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Nature rules

CASCABEL - Keep goats in Hot Springs Canyon, and, sooner or later, you're going to meet a mountain lion. Pearl Mast thought having her goats in a pen near the encampment she shares with David Omick would keep lions at bay until one night's peace was shattered by bleating and howling. As she reached the pen, a lion sprang from it and bounded off. "I'd been wishing I could see a mountain lion, but not under those conditions," she said. On another night, Omick was "goatwalking" about three miles up the canyon when he decided to bed down. During the night, he heard similar sounds from the two goats tethered outside his backpacker's tent. One goat was badly mauled before Omick chased the lion off. He brought them closer and kept a lantern burning the rest of the night. The mauled goat survived. They now share two goats, Lulu and Etta, with a neighbor, keeping them in a "Jurassic Goat Pen," a lion-proof wire enclosure, 16 feet high. It's the only way to do it in a canyon where the killing of predators, even those that attack livestock, is prohibited by a covenant signed by more than 60 members of the Saguaro Juniper Corporation. The organization has purchased the land or bought the grazing rights on 11 square miles along Hot Springs Canyon. The purpose, stated in the covenant, is stewardship of these still-wild lands astride the San Pedro River, just over the Rincon Mountains east of Tucson. "In acquiring private governance of land, we agree to cherish its earth, waters, plants, and animals in a way that promotes the health, stability, and diversity of the whole community," the covenant's preamble states. The San Pedro, along with Hot Springs Canyon and the other streams that feed it, has been called the most precious riparian habitat in the Sonoran Desert by the Nature Conservancy. Undammed for its 140-mile length from Mexico to its confluence with the Gila River at Winkelman, the San Pedro supports a cottonwood-and-willow forest along its banks, flanked in places by lush mesquite bosques. The Nature Conservancy reports 345 species of birds here, including 13 species of raptors, and the river supports more than 80 species of mammals, 40 species of reptiles and amphibians, 100 species of butterflies and 20 species of bats. The sightings of lions, the occasional bear and the bands of coati-mundi described by visitors to Hot Springs Canyon are hopeful signs that the canyon is filling its important role as a wildlife corridor between the San Pedro and the Galiuro and Winchester mountains. For three decades, federal agencies and conservation groups have been buying up land and water rights in an effort to keep the San Pedro watershed one of our last, best places. The efforts of Saguaro Juniper are the most novel, and their grazing management "provides a little bit of a model for an organization that's purely going to graze with ecological objectives in mind," said Dave Harris, former program manager for the Nature Conservancy's lower San Pedro holdings. "If you look at their landscape now, even in the height of one of the worst droughts in 50 years, their land looks good," Harris said. Pearl Mast and David Omick

Mast, 47, and Omick, 49, live here in a movable home Omick built, 8 feet wide and 16 feet long. "My sisters, who have closets bigger than this, call it my hovel," he said. It is a simple but elegantly built "hovel." There is plenty of shaded outdoor space and there is water that runs from a windmill well. There is a solar shower and there is a wood stove. There is a battery-powered radio for listening to the news on the BBC and PBS. There is a laptop that Omick powers with a car battery. When it needs recharging, he swaps it with the one in his truck. By covenant, no electricity is allowed in Hot Springs Canyon. It's available at the farm in Oregon where the couple will go soon for the two hottest months of the year, but they haven't decided whether to hook up yet. "That's a slippery slope," Omick said. "Next thing you know, we'd be buying a television." Mast and Omick are conspicuous nonconsumers. They met while Mast was a Mennonite volunteer at a birth center in Texas and Omick was at a colonia in South Texas, where he and a Catholic nun had started a nonprofit organization to help migrant workers build alternative housing, power and sanitation facilities. They choose this kind of life because they enjoy it, Omick said. "I hesitate to talk about it in terms of what's our fair share of the Earth's resources because, for me, it's no sacrifice," he said. "There is some sense that it's a more connected way of living," said Mast. "It brings me more into the realm of the rest of the environment, of nature." They have figured out that they can live adequately on 50 paid days of labor each per year. In Oregon, they live on a farm that breeds waterfowl. There, Omick designs and builds whatever needs building. Mast, a nurse, works vacation shifts at a nearby nursing home. For the rest of the year, they live at Hot Springs, growing and canning food from their garden, drinking goat's milk, eating a daily breakfast of mesquite pancakes, made partly with flour milled at Saguaro Juniper's annual mesquite-milling festival. "It's a lot of work," Omick said, "but I don't have to go out and get a job to pay for refrigeration." Omick also earns a small stipend as program director for the Cascabel Hermitage Association, a nonprofit formed by some Saguaro Juniper members and others to hold conservation easements on land bordering the canyon and to provide sites for solitary stay in the desert above the canyon. Sojourners with an artistic or spiritual reason for solitude can stay for a day, a week or, as one Catholic nun did, 41 days and 41 nights. There you are left alone at a campsite, a sheltered tent or a single-room, straw-bale building with a water supply. A signaling system, visible through binoculars from the canyon, lets the couple know that you don't need assistance. If you don't change the color of the signal, they'll come check on you. Omick and Mast also organize workshops for the Cascabel Hermitage Association education program. The association hosts classes on sustainable living, geology and other topics. They came here seeking a community that would foster their desire to live simply. They had heard of Saguaro Juniper and its philosophical leader, Jim Corbett. "We were very hospitably treated and heavily petitioned" to stay, Omick said. They have stayed for seven years. Jim and Pat Corbett

"On the prairie, when the wind wails a dirge and snow sifts in rivulets through the sagebrush, I've hugged the sticky-pink, death-chilled body of a newborn lamb under my coat, and its heart fluttered in reply.

