it used to be.
At night, northbound planes loaded with drugs have taken off from old airstrips originally built for mining operations. One of the Pinacate pirates told of running into armed men in a truck near nightfall on the western side of the Sierra, but he didn’t stay around long enough to learn their activities. Not far from there, I picked up a Mexican hitchhiker in his 60s whose face itself somewhat resembled the floor of the Pinacate, weathered and dry with sudden outcroppings. He said he lived on the outskirts of the range and confirmed what I’d been told up till then. “Oh, yes, of course, marijuana and cocaine cross there. I’ve seen the landing strips. But I don’t think they send a lot across at a time. It’s just too isolated.”
At the northern edge of the Pinacate, tongues of jagged lava called aa (a term from Hawaii) stop just shy of the U.S.-Mexico border. Mexico Highway 2 parallels the border, and Mexicans hoping to enter the United States often travel along the highway at the edge of the Pinacate before turning north into the unmerciful desert. Now and then too much heat and too little water leaves them deader than Hornaday’s sheep.
Three truck stops along the Pinacate’s northern expanse are considered takeoff points for smugglers called coyotes shepherding Mexicans and others into the United States. The café-gas station at Los Vidrios, which means pieces of glass, seems to get all the attention. Word among the pirates was that since the long-time owner sold the business to some strangers, it has been taken over by drug smugglers. One of the pirate kings said he refused to stop there any more—“Can’t tell who or what you’ll run into.” Another pirate, researching the splendid bighorn sheep, was a bit apprehensive when I suggested we go to Los Vidrios.
“Why don’t you just tell me about it afterward, okay?”
Any builder would be proud to claim Los Vidrios as his own creation. The three-building complex is made entirely of volcanic rock so solid and settled that it resembles a fortress more than a café. A water tower constructed of the same rock, filled three times a month with water trucked out from Sonoyta, sits in back. The Sierra del Pinacate is Los Vidrios’s front yard.
When I stopped by, a few truckers sat sipping beer while their rigs were prepped outside. Gimme caps filled part of one wall—from a furniture company in Mississippi, a construction outfit in Massachusetts, and one from Mr. Steak, address unknown. An unused wood-burning stove sat in the corner. Gas lanterns had replaced electrical lights a few weeks earlier when the power went out. Owner Alberto Soto Acosta came up to wait on me. “We don’t have a menu,” he said, “but you can order whatever you want. You can even get huevos rancheros at two in the morning if you’d like. Carne machaca is the most popular dish we serve.” Soto’s elderly relatives busied themselves in the kitchen. His wife lived in Phoenix. “She’s an immigrant. I don’t have papers.”
A truck filled with cabinets arrived from the central state of Michoacán; as the driver and his family unloaded them to sell in the parking lot, I asked Alberto about the Pinacate. “Oh, sure, I’ve seen bighorn sheep. But I’ve never gone south across the highway to explore.” We walked around back of the café and looked north into the United States. “People cross here, not contraband. The smuggling is closer to the cities. The wetbacks come in groups of anywhere from four to twelve. Mojados”—U.S.-bound migrants—“pass by from Oaxaca and Tabasco and other states where there’s real high unemployment. Usually they’ll stop and ask for water and food before they start out. The last group of four left a few days ago—all they had was a little container for water. It wasn’t enough. A galoncito.”
Soto motioned to the desert floor northwest of the café. “Rattlesnakes live there. Once we found some bones in that direction. We never knew if the person died from dehydration or from the rattlers.”
The biggest problem at Los Vidrios has nothing to do with smugglers or contraband. It’s jets from Luke Air Force Base. “They fly overhead,” Alberto said, and sometimes the windows break. We often feel the tremors. The whole house shakes,” a motion he demonstrated with his body. Although their air space ends at the border, the pilots above, like the migrants below, often don’t recognize the international frontier.
The best-known visitors to Los Vidrios have been Juan Matus, a Yaqui sorcerer better known as Don Juan, and Carlos Casteneda, the writer who chronicled Don Juan’s powers. In June 1968, with Casteneda at the wheel and Don Juan riding shotgun, the two stopped for a bite on their way to a peyote ceremony, according to A Separate Reality. Looking into the Pinacate at night from his table at Los Vidrios, Casteneda saw “black jagged peaks…silhouetted against the sky like huge menacing walls of glass slivers.” He assumed this was how the truck stop got its name. Don Juan replied that the name came from glass shards lying around the highway for years after a truck carrying glass had overturned there.
Following their meal, Don Juan noticed Casteneda feeling a bit queasy. “Once you decided to come to Mexico,” Don Juan admonished, “you should have decided to put all your petty fears away.” After pulling out to the east, Carlos looked in his rear-view mirror and saw what appeared to be headlights gaining on him. Don Juan knew different. “Those are the lights on the head of death,” he said. When Casteneda looked again, the headlights had vanished. Death had turned south into the Sierra del Pinacate.
WHAT IS THE SOUND OF ONE BILLBOARD FALLING?
ED AND I SAT IN A FIRE TOWER ABOVE AZTEC PEAK, a 7,748-foot-high mountain in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest. Slowly he stood up, grabbed a half-full carton of sour cream, walked outside the lookout tower, and heaved it far into the forest below. The container rested near the top of a tall ponderosa pine. The sour cream glopped down to lower branches and finally to the ground as a couple of Los Angeles television producers slowly pulled out of sight. It was Edward Abbey’s way of wishing them Godspeed down the treacherous dirt road to the paved highway.
In the publishing industry, Abbey was categorized as a “Southwest writer,” a condescending but ultimately benign label that plagues those writing about the area west of Louisiana and east of Los Angeles. More than twenty years after his death in 1989, Abbey still has what is euphemistically called a “cult following,” which simply means that devoted readers enthusiastically spread their admiration by word of mouth, thumping dog-eared paperbacks in front of friends who haven’t yet fallen prey. His words are sufficiently safe for classroom reading lists, incendiary enough to trigger fury against public works, and adequately anarchistic to dispense with polite conversation. His fictional characters sometimes assumed cartoon qualities and their dialogue could be clunky, but his appeal transcended literary niceties for sturdy truths.
Notwithstanding the fact that one of his books was made into a movie—The Brave Cowboy became the Kirk Douglas classic Lonely Are the Brave—and despite having written one of the great books of the American Southwest, Desert Solitaire, Abbey’s notoriety never broke through the invisible barrier separating “underground following” from popular acceptance.
Lord knows he tried. The subject about which he was most eloquent and prolific—wilderness preservation—became, as he put it, “in vogue,” and for a number of years he was at the height of fashion. Still, “wilderness preservation” sounds too much like the tail end of a preachy bumper sticker. Abbey made defiant celebration of the outdoors without yielding to the “ain’t it beautiful” approach. He stood apart from others by his cantankerous and acerbic style, mocking land exploiters and tepid liberals in the same phrase. He could go for pages describing something as common as a sunset and never lose the reader. Joyful veneration of the natural world coupled with defiance of man-made strictures permeated his writing, an attribute that distinguished Abbey from others. It was this virtue that made him a most reluctant guru to environmentalists, and it was this quality that spurred the men from