Another young Hoosier, born a year before me right beside Lake Michigan in Gary, Indiana, spent much of his childhood wandering along the lake and through the Indiana Dunes. “As a toddler,” he writes, “I loved to take in the sweet aromas emanating from flowers, leaves, scales, and skin, from hair, fur, feather, and ferment.” He wondered “how these songs and scents—the sources of which remained mostly hidden—shape us in innumerable ways.” Quite the toddler.

And he never stopped wondering.

Years later, I encountered this young Lebanese-American man, Gary Nabhan, at Prescott College in Arizona. I didn’t really know him. In that three-hundred-student school, we recognized everyone’s face but traveled in different circles. I was an art-and-lit type; Gary was a biology-ecology savant. I had no idea he had already been involved with the birth of Earth Day.

More years passed, and I was aware that he had written a modern classic in Southwestern literature, The Desert Smells Like Rain. He co-founded Native Seeds/SEARCH, and won a MacArthur “genius” grant. In the mid-eighties I was living at the Spiritual Life Institute’s Nada Hermitage in Crestone, Colorado, and William Irwin Thompson, founder of the Lindisfarne Association, was a neighbor. Lindisfarne sponsored an annual August gathering of artists, scientists, and religious visionaries. One year guests included Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson of the Land Institute, and Gary.

At that time, Gary and I discovered that we had both been drawn to contemplative Catholicism. While I had discovered John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila and embraced a life of solitude and community, he had been influenced by the spirituality he encountered through the Franciscans serving the Tohono O’Odham nation in Southern Arizona.

With his globetrotting, field work, and vast network of colleagues and my own commitment to solitary life, our paths rarely crossed. But we have settled in southern Arizona for our final decades. I thought I had a fairly good general sense of Gary’s life’s trajectory, but I was wrong. I am amazed at the depth and breadth of his ever-expanding spirit and learning. He moves nimbly between earthy anecdote, accurate scientific data, inter-cultural literacy, self-deprecating humor, and spiritual wisdom.

Some of his most poetic writing arises post-injury as his olfactory sense expands, allowing him to sniff out subspecies of milkweed. He even pinpoints the twenty-six plants out of hundreds that contribute most to the fragrance that intoxicates every desert dweller when monsoon rains arrive.

That’s just one example of how he leaps into efforts that combine scientific research, strong moral commitment to earth care, and reverence for cultural and spiritual traditions. The goal: healing and celebrating an earth charged with the grandeur of God.

Dave Denny and Gary Nabhan in Patagonia, Arizona: Hoosier Gothic.

He wrote to tell me that the Comcaac would probably try to elect her Governor of Sonora, given how many lives she had healed and even saved. She did it by combining her medical-school skills and her Comcaac friends’ knowledge of the region’s medicinal plants.

The book closes with a walk through the Colorado River delta, where young Gary and some of his mentors had witnessed the virtual extinction of Palmer’s saltgrass, a sacred grain that had nourished indigenous peoples for millennia. His friend Francisco takes him to mud flats where Gary is astounded to see flourishing saltgrass.

He remembers the mentors who died before seeing this epiphany of resilience and restoration. Gary notes that only one third of the world’s 250 longest rivers flow freely to the sea. He stands in wonder in this “lost” ecosystem that now sustains grain-producing saltgrass and more than 360 bird species “hooting and honking, chipping and chuckling every year” where the intermingling river, desert, and sea make Life.