"And on a desert mountain, amidst the hush of soaring granite, I've opened a forgotten spring. The few who remembered thought it had long ago gone dry, but I found the hidden place and dug down until a stream ran clear and cold in the summer sun.

"So what are epitaphs to me? Still in my twenties, I could already write as good a remembrance as any I could imagine for myself at ninety: 'He kept a lamb or two from freezing, he found and opened a forgotten spring.' "

Nobody could write a better epitaph for Jim Corbett, who died at his home here on Aug. 2, 2001, than this one he wrote himself in "Goatwalking: A Guide to Wildland Living; A Quest for the Peaceable Kingdom." But people today live Corbett's epitaph, in the homes of now-legal immigrants across America and along this dusty stretch of road that parallels the green canopy of the San Pedro River. "Most of us," said his widow, Pat Corbett, "might look at something and say 'My, that's a terrible thing to happen,' but Jim would say, 'Let's go do something about it.' " Corbett and his friends were well on their way to creating a land-centered covenant community when, in 1981, he stumbled across a more compelling need - Central Americans who were being rounded up and returned to El Salvador and other war-torn places despite their very real fear of persecution and death. Corbett, working at first through the Pima Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), enlisted a growing network of churches into a nationwide Sanctuary movement that eventually led to the prosecution of Corbett and 10 others on federal charges. "For six years," said friend Nancy Ferguson, "it was Sanctuary, Sanctuary, Sanctuary." Afterward, the Corbetts and their friends turned their attention back to the quest for that peaceable kingdom. Pat Corbett, who lives here now with one dog, four cats, two horses, a retired mule and a few cows, remains the heart of Saguaro Juniper. Her place is along the San Pedro in a mesquite grove where she and friends have added a stuccoed straw-bale living room to an old trailer. This is El Potrero, where her husband, the Harvard-schooled philosopher, rancher, goatwalker, librarian and Sanctuary co-founder, spent his last days. The obituary on the Saguaro Juniper Web site relates that "on the day before he died, Jim told a friend, 'I'm going on a journey but I don't know where.' His last words to Pat were 'I love you,' and then, 'We should go move cows tomorrow.' " Pat, 64, still rides her horses and helps move cows. She's also a firefighter in Cascabel's volunteer department. She's 20 miles down a dirt road but still needs to get away from the madness now and then on her horse. Things were quieter and people were more sociable seven years ago before the telephones came, she said. Once a month, she hosts the rotating weekly worship group of six to 10 Quakers who have settled or often visit nearby. A horsewoman from birth and a rancher for much of her life, she also embraces the greater rural community and likes the fact that you can't pass someone on the road without stopping the truck and chatting. Asked why the group has invested so much time, money and energy in Hot Springs Canyon, she replied: "It's gorgeous, just one little chunk of Creation that gets to keep on doing what it's doing. Why wouldn't you do that?" Tom Orum and Nancy Ferguson

