THE BEAUTY THAT WILLS US ON

THE BIRDERS ARE OLD, INTENSELY ALERT. TWENTY OR more of them move through the brush slowly, weaving like dreams. They have risen early to meet their passion. There’s a proposed mine threatening that, and much else—another mine in southern Arizona’s long history of scraping away the beautiful sky islands of mountains, sucking up all available water to bathe the damaged soil and stone in acid mix to then precipitate out the glitter that we paste and affix and fasten to our wrists and fingers and necks in order to feel beautiful. The Rosemont copper mine, this time.

It’s cold—dawn, February, down near the Arizona–Mexico border, south of Tucson—and whenever there is movement back in the brush, the birders all stop and watch, waiting—some keen-eyed with binoculars still hanging from their necks, others with binocs already raised, their eyes gifted suddenly with the sightedness of gods—and no matter how drab or dull the first bird of the day may seem to a non-birder like me, to these veterans of beauty, it seems amazing. They rhapsodize about sparrows. They’ve been coming here for a long time.

In the midst of a war, one has to write or speak about war, but one has to write or speak about beauty, too. When to do which? No one knows, I think. Perhaps you know only each morning upon awakening.

Some of the elderly birders are couples, who hold hands as they walk along the birding trail. Others are friends, and as they stand there peering into the brush as if into the great mystery of their lives—hoping and believing that, as it often does, the mystery will in time present itself and will pull them in, as close as they wish or dare—they rest a steadying hand on each other’s shoulders. My informal survey indicates that most of them believe the mine cannot be stopped. Every one of them will do what they can do, but they have each been defending beauty and integrity for a long time, and have seen a lot of loss. Just to the south, a great anti-immigration wall has been constructed, physically dividing one county from another—blocking the flow of humans back and forth, sealing each of us further into our own diminishing capsule, but impeding also the natural passage of animals that for hundreds of thousands of years passed across that invisible line of the imagination with the freedom of birds: jaguar, ocelot, coatimundi, Sonoran pronghorn, wolf, bear. Now, all cut off, all isolate. Only the birds can pass over and through now, and where they are coming, there is already often no water. They seem to fly following the old pathways of memory, or perhaps hope.

I will likely never see any of these people again.

Sometimes I get tired of arguing for or against things, yet it seems I always answer the bell, always show up whenever there’s a fight, or a need to stand and defend, or attempt to defend. Might I one day feel tired and worn out, with my imagination dimming, so that I might not be able to envision a way to win, a way for beauty to burn brightly, intact and mysterious and powerful in the world, strengthening and building our puny little hearts and the not-insubstantial lives those hearts power, in our comings and goings? Beauty like little oases or wellsprings at which we stop and sit before pushing on in our travels, our migrations.

Ruby-crowned kinglet. Say’s phoebe. Some kind of pipit. Vesper sparrow, Lincoln’s sparrow, house finch, female cardinal: one by one, the birds are stirring, going about their business, taking little dust baths, feeding, singing, courting. There’s a dew and in the rising sun the grass blades ignite, rainbow prisms incandesce, and the birds fly above it as if with no interest in these temporary jewels that will dull quickly as the sun rises higher.

We peer through sunflowers as if into a kaleidoscope. Ladder-backed woodpecker, Gila woodpecker, Savannah sparrow, kestrel. We cross a narrow wooden footbridge where there used to be deep water, but now is only a web of cracked mud plates. A man named Al tells me he used to see mallards, snipe, rail here. Today, nothing, just dust. We move on, searching, or rather looking.

An owl—no one’s sure what kind—leaps up from the grass and flies away into the sun. No one, not even here among the experts, is willing to make a guess—they squint after it eagerly, hoping for a second clue, as if it might for some strange reason turn around and come back—but it does not.

The old birders tell me that often on these outings they encounter migrants, following these brushy water courses, or courses where water once ran. Immigrant trails exist everywhere here. Lesser (Lawrence’s) goldfinches, the birds far more brilliant than the mineral for which they are named, flash and rise and fall, sparks among the brush, delighting the brief humming life of our brains. The mine will suck millions of gallons of water, far and away the most precious mineral in the aridifying Southwest.

Great horned owl. Bewick’s wren singing with a song like an old-time rotary dial telephone. How much change these old people have seen, how much more we will all see. Of course everything is temporal, everything is flux, but surely too at some point to stand quietly in the face of violence and injustice is to condone it with that silence.

We come to a barbed-wire fence and note where the prongs have snagged not only the hair of passing deer, but scraps of faded color from the shirts of humans traveling down this narrow brushy trail: a natural history of collapse and exodus.

Black phoebe, Cooper’s hawk. White-crowned sparrow, green-tailed towhee. Later in the spring, flame-colored tanager, elegant trogon, thirty-six species of wood warblers, and an entire planet’s worth of hummingbirds.

We must have courage, we must have fire, we must have energy, there is a war and all hearts are tempted to grow numb, to withdraw and tuck in as if to roost for the long night. We must not allow this to happen, we must burn, we must travel on, with morning’s fire in our hearts and beauty everywhere we turn, amid the great burning.