Ever since I was a kid, people have been telling me I couldn’t do some things. I’ve never believed them. Sometimes, they tell me the earth was simply made for people and using it is the right way to live and fussing about wild animals and wild ground was a waste of time. By the time I was ten, I didn’t believe a word of that argument and now I’m a lot further down the road and I believe even less of it.

I roll down the Ruby Road and there is a new federal sign on old ground that warns me of illegal immigrants and drug smugglers. If there is a place that has been ignored and at the same time taken for granted, it is the Tumacacori highlands, that understated part of the Coronado National Forest that rakes the earth with canyon, mountains and spires of rock north of this road. It is a kind of haunted mirror of who we have been and who we are and just possibly who we might become. At times, the terrain has been grazed hard. The hills gouged with mines, the trees murdered to run various mills and prop up shafts undergound.

I’m talking to an old cowman who is my friend and who has been riding trails here for seventy years and he says there are cow paths from his childhood that are now as wide as small roads and he rides down them and can find not a single hoof print, just tracks left by human beings, that stream of stricken people fleeing north into the bowels of the American economy. The man is border bred for five generations, rooted in both Mexico and the United States and I can sense for the first time a caution in him, a kind of tallying of damage to the land and damage to his heart as he sees a world he thought he knew go berserk and ravage what he loves.

I’m talking some years ago to an old friend bred up in this country and he takes me to his ground and shows me grazing scars a century old from when the great herds mauled the ground at the end of the nineteenth century. He decides, to my surprise, to banish his remaining steers and let the ground finally heal. And then, he dies far too young, and I speak at his funeral and notice that not one of the old ranch families attends because he has become a heretic to a long treasured way of life.

I’m talking to a lobbyist who is my friend and his people also sprang up out of this ground and he shows me how he is plotting a massive power line right through the Tumacacori Highlands and the line aims like a dagger at a place called Sycamore Canyon and I tell him, no, no, you will reap a whirlwind if you maim that place and he looks at me with puzzlement and the line remains as sketched.

I think of these moments and others as I rumble down the Ruby Road against the Atascosas, the track dirt and bare rock and very a slow go after the summer rains. What is on the table now is a simple proposal: take 84,000 acres of this national forest and give it a wilderness designation: the Tumacacori Highlands Wilderness Proposal. Grazing will continue and ranchers can use machines to maintain their fences, stock tanks, and wells.

At the moment, this surviving shred of what we once called the land is threatened by power companies, some crazed off road drivers who seem to love murdering ground, a legion of poor people seeking a future, and a small army of drug dealers selling what we buy. None of these things are magically fixed by calling the place a wilderness, but, my God, what have we become as a people if we cannot even stir ourselves to try to save this small portion of our nation? And if we do not realize that wild ground feeds the most essential part of ourselves and of our history, well, then, we best retire to the saloons and home entertainment centers because we have ceased to be the people our ancestors thought we would be.

Last summer, I wandered around this area and sought to fathom why it has a hold on me and what it means to me. I was scribbling a book then about power and the border and this section of the earth erupted into my mind without warning.

I’ll try to explain.

Sycamore canyon comes into my life in my twelfth year. It is a stone slot knifing five miles south through the oak hills to Mexico. The dirt track crawls over the shoulder of the Atascosas. Bear Canyon opens below, a spot where Yaqui warriors were caught in the 1920s coming north for guns to take back into Mexico for their endless wars against outsiders.

In the Apache wars, white men settled at the mouth of the canyon and then were murdered. The stream purls along, the banks sporting large sycamores and cottonwoods. The green breath of the slot inspires fantasies of bounty. I once had a drink with an old trapper who had wintered in the canyon murdering bobcats. He scoffed at the notion that his work could dent their numbers.

Trogons, that colorful, parrot-like bird, seep into the canyon from Mexico, as do rosy-throated becards, five-striped sparrows and hordes of other species. The canyon hosts bandits, smugglers, drug caravans, and herds of poor people trekking to the riches of El Norte. Sometimes gunfire rips the night as men war over kilos. One exasperated rancher in the area, after endless cutting of his fence bordering Mexico, simply puts in a gate for the smugglers’ convenience.

Dawn brings the tolling of the doves, light dancing on the tops of the cottonwoods and along the stream cold hangs like a wet sheet. The canyon wren trills, the tracks of beasts on the soft sands echo the passing of the night. Moss shelters in the wet places, the Sonoran chub darts in the pools. The cliffs and pinnacles always take command of the eye.

Just to the south and east, men found sheets of silver on the surface of the earth in the early eighteenth century at a place called Arizonac and this strike, now lost to memory, lingers on the tongues of people and becomes the name splattered on an American state. The slot is a pathway for Apaches raiding south, for Yaquis, during their wars, coming north to buy guns, for Mexican revolutionaries bartering for supplies.

I was the friend of a man whose grandfather kept store for less than a year near the canyon during the Mexican Revolution, a business a few hundred yards from the border. He took his earnings from selling produce and dry goods and guns and bought a ranch of some fifty square miles.

Dreams of power slip through this slot, then fade, and yet, the stone walls remain cool and calm long after the killing and shouting falls away.

