Gary Paul Nabhan's memoir looks at a life lived near bodies of water around the world

Water is a precious commodity in the desert — and especially so for Gary Paul Nabhan.

Nabhan is a desert ecologist and ethnobotanist. His new book, a memoir, is called "Water in the Desert: A Pilgrimage." It includes stories from his childhood, as well as his career — often surrounded by bodies of water from around the world.

Nabhan spoke with The Show about what water represents to him.

Full conversation

GARY PAUL NABHAN: Well, those of us in the desert regions of North America don’t take water lightly.

[LAUGHTER]

It’s more than a commodity. We crane our necks during the summer months looking up at the sky, hoping that clouds will build up and drop some rain on us.

And we are delighted whenever we see water, whether it’s from an artesian spring or a seep or the little potholes in the mountains called tinajas. And it’s so essential to life that we don’t take it for granted, as other people do in regions beyond the deserts.

MARK BRODIE: Well, it’s interesting because it sounds as though you are not someone who’s really ever taken it and its role in sustaining life for granted. I mean, you tell these stories about being a really little kid and sort of being in your yard and almost like communing with nature before you could almost communicate with humans.

GARY PAUL NABHAN: That’s right. I had a sense of belonging that I was connected to other species, whether it was the birds singing above me or the worms and larvae in the sand dunes that I was sitting on and the little beetles that made their tracks across the dunes. I just felt that they were part of my family or even part of me.

Now we have a word for that in science. That word, we’re not individual animals, we’re holobionts, which means that the community of microbes and other organisms in our guts and on our skin and in our ears really change our perception, nutrition, and they’re part of who we are.

MARK BRODIE: Do you think that those experiences as a child helped inform what you do now as an adult, like what you’ve done for your career?

GARY PAUL NABHAN: Well, obviously, I didn’t know the word holobiont when I was 4 or 5 years old. Of course. But I would say that I felt such a strong, pervasive sense of wonder whenever I was out in the dunes or on lakes or oceans that when I chose a career, the only real criteria I had was it had to be something to keep me outside as much as possible, so that it was either becoming a field biologist, a geologist or a land surveyor, because I just couldn’t see how I could survive if I were captured in a room all day long.

MARK BRODIE: Ah, so interesting. And was there something about working on and around water that was particularly appealing? I mean, the book is sort of organized into different bodies of water around which you’ve had these sort of formative experiences.

GARY PAUL NABHAN: I think that’s the throughline of the book, that people may not think that the dunes along Lake Michigan are anywhere like a true desert, but I had a Lebanese grandfather who told me stories of going out toward Mount Hermon, picking anise seed from wild anise plants in the dunes at the base of the sacred mountain. And where he lived wasn’t sandy in his orchard or field, but he told those stories like that are part of oral histories of any immigrants that made deserts loom large for me, and the Indiana dunes was about as close to a desert as we could have in the Midwest.

So I think it was a setup for what I did later on. By 17, I was visiting the North American deserts and just felt completely won over by them.

MARK BRODIE: What won you over about them, especially coming from where you did?

GARY PAUL NABHAN: Oh, I think it’s the funniest things, because it isn’t what most people think of with a desert. Rather than thinking of it as barren, I saw little clusters of plants that were in elegant little formations. It seemed uncluttered rather than completely chaotic because one plant had broken branches that obscured the other. It just seemed like there was space between the plants that gave me a chance to see each one as an individual being.

And so that the elegance and sparsity and spaciousness of deserts, and the sounds and the scents that came with it, just riveted me.

MARK BRODIE: Well, it’s interesting, it sounds like where some people look at the desert and see sort of a barren landscape, you see it as uncluttered and giving you an opportunity to really see and appreciate each individual plant.

GARY PAUL NABHAN: Well, you know what’s funny about that is I co-wrote a paper in 1976 with a great desert botanist, and we called it "Deceptive Barrenness."

And now we know that all deserts are deceptively barren because 20 times the amount of above-ground structure of a plant — what scientists call the biomass — is below ground. So a mesquite that’s 30 or 40 feet high above ground might have 160-foot-deep roots.

And so it is like we’re seeing the tip of the iceberg, that there’s a richness below ground and seasonally when the rains come that we don’t see year-round above ground.

MARK BRODIE: So you mentioned that, you know, this is a place where a lot of us crane our necks to the sky, you know, to see if there’s going to be rain coming, especially this time of year.

And as we are in monsoon season right now. I wonder if that holds a particular meaning for you, given the work you do, given your family background, given your childhood and your life so far. Like, does this time of year have any special significance for you?

GARY PAUL NABHAN: Oh, it’s the most spiritually uplifting part of the year. I look at those clouds, and I feel lifted up into the heavens. It’s my favorite time of the year.

I live part of each year with the Comcaac, or Seri, indigenous community in Mexico, and of course, I’ve had the benefit for working with the Pascua Yaqui and Tohono O’odham, too. And all of those peoples are reverential toward the coming of the summer rains.

I wrote a book called "The Desert Smells Like Rain" over 40 years ago, and I only think now, after four decades, I’m beginning to understand that that fragrance we feel as the first rainstorm comes in is sort of this divine moment in the desert where we’re overwhelmed by the same fragrances that churches and synagogues and Buddhist temples have used for thousands of years, fragrances that are full of antioxidants and just rivet our attention with their healing aromas.

And so to me, the wait for the rains is like the wait that people feel when they’ve fasted for Lent, and then there’s a big celebration for Easter or Passover. It’s just this beautiful, beautiful time of the year that makes me so happy to be an Arizonan. I would not want to live anywhere else except where there’s those summer thunderstorms that really rock our boats and open our eyes and noses.

MARK BRODIE: Wow. All right. Gary, thank you so much for the conversation. I really appreciate it.

GARY PAUL NABHAN: Thank you.