Cactus Smuggling & Other Adventures

I stood alongside two Mexican tourists looking through a chainlink fence at an enormous hole in the ground. Somewhere near the New Mexico/Arizona line, it was maybe half a mile across and easily as deep, though the clarity of the air could have been deceiving and the whole void could have been a cubic mile. There's nothing like an open-pit mine to remind you of what man, in this instance the Phelps Dodge Co., will do in the great cause of making a buck. We could see the geology in cross-section, layered green, dark blue, red and sandy white as, somewhere back in ur-time, the various strata had heaved and settled themselves in an arrangement that, half a billion years later, proved most satisfactory to the stockholders of Phelps Dodge, a company that has always resisted the heroic efforts by the miners to secure decent payment for their labors and which notoriously, in recent times, snapped its fingers at then-Gov. Bruce Babbitt and commanded that despicable invertebrate to call out the state troopers to break a strike.

Only a few days earlier, back in Alabama, I'd been reading a terrifying story in The Wall Street Journal, a truly brilliant and important piece of historical research by a reporter called Douglas Blackmon into the way U.S. companies, including units of U.S. Steel, had contracted with the state of Alabama to recruit cheap prison labor to dig coal, notably at the Pratt mining complex outside Birmingham. The total number of those sent into the mines over the 60-year span of the system probably far exceeded 100,000.

The reporter had the temerity to note that in June a $4.5 billion fund set up by German corporations began making payments last month to the victims of Nazi slave-labor programs during the 1930s and 1940s and that Japanese manufacturers now face demands for compensation for their alleged use of forced labor during the same period. Maybe the profiteers from mines in Shelby County, AL, should face some questions too, and victims or their offspring be vindicated.

Most of the convicts condemned to the coal mines in Shelby County were charged with minor offenses or violations of "Black Code" statutes passed to reassert white control in the aftermath of the Civil War. The system was simplicity itself. The sheriffs and guards made their livings off commissions for supplying the black convict labor, also by pocketing the difference between the food money they were allocated and the slop they actually dished out to the convicts. The pretexts for arrests were trivial or nonexistent, such as being rowdy, riding the rails, looking at a white woman (unless the glance was of a quality that required a lynching). Fines were imposed and since the blacks had no money, the men were sent to the coal mines instead, with years added on to cover "court costs." What followed was most often a prolonged death sentence, by dint of overwork, starvation and then sickness, unless the process was speeded up by being beaten to death with a pickax handle by one of the guards.

Some Alabama officials in the late 19th century were horrified. At the Pratt Mines an observer for a special Alabama legislative committee in 1897 wrote a report describing 1117 convicts, many "wholly unfit for the work," at labor in the shaft. "The men worked standing in pools of putrid water. Gas from the miners' headlamps and smoke from blasts of dynamite and gun powder choked the mine. Men were priced depending on their health and their ability to dig coal. Under state rules adopted in 1901, a 'first class' prisoner had to cut and load into mine cars four tons of coal a day to avoid being whipped." That's 8000 pounds, maybe three times the weight of a Volkswagen.

U.S. Steel bought Tennessee Coal in 1907. U.S. Steel Chairman Elbert H. Gary, after whom the Indiana steel town is named, was a man of progressive reputation. He commanded his subordinates that association of U.S. Steel or its subsidiaries with the penal system of Alabama should cease. It didn't. That same year 50 black convicts set fire to the mine in an attempt to escape and many were suffocated or roasted alive. One executive noted that U.S. Steel's "chief inducement for the hiring of convicts was the certainty of a supply of coal for our manufacturing operations in the contingency of labor troubles."

Which takes us back to the miners in Arizona, striking Phelps Dodge, and having to face the state troopers sent in by governors like Bruce Babbitt, more recently secretary of the interior in Clinton time and now gainfully employed by a Washington law firm to assist in the predations of looters of the public domain like the Hearst family. Any governor of Arizona has as one of his prime functions the provision of cheap water, transported at public expense, for the state's big real estate and agricultural interests.

That night, ensconced in my Days Inn in the little southeastern Arizona town of Safford, I was able to gaze at the great cotton fields surrounding the town as they have for decades now, with the abundant water sloshing through the ditches. Over on the southeast horizon was Mount Graham, sacred to the Apache and sanctuary to the endangered red squirrel, both of which attributes are being swiftly destroyed by the mighty telescopes installed with the vehement support of Sen. John McCain, also the Vatican, which endorsed the telescopes, I recalled reading a couple of years ago, though in retrospect it seems fantastical, as vital for the search of the cosmos for further possible converts to Christendom.

Along state Hwy. 70 I rolled next day through Globe, and on Rte. 60, its nearby satellite of Miami, where one is afforded a definitive vignette of the role of environmental regulation, in the form of a vast, awful mine, like a cross between something out of Caspar Friedrich and a Fritz Lang nightmare: a mountain of shale, its base oozing green pus, topped by a mining building, the whole thing 1000 feet high, and right at the bottom, next to the highway, a tiny shack labeled "Environmental Compliance," and next to this the cryptic sign, "Zero and Beyond."