We got this stretch of ground, the canyon, the hills and mountains to the north, because we stomped on another nation. The Mexico of the 1840s had maybe seven million souls. The Mexicans faced over twenty-three million Americans, a nation almost like the Mongol hordes that once streamed out of the steppes, a restless people constantly reaching out for new ground, a hungry people who by the 1840s had six hundred ships in the China trade. A nation that invents out of whole cloth a secular theology and calls it Manifest Destiny, a hack’s idea of meaning coined by a newspaper man, John O’Sullivan, editor of the New York Morning News, who argues in the year 1845 that the United States “had a manifest destiny to overspread the continent, allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions,” and, they multiply, coming down the gangplanks in eastern cities, refugees from some place called Europe, ambitious Germans, famine-starved Irish, all cannon fodder for an idea they have surely never heard, this Manifest Destiny, something so natural to the nation that even a conservative leader and one time president such as John Quincy Adams notes as early as 1819 that the world will soon have to learn a new fact, and “be familiarized with the idea of considering our proper dominion to be the continent of North America,” and they all mean it, that the great Jehovah or some other potentate has decreed that Mexico and Canada are meant to fall under the heel of the United States, and of course, the heel is always denied, this mission is simply an effort to extend the joys of democracy but still, the mission is there and it is like oxygen, something in the air, not questioned but simply inhaled.

When the war ended, half of Mexico was amputated by the United States. A few years later, the conquerors noticed they failed to steal a sound route for a southern transcontinental railroad and so with the Gadsden Purchase this error was remedied and Sycamore Canyon and the Tumcacori Highlands to the north came into American possession.

By the 1860s, General James Henry Carleton can crush the Navajo with a scorched earth policy, herd the starving tribe into Bosque Redondo far from their canyon homes and justify the whole enterprise by simply stating what to him is obvious: “In their appointed time, God wills that one race of men—as in the races of lower animals—shall disappear off the face of the earth and give place to another race, and so on in the Great Cycle traced out by Himself, which may be seen but has reasons too deep to be fathomed by us. The races of mammoths and mastodons, and the great Sloths, came and passed away. The Red man of American is passing away!”

This notion of divine right and might is met with dismay by some—the London Times argues, “To assert a prospective dominion over territories beyond [a nation’s] frontiers, is to confuse and overthrow the barriers of power, and to hasten the return of universal war and confusion.”

Today, we tend to think that the border and the land is the way it has always been. Ten thousand years ago, the mountains against Yuma, Arizona had pine and now they are rock, and cactus and volcanic heat. Armies move through in 1846 as the theater of empire is played out in this Mexican war, a clash of cultures, to be sure, what with the Mexican army having 20,000 soldiers and yet listing in its records 24,000 officers, and the U.S. forces being a mob of some regular army and the rest, volunteers under elected officers. Of the sixty-two volunteer colonels in the war, only eleven had any military training. They are men subject to strong passions and little discipline—on the fourth of July 1846, a Texas Ranger unit in Mexico salutes patriotism with two horse buckets of whiskey and some pigs and chickens “accidentally killed while firing in honor of the day.” And somehow by hook or crook, or what they see as the grace of God, they keep winning battle after battle until they peel off from Mexico half of its territory and now we live in it. And it came to pass because of deception by the president of the United States, James K. Polk, who insisted Mexican troops violated the border by crossing the Rio Grande when, in fact, every previous U.S. administration has seen the line between Texas and Mexico proper as the Rio Nueces.

The Spaniards and Mexicans claimed this ground but left it largely alone and seldom lived there or held sway. The tribes came and went and killed and surged and then receded as they, too, sought to say this belongs only to us and then found that others held the same idea and were willing to use force.

This ground of Apaches and Tohono O’odham and Maricopas and many other peoples was seized as a happenstance . The real prize was California and the key ports for the dreams of the China Market. When the war with Mexico ends, the United States has added a chunk that finally makes it about the size of the Roman Empire or the imperial domain of Alexander the Great.

So I have been coming down to this slot in the earth, a place called for the moment Sycamore Canyon, since I was twelve-years-old and it is the natural area, the refuge for the plants and beasts, the place where the song of the canyon wren hangs in the still air of morning, splashes of green, cool shadows, the pad of the bobcat and now, in the night, the movement of drugs and people, and all this in land stolen in a war and now certified as the property of the United States but once again the ground is in play because that is the nature of the zone of dust and heat regardless of the claims of nations.

We own it for the time being. Now we must decide just what kind of owners we are. The land has endured a lot. We’ve largely ignored the wounds of the land—as every beast and plant and molecule of soil will testify in our courts when we finally open our ears.

I walk into the hills, lie down by an oak and listen to the grass whisper. Now and then a hawk wheels overhead. If I stir myself, I can see a deer moving through the trees. Or I can do what is nothing at all and finally join that fabric of what we call life.

This is a chance to do something right.

Or if you prefer suicide, keep on the path we have been following and pave everything, rip up everything and douse the sky with the whine of machines roaring and tearing up the hillsides.

It’s our call. As I said, here is the place, the Tumcacori Highlands, where we can glimpse who we have been and face who we will be. You want it to be like the I-19 corridor? Or do want a place to visit that is beyond our everyday imagination?

I’ll take my ground wild and free.

For Manifest Destiny and the Mexican War see Bernard Devoto, 1846: the year of decision, and Joseph Wheelan, Invading Mexico: America’s continental dream and the Mexican war, 1846-1848, Carrol & Graf, New York, 2007.

Charles Bowden is author of many books and published essays. He makes his home in Tucson, Arizona.