a dozen bighorn sheep were galloping eastward across the desert floor. From my elevation I was able to follow their graceful strides for miles. Never have I seen air so extravagantly clear, so brutally still.
Most of the Pinacate’s rattlers, vultures, and javelinas have never confronted shotguns, Nikons, or Jeeps. It reminded me of the volcanic Galápagos Islands, whose animals are likewise innocent of our imperial tendencies. Slabs of shimmering lava lie about the sides of some Pinacate volcanoes; barrel cactus, which the sheep break up with their hooves for moisture, spring from cracks in the rocky soil. Above ground, it is the Great Stinking Desert at its greatest and most stinking. New Mexico artist P. A. Nisbet speaks of “atmospheric clarity” and “a magical sense of deep space” when describing the Pinacate. The range, he says, “has the character of mystery and the quality of darkness about it. It’s primeval, terrifying, and reassuring at the same time. You feel as if you’re walking through the Pleistocene age.”
The pirates’ protectiveness was understandable; elitist antagonism was something else. Soon after returning from one of my trips, a call came in from out of state, quite unsolicited, from a man I didn’t know. He had heard through the grapevine that I hoped to write about his Pinacate for a weekly newspaper. “It’s a sacred place, and it shouldn’t be revealed to common street people,” his tirade began. “I don’t see any reason to draw attention to that area. It has a pristine quality, but you can sense the deterioration with each additional visitor. Last time I went I didn’t see another human for an entire week. I had 360-degree open vistas the whole time. Yellowstone, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon—they’re just amusement parks compared with the Pinacate. I’ve made 50 trips there over the past ten years. Most people who go there now are true explorers or geologists or anthropologists—scientists who have a love for the desert. If not another person were to find out about the Pinacate, except by his own personal exploration, well, that’d be fine. It’s one of the last strongholds of the Sonoran Desert.”
The pirates, of course, are further bothered by the more recent and better-organized Pinacate administration. “It’s hard to get around now,” one told me. “I’ve seen the Mexican army and American DEA in there. All the back roads and most of the campgrounds are now prohibited. It’s riskier to move around.” In other words, it ain’t what 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.