Then came more mines and astounding red rock, sandstone formations and then, 10 minutes later, the other side of the range, a sign for the Boyce Thompson arboretum. I rolled right past it, and then, always a sucker for gardens and arboreta, made a U and went in. So glad I did, since these 1075 acres of the Sonoran desert nestling at the base of Picketpost mountain now comprise one of the premier horticultural attractions of the country, for which we can thank William Boyce Thompson and, no doubt, Mrs. Thompson.

He was a mining engineer from Montana, who made his pile figuring out where to dig some of the big holes I had been gazing at a few minutes earlier. Flush with income from the Inspiration Consolidated Copper Co. at Globe-Miami, Thompson won his honorary title of "Colonel" by leading a Red Cross expedition to Russia in 1917. As he marched across the arid Asian steppes toward St. Petersburg, the Colonel became mightily impressed not only by the extreme hunger he witnessed on all sides but also by the fact that what little food the locals had often came from plants. All food, the Colonel suddenly appreciated, comes originally from plants. Back in Arizona he swiftly laid plans for an arid land arboretum where plants from the world's deserts could be brought together, their uses assayed and their seeds distributed. Work began in 1923, and by 1929 it was up and running as a joint project of the arboretum, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Civilian Conservation Corps. These days there are more than 3000 different plants flourishing at Boyce Thompson, and among the beneficiaries of the Colonel are sperm whales, a substitute for whose oil is the oil pressed from seeds of the desert jojoba bush, now planted on a large scale in Arizona.

I wandered about in the 105-degree heat and soon saw in the distance the tapering trunk, some 35 feet high, of Idria columnaris, otherwise known as the Boojum, whose erroneous identification proved so fatal to the Baker in Lewis Carroll's heimlich masterpiece, The Hunting of the Snark. All around were marvelous cacti and kindred succulents such as euphorbias and agaves. The arboretum, which must be a particular miracle to visit in the spring when the desert is in bloom, has many interesting cacti for sale, and I loaded up the '62 Plymouth station wagon, which was already freighted with cacti and a Madagascar palm I'd bought in Truth or Consequences.

I headed west through Phoenix, then onto Interstate 10 toward Blythe, CA. Beside the highway ran the power lines, and I thought of that great son of the desert, Edward Abbey, and his malediction in The Monkey Wrench Gang: "All this fantastic effort?giant machines, road networks, strip mines, conveyor belt, pipelines, slurry lines, loading towers, railway and electric train, hundred-million-dollar coal-burning power plant; ten thousand miles of high-tension towers and high-voltage power lines; the devastation of the landscape, the destruction of Indian homes and Indian grazing lands, Indian shrines and Indian burial grounds; the poisoning of the last big clean-air reservoir in the forty-eight contiguous United States, the exhaustion of precious water supplies?all that ball-breaking labor and all that back-breaking expense and all the heartbreaking insult to land and sky and human heart, for what? All that for what?Why, to light the lamps of Phoenix suburbs not yet built, to run the air conditioners of San Diego and Los Angeles, to illuminate shopping-center parking lots at two in the morning, to power aluminum plants, magnesium plants, vinyl-chloride factories, and copper smelters, to charge the neon tubing that makes the meaning (all the meaning there is) of Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Tucson, Salt Lake City, the amalgamated metropoli of southern California, to keep alive that phosphorescent putrefying glory (all the glory there is left) called Down Town, Night Time, Wonderville, U.S.A."

A few yards after the Colorado River, which is at the state line, there was a checkpoint staffed by the California Dept. of Agriculture. A tough-looking fellow took one glance through the window of my station wagon at the cacti within and demanded proof of origin and purchase. Fortunately I managed to find a tag from the arboretum, but he wasn't entirely satisfied, pointing at the Madagascar palm and saying it looked as though I'd dug it up myself. Finally he let me through, and I went off down the interstate wondering whether the big cactus smugglers used geezers in old station wagons as mules to shift product.

Next day I remarked on the fierce inspection to young Rick, who runs an excellent little roadside cactus store at Four Corners, where 58 crosses 395, and he told me that all cacti in the U.S. are protected, and indeed gangs do dig them up in the desert for later sale. A substantial saguaro can cost hundreds of dollars. When the Arizona Highways Dept. has to move a cactus, the road crews will tag it and sell it to a dealer, who can then legally put it up for sale. He told me I was lucky to have gotten my plants through, even though their papers were basically in order.

Drive through interior California and you drive past prisons. In Adelanto the mother and daughter who ran the local Days Inn told me that they already had two in town, one state and one federal, and were scheduled for three more. Higher up Interstate 5 you pass Avenal and Coalinga, with others over the horizon. In San Jose the headlines spoke of further implosion in the e-markets. Hewlett-Packard was laying off thousands worldwide. I chugged up through the wine country and into Humboldt County, and, in mid-afternoon, 4000 miles and 10 days after I left Landrum, SC, swung into my yard. Five minutes later two F-14s flew down the tiny valley at 500 feet, amid a deafening roar. "The sound of freedom," they used to call it. These were just pilots being assholes. I watched my horses jump about four feet in the air. A mile downriver, Margie Smith's old horse jumped too, wounded itself on a fence post and bled to death.