one, lone, lovely little Mexican poppy blooming right in the middle of the road. What a lovely morning! Something cheery to write in my journal!

Where Teddy Bears Are Not Cuddly

Sarah had a bath, at last. She is clean and soft again, but she's never been an especially cuddly dog.

Originally, weeks ago, I began drafting a post I called “Not Barefoot Country,” having to do with the terrain around our winter ghost town cabin. In that draft I listed many reasons, with details, for not going barefoot here: thorns and spines and prickers; sharp stones (especially the little ones); cow pies (especially the fresh ones; sunning snakes; winter cold; dust and dirt; old rusty barbed wire; broken glass; old rusty nails; splinters from odd bits of old lumber; and abandoned well pits. I added the last item not only because there are abandoned well pits nearby but also because I figured that climbing out of one, should one stumble and fall in, would be easier with shoes than without. 

There was nothing particularly wrong with that draft post, and every once in a while I would look back and add or change something — for instance, inspired by cowboy lingo, I changed the tentative title from “Not Barefoot Country” to “Not Tenderfoot Country” — but somehow I kept finding more interesting things to write about for Books in Northport. And now so much has changed that “Not Tenderfoot Country” seems beside the point, like the first chapter of my dissertation, the old one I kept rewriting for two years until I set it aside and moved on to write the rest of the thesis, finally writing an entirely different first chapter when all the rest was done.

Boots on the ground are still a better idea than bare feet on the ground. That hasn’t changed. All the old hazards to unprotected skin remain. It’s just that things just look different to me now. My concerns and responses are different. For one thing, the high desert is now clothed in spring green, its look softened more every day, but even that, I realized the other day, doesn’t explain the deeper difference.

“Soaptree yucca doesn’t make me laugh any more,” I remarked to the Artist as we made our way east on Hwy. 186, home to the ghost town after a morning of exploration from Willcox to Benson to Pomerene and nearly to Cascabel. “It just looks normal to me now.” I hadn’t thought before about this change in my perceptions, but there it was. Three years ago when we first arrived, soaptree yucca brought to my mind the fantastic illustrations of Dr. Seuss, looking to my Michigan eyes more like a product of imagination than of nature. Now it just looks normal.

One book I read this winter, in describing Western plants, labeled the ocotillo as one of the “strangest,” and yes, ocotillo seemed pretty wild, too, when first I saw it. Now it is in bloom, and I see it as stunning and beautiful but not strange. Not at all. 

Soaptree yucca and ocotillo belong here. Strange — étrange — is another way of saying alien, and the plants native to the West are the complete opposite of alien. When the Artist and I were newly arrived, it was we who were the aliens. Now (as is true for me in Michigan, also, though not for him, Detroit-born), though we will never be native to this place, we are feeling a kind of sense of belonging. More attached, more rooted. This has been true for me for a while.

One of my Facebook friends was recently astounded by the way I thrilled to the rodeo. She didn’t know me when I was a girl on the Illinois prairie, looking out over fields of corn and soybeans across the road from my family home, looking west from our front porch, toward the setting sun, and yearning with all my heart to ride my pony (the one I never had, even after joining 4-H, but that’s another story) toward that red evening sky! My parents had bought our first black-and-white television set when I was in first or second grade, and cowboy shows — Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, the Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, and later the “Spin and Marty” series on the Mickey Mouse Club show — all fueled the dreams of a little girl whose first word for horse, ‘fersie,’ had been uttered in a thrilled shriek of delight whenever, out for drives in South Dakota 

with her parents in the family Oldsmobile, she spotted a horse. Finally the parents had to save their eardrums by threatening not to point out horses to her if the child didn’t stop shrieking. She learned to whisper her excitement: “Fersie!”

As for the Artist —

“You know,” he began thoughtfully the other day at the high school rodeo competitions at Quail Field in Willcox, “if I were young and thinking about starting a family, I’d want to do it here.” Quite a surprising statement, coming from a such a staunch Piscean! I think it was the rodeo that finally won him over. As a boy in Detroit, he haunted a local riding stable and would ride horses in the spring for urban owners who needed the winter cabin fever (stable fever?) hijinks ridden out of their mounts before they dared to ride them. When he was twelve years old, his parents drove cross-country for a ranch vacation, and he rode out every day with the cowboys. “Real cowboys,” he stresses, cowboys working cows. I love stories of that vacation, imagining myself into the scene. I tell him how lucky he was! I would have been in heaven, as he was.

So we were both “horse-crazy” kids, and we both had the West in our blood, one of us by virtue of actual experience, the other only in her dreams.

I say we drove “nearly to Cascabel” the other day. Actually, we drove as far as the Cascabel Road was paved, turning back just past the intersection with Three Links Road, both roads unpaved from there on, which was exactly what I expected we would do, tempering the road to our 20-year-old van. It was for that reason, as Trail Boss, that I had chosen the Pomerene and Cascabel roads in the first place, though the route did not reach all the way to the intriguing hot springs I knew we would never reach them, anyway.

Remote! We were in in the San Pedro River Valley and could see the deeper green to our west, indicating the course of the river, and every few miles the terrain would change rather dramatically, one stretch filled with teddy-bear cholla and varieties of barrel cactus common around Tucson but not in Cochise County, certainly not in our own Sulphur Springs Valley. At the intersection where we reversed direction, I was surprised to turn the pages of the Arizona atlas and realize we were not at all far from Tucson. Not far, and yet a world away: Tucson was on the other side of the mountains to our west, and only rough trails lead across the mountains.

On the way back south to Benson, I had to stop to photograph the teddy-bear cholla. Though excited about being on foot in this very different kind of desert fauna, I thought I was maneuvering carefully around the plants until I felt stabbing pains and found myself limping, trying not to put full weight down on either foot. Well, that is hard to do! Pain did not deter me from my object, and I was pleased with the shots I got; however, when I realized the source of the pain, I was glad Sarah wasn’t out there exploring with me. This particular cholla, you see, so tall and stately in maturity, begins closer to the ground, much less obvious to a walker, and the long spines pierce leather like it’s silk.

Look like spurs? Maybe the inspiration for?

As for pulling out those spines? Thank heaven for the toolbox in the van and especially for the needle-nose pliers! And so, another desert lesson learned. Even shod feet need to be careful where they step. Bottom line, though? It was worth it. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. 

I started this little essay without a tidy conclusion in mind. Maybe, though, it’s that a place doesn’t have to be “cuddly” or even completely welcoming to call forth love. People lived here in the West before they had running water or air conditioning or internal combustion engines. The country is challenging. If you’re going to live here, the country itself sets the terms of engagement. 

Here’s one paragraph from the discarded draft post: 

“So there you have it -- a walk in a high desert ghost town is not a walk on the Lake Michigan beach. But whoever thought it would be? One similarity is the sense of vastness -- the faraway, receding horizon by day, dazzling stars against a black night sky. Both Great Lakes and Southwest high desert offer those marvels. One big difference, other than flora and geology, is the stillness of the desert: there are no waves, and unless the wind is particularly strong there is almost no background sound, only occasional nearby sounds of fluttering, chirping birds or a bawling cow or calf off in the distance.” 

Last night the cattle were very vocal around the cabin, and this morning they are still calling to each other out in the mesquite. Their presence pleases us both, the Artist and me. We like seeing and hearing them and having them for neighbors. (Watching our step seems a small price to pay.) Birds too are vocal this morning, calling and singing all around the cabin and yard and down in the wash. Desert spring symphony, all of it pleasing. 

Yep, I like it fine. I am very happy here.