Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver Page B

it often and sometimes don’t even get very wet. Where its headwaters cross from Mexico into Arizona, this river is barely three feet across. As it runs north across a hundred miles of desert with a scant but persistent flow, it rarely gets much wider. In the scheme of human commerce it’s an unimpressive trickle. Mostly it’s a sparkling anomaly, a novelty for us here—a thread of blue-green relief for sunstruck eyes.
    In the heat of late April the modest saint invites us down from the blazing desert into a willowy tunnel of cool shade, birdsong, and the velvet-brown scent of riverbank. We take unhurried hikes there whenever we can, reading the dappled script of animal tracks and the driftwood history of flood and drought embedded in the steep banks. The sight of a vermilion flycatcher leaves us breathless every time—he’s not just a bird, he’s a punctuation mark on the air, printed in red ink, read out loud as a gasp.
    The kids dance barefoot between sandbars, believing they have found the Secret Garden. For the space of an afternoon we’re sheltered from the prickly reality of the desert in which we live. Most human visitors to the San Pedro appreciate it for about the same reasons people value gold: It sparkles, and it’s rare.
    From a resident’s point of view, though, the price of gold couldn’t touch this family home. For the water umbel spreading delicate roots in a lucid pool, the leopard frog peering out through a veil of duckweed, the brush-prowling ocelot, and the bright-feathered birds that must cross this hostile expanse of land or find a living on it, the San Pedro is a corridor of unparalleled importance. Nearly half the river’s hundred miles, and fifty-eight thousand acres of the surrounding corridor, have been protectedsince 1988 as the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation area. The Nature Conservancy has named it one of the nation’s “Last Great Places.”
    To jump across this river with the right measure of reverence requires an animal frame of mind. Eighty-two species of mammals—a community unmatched anywhere north of the tropics—inhabit this valley. Hiding out here as well are 43 kinds of reptiles and amphibians, including the endangered Huachuca leopard frog, a bizarre critter that calls (as if he knew it was a big, harsh desert out there) from underwater. The San Pedro also harbors the richest, densest, and most diverse inland bird population in the United States—385 species. It’s one of the last nesting sites for willow flycatchers and western yellow-billed cuckoos; green kingfishers breed nowhere else in the country. For millions of migratory birds traveling from winter food in Central America to their breeding grounds in the northern U.S. and Canada, there is one reliable passage, on which their lives depend. Just this one.
    I lead my children down its banks in the hope that they’ll come to recognize in the San Pedro the might and consequence of that splendid word river . Never mind that Huck Finn wouldn’t have troubled himself to spit across it. As our girls stoop at the edge of a riffle, peering into the clear, fast water, my husband and I talk to them about heroic navigational feats undertaken not by paddle and steam but by feathered wing.
    Our Tucson-born children are more accustomed to ephemeral desert streams that roar briefly after a storm, leaving behind bleached, stony channels that stay dry for weeks or months until the next good rain. “This one never, ever dries up. Wow,” the elder observes. “There could be fish living in there.” Her little sister, meanwhile, hurls herself toward the sandy shallows, crying, “Clothes off!”
    This may or may not be reverence, but most children are good at the animal frame of mind.
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    This place is one of the blessings I count when I brace myself to consider a dearly beloved and threatened world, and stake my heart onto pieces of