Mountain Islands and Desert Seas: A Natural History of the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands by Frederick R. Gehlbach (review)

Reviews 287 If you are looking for an evening’s worth of preposterous tall-tale tell­ ing, then this might be your cup of tea. Otherwise, don’t waste your time and hard-earned money on it. FRED L. LEE Kansas City Posse of the Westerners Mountain Islands and Desert Seas: A Natural History of the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands. By Frederick R. Gehlbach. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981. 298 pages, $19.95.) The day is hot. Camped in the sycamores along the Rio Grande, Frederick Gehlbach listens to yellow-throated warblers singing in his little grove. A time of reveries. He remembers the pleasant shock of nearly twenty years ago when he came face to face with a jaguarundi in the nearby cattails. But as he relives the encounter with the rare tropical cat, the naturalist’s trained eye notes the high cirrus clouds and the southerly wind. The thermometer begins a sixty-degree dive. Soon freezing weather moves into the semitropical setting. Yet the change is not at all unusual. Sharp contrasts typify the narrow strip of land stretching hundreds of miles along the U.S.-Mexican border from the Gulf on the Texas coast westward to the Colorado River that forms the ArizonaCalifomia state boundary. For this is, in one way of looking at it, more an environmental than a political border, a land where peaks glint over cactusstudded deserts nine thousand feet below, a region of jungles and hurricanes, sand dunes and drought. Gehlbach explores this margin between the temper­ ate zone to the north and the tropical region to the south, taking the reader in easy stages east to west through its three major sections. Adding another dimension, the professor of environmental studies at Baylor University readily dips into history, bringing to bear, for instance, the impressions of William Emory, leader of the first U.S. boundary survey to cross the wilder­ ness in the 1850s. And Gehlbach is equally familiar with the current litera­ ture, pointing with footnotes to further exploration of the natural puzzles he encounters. Taken up with his enthusiasm, bird lovers will delight in the flashy trogon, in the noisy chachalac, and in a visit to the only known U.S. nesting population of brown jays. As to mammals, the author speculates about the growing range of the armadillo, about the northward wanderings of that strange creature, apparently half monkey, half raccoon, the chulo. In fact, theorizing makes up the most valuable portions of the book, for Gehlbach ponders the future of a delicately balanced and ever teetering flora and fauna in an area particularly vulnerable to civilization’s follies. Agriculture and urbanization have caused the main disruptions, denuding the soil and 288 Western American Literature asphalting the desert to such an extent that, the author claims forebodingly, the weather now is off kilter. And Smokey the Bear doesn’t get off scot-free in the often well-intentioned but almost always simpleminded approaches to nature by a technological culture. A series of maps, drawings, and color photographs add impetus to Gehlbach’s arguments. Still, for all its assets, Mountain Islands and Desert Seas calls for a cautionary note. The author hasn’t decided whether he is writing an informal natural history or a scientific treatise. In consequence, Gehlbach’s easy style tends to careen into passages heaped with statistical stones and jargonistic boulders. Though the patches of clinical language may not buffet a biologist in the least, they will give the general reader occasional rough going. PETER WILD, Tucson, Arizona The Literary Guide to the United States. Edited by Stewart Benedict. (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1981. 246 pages, $15.95.) The explicit aim of The Literary Guide to the United States is to focus on geography in the name of literary appreciation, to explore the “American writer’s sense of place” in order to provide “a fuller understanding and enjoyment of American literature.” To this end, the country is divided into six regions, each covered by different commentators. “New York & En­ virons” is done by Stewart Benedict, the general editor, “New England” by Eugene and Patricia Flinn, “The Midwest” by Jon Spade, “The South & Border States” by Butler...