Tom Orum and Nancy Ferguson, two of the seven owners of El Potrero in Cascabel, sometimes stay there in what Tom calls his "plywood tent" - a sleeping shack fitted with an evaporative cooler. Most times they live just outside Tucson, in a trailer on a piece of land across a farm field from Mission San Xavier del Bac. There, Orum, a plant pathologist, and Ferguson, a biologist, both retired from the University of Arizona, share their land with "friends with a small f," some of whom are also "Friends" in the Quaker sense. A straw-bale building on this land is the Tucson home for Saguaro Juniper visitors from Cascabel and elsewhere and world headquarters of the "Goat and Garden Group." That group was first formed to help Jim and Pat Corbett with their goat-milking chores back when Jim was wandering around Mexico with the goatherds, discovering the practice and philosophy of "errantry" that he would later describe in his book. Then, through a friend, he came face-to-face with the desperate plight of Central Americans who were uprooted by wars the United States aided and then refused political asylum. The Sanctuary movement began. For six years, the members of the Goat and Garden Group became a nexus for support of Sanctuary efforts. Tom Orum handled the financial end. He was, said Pat Corbett, the "debt coordinator." After the 1986 Sanctuary trial, at which Jim Corbett and two others were acquitted and eight Sanctuary members convicted on federal alien-smuggling charges, the group turned its attention back to finding land. Once again, Jim Corbett was the philosophical guide and Orum was the group's nuts-and-bolts guy. A lot of people had a hand in forming the group, said Pat Corbett, but "Tom Orum made Saguaro Juniper happen." Orum, 56, is a "Johnny Appleseed" figure; projects and gardens grow when he's around. He and Ferguson, 60, got together after he knocked on her door one day to ask if he could plant a garden in her back yard. They've been married for 24 years. Orum met Jim Corbett while rolling his garden cart past Himmel Park one day, on his way from one garden he had planted to another about seven miles away. Pat Corbett was playing volleyball with a woman Orum knew. Jim, plagued throughout his life by rheumatoid arthritis, was watching. "I was a bit crazy then," Orum said. "I had this thing about automobiles." He had a Volkswagen Beetle, Ferguson said, up on blocks in his yard. Corbett was more than happy to talk to a man who would rather walk and garden than drive. Orum was happy to be introduced to someone with available goat manure. Orum later went on a long goatwalk with Corbett - you take a couple goats and head out, unworried about water and provisions. The goats forage and provide milk. They are the ideal companion for the pastoral nomad, "a way to be at home in wildlands, living on milk and wild foods," Corbett wrote in his book. They are the ticket to "errantry . . . sallying out beyond a society's established ways, to live according to one's inner leadings." It is the way of St. Francis and of Don Quixote and it became the way of Jim Corbett, who said people often remarked on his resemblance to Cervantes' fictional knight. The skills Corbett learned early as a rancher and cowherd were honed while goatwalking. It made him a wonderful immigrant smuggler during Sanctuary times and an accomplished two-footed cowherd during his 14 years on Saguaro Juniper land. Dave Harris of the Nature Conservancy said he would often encounter Corbett on the road, walking from El Potrero to Hot Springs Canyon, paying a daily visit to the cows that grazed its 11 square miles. "You'd see this old, scrawny guy out there, and he's got his gnarled-up arthritic feet stuck into sandals with nylon webbing. He's already walked four or five miles, he liked to see his cows every day, heading off there with no water, a pair of jeans, crummy sandals and an old hat. Anybody else would just die in that situation." Debbie Hawkins

Debbie Hawkins lives across the river from the others, on a borrowed farm where this year her green pastures sustain the cows taken from the Saguaro Juniper land during the growing season. Hawkins, 29, has a liberal arts degree and is now entering a nursing program. She is also a singer and a songwriter who took the stage at the Tucson Folk Festival early this month to sing about growing up in Louisiana and keeping the right to choose abortion and women with big butts. She has a lot of interests, but after college she wanted to work outdoors. "I thought what I'd like to do is work as a cattle rancher," she said, knowing how tough that would be without a ranch in the family. Then she heard about Saguaro Juniper through friends and read "Goatwalking." She and her partner, Chet Phillips, joined Saguaro Juniper and moved to Cascabel, where they "farm-sat" for a couple who intend to eventually retire there. "We kept getting more cows. Jim was really a smashing salesman. He believed in the benefit of people integrating into the land using cows." In addition to eventually managing Saguaro Juniper's herd, Hawkins also put together a plan for marketing the "grass-finished" beef they raise. It was easier than she expected. The 60 members of Saguaro Juniper were all affiliated with other groups. Word spread. Then the mad-cow scare hit, and people became more interested in knowing where their beef came from. Word spread farther. Having a large group aids in other ways - when it's time to build fence, move cows or build rock wedges in the side drainages to catch water, build soil and promote plant growth. The Covenant Community

Involving people in ownership and stewardship of protected land is the real genius of Saguaro Juniper, said Gary Nabhan, the ethnobotanist and author who co-founded Native Seeds/SEARCH in Tucson. Nabhan is now director of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University. "It's not just an abstraction," said Nabhan. "They have found a way to bring people into participation into those practices that has had a ripple effect throughout the Southwest, if not the world. "It's sort of a nursery ground of new ideas that exemplifies Jim's very pragmatic, collaborative, Quaker way of doing things." It's not always easy. The group makes decisions by consensus, overcoming the last objection before moving on. Corbett notes in his book that the group reached easy agreement on things like banning roads, motorized vehicles and electricity in the canyon but spent days discussing whether to require that pets be leashed. Some members of Saguaro Juniper are philosophically opposed to grazing cattle in the desert but agree to the process to protect the integrity of their state grazing leases. At its mouth, Hot Springs Canyon is wide and dry, but as you walk upstream the canyon narrows and the streambed dampens. A fence protects this part of the canyon from cows. Lush grass and wildflowers line the banks. Sycamores shade a running creek that doesn't dry in midsummer, even in these drought-ravaged times. Farther up canyon, the Nature Conservancy's Muleshoe Ranch protects the five streams that drain the Galiuros and the Winchesters into this canyon. It's tempting to call this jewel of a setting the reason for the monetary, spiritual and social investment being made here. But this group embraces a wider love of this canyon between the mountains, where lions and rattlesnakes can't be killed, where the Chihuahuan Desert meets the Sonoran, where juniper trees grow up one slope and saguaros dot the other side. In 1987, when Jim Corbett proposed buying the first 135 acres in Hot Springs Canyon, he asked Nancy Ferguson: "What would you say if I told you about a place where a juniper is a nurse tree for a saguaro?" "I was essentially sold at that point," Ferguson said.