Faith

Yaqui Well is a year-around spring located a thousand feet above the sea, in a windy pass between two desert wastelands. Hundreds of years ago, before the arrival of Spanish missionaries and Yankee cattlemen, it was the lifeblood of a Kumeyaay Indian village, providing enough plant life and game for successful hunting and gathering. Now part of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, the spring is a popular attraction for snowbirds and weekend warriors from nearby San Diego. According to canonical guidebooks and esoteric ranger lore, somewhere near the spring there is a clandestine slab of granite covered in morteros, deep pits left in stone by Kumeyaay women as they ground acorns into flour with smooth, hand-sized rocks called monos.

Recently I went in search of this fabled slab, wandering for hours in the maze of narrow pathways that wind through the forest surrounding the spring. As the sun sank behind the gray mountains, the bats came out to hunt, and Saturn emerged from the darkening sky. Under the light of my lantern, the paths through the ironwood trees took on the appearance of deep limestone caves, and the clumps of mistletoe that drooped from the branches above my head transformed into clusters of shoelace-thin stalactites. After another hour of wandering, the sky above now black and rippling with stars, I came across a path that was particularly well-trodden, leading off into a narrow ravine behind the spring. “This,” I thought, “must be the road to the morteros. Why else would it be so heavily traveled? Other people must know where the morteros are, and here are their footprints leading me to the spot.”

Encouraged by this sight, I followed the path to where it ended at the mouth of the ravine. Raising my lantern high above my shoulder, I scanned the area for any signs of the slab. All I found, though, was an old, gnarled mesquite tree and a tiny grotto in the wall of the ravine stuffed with dead cactus and owl scat. Unwilling to abandon my faith in this promising place, I scrambled out of the ravine and onto the slope above, and from there I scoured the surrounding landscape. By now my eyes had grown tired from straining in the artificial light of my lantern, and my mind had become sick and weary from racing for so long to identify the form of the slab against the background of ocotillo and barrel cactus. “It has to be here; it has to be here,” I kept saying to myself. But it was all in vain. The only rocks that I could spot were the black pebbles of the desert pavement—mere rubble, hardly more than dust. Defeated, I laid down on the ground. There was no choice now but to be honest with myself: The morteros were not there.

Sprawled out on the desert floor, I began to wonder: “If that path behind me is a dead end, a road to nowhere and to nothing, then why have so many people taken it?” That’s when the thought came to me: Years ago a single person probably traveled up this ravine in search of the morteros, but when she came to the end and found nothing, she walked away and never looked back. A few days or months later, another seeker must have spotted her footprints, and believing they led to the morteros, he faithfully followed them. Now there were two layers of tracks leading into the ravine—a fledgling trail in the sand. And this trail must have attracted even more seekers, who left their tracks. And thus, over the years, the trail grew deep and authoritative. With its hundreds of footprints, some fresh and others old, it seemed to announce, “I am the way.” But it was all folly.

I have since found the morteros. They were, as the old saying goes, in the last place I looked: hidden under a leafy cottonwood tree that grows from the side of a hill east of the spring. O if only the last place were the first! Then I would have saved some time. Now, though, whenever I come to Yaqui Well, I try to atone for my earlier lack of direction. On cool spring afternoons, when the wildflowers glow in the sun and the golden orioles haunt the trees, I like to sit by the morteros, alone with my thoughts. The slab of blue granite into which the morteros have been carved sleeps peacefully beneath the shady cottonwood, and the morteros themselves lie half-filled with water from the last brief desert rain. The trail leading to this spot is nearly invisible—just a few tracks buried beneath the red blossoms of apricot mallow and the purple petals of desert woolstar. Perhaps when spring becomes summer and the wildflowers die, the tracks will become more noticeable. But for now they are a secret—a secret I shall gladly keep.?