“…in this fashion they crossed sometime near noon the international boundary line into Mexico, State of Sonora, undifferentiated in its terrain from the country they quit and yet wholly alien and wholly strange…To the east he could see one of the concrete obelisks that stood for a boundary marker. In that desert waste it had the look of some monument to a lost expedition”

- Cormac McCarthy “The Crossing”, 1994

Water is found at altitude where I currently live. The sky islands rising to my south are just high enough to support a stream or two and they are a long ridgeline of granite massifs thrusting upwards from the chapparal. They dominate the landscape and form a natural barrier between Sonora and my corner of Arizona, forcing most of the drug trade and undocumented migration east towards Douglas or west towards Nogales. Timbered with oak and mesquite, they support a healthy amount of wildlife, ranging from packrats on up to cougars.  The mountains fall away to the south, leveling out to the not quite flat desert floor and once you cross Montezuma Canyon Road, you enter Mexico, which for me is terra incognita- a white blank space on the map that evokes images, fables and myth rather than a land of right knowing.

I was following a stream through one of the canyons there, not fishing hard because it’s doubtful there are trout in there, being the stream flow is unpredictable year to year, making this particular area unlikely to be stocked or support a native population. Still, it’s worth a try and I may be suprised as I gain elevation and the water gets bigger. I try to learn something each time I go fishing, and usually succeed, with most of the epiphanies being minor, the type of lessons that come to someone fairly new to trout fishing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 10:53 am and is filed under On the Border. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.