ARMED AND DANGEROUS

Visiting Saguaro National Park

The America the Beautiful annual pass — eighty dollars, gets you into more than two thousand federal recreation sites, has featured sweeping national park photography since 2004 as required by federal law — now features Donald Trump’s face. Specifically, a closeup of Trump’s face alongside George Washington, which is a pairing that one of these men finds deeply flattering and the other would have found deeply baffling. The actual contest winner — a photograph of Glacier National Park, chosen through the legally mandated public competition — was demoted to the Nonresident pass, which now costs international visitors a hundred dollars per person.

The main pass, the one for Americans, the one that says this land is your land, has a Trump’s face on it. One visitor described it as a mugshot slapped onto natural beauty. A lawsuit was filed. Sticker campaigns launched. The Interior Department updated its alteration policy to make covered passes potentially void at the gate, which is the federal government using its enforcement apparatus to protect a portrait of Donald Trump from the menace of wildlife stickers.

Chance Meeting’s response to all of this was surgical. Somewhere on the highway between Holbrook and Tucson he produced a penknife and carved Xs through Trump’s eyes on our pass — not frantically, not with performance, but with the calm focused precision of a filmmaker who has spent considerable time thinking about what deserves to be in the frame and what doesn’t. When I presented the pass at Saguaro National Park, I was wearing my embroidered DEPORT MELANIA hat. My friend, Chelsea Gods, had gifted it to me earlier in the year. The ranger looked at the Xs on the pass. Looked at my hat. Paused in the way that people pause when they are deciding whether today is the day they want to have a particular conversation and concluding that it is not. She waved us through without issue.

A few people in line behind me were smiling. Nobody said a word. Nobody seemed to care. The machinery of authoritarian aesthetic enforcement, it turns out, is a little wobbly when it meets a penknife and a hat with a strong position.

The saguaro cactus also does not care about you. It does not care about the news cycle or the quarterly projections or who is currently posting on Truth Social or what the Department of the Interior has decided this week about the definition of alteration. The saguaro — Carnegiea gigantea, the largest cactus in the United States — has been standing in this desert since before humans arrived in this hemisphere, doing exactly what it does, which is survive in a place that should not be survivable, with a calm and total indifference to outside opinion that the rest of us can only aspire to.

A saguaro doesn’t grow its first arm until it’s seventy-five years old. The oldest ones in the park are a hundred and fifty to two hundred years old. They were here before Arizona was a state. They watched the Civil War happen from a distance. They have now survived long enough to watch someone staple a president’s vanity project to a laminated card and call it patriotism. They are unmoved.

If you ever get the opportunity, I suggest walking the trails at dawn. The light is lateral and honest and the javelinas move through the scrub like they own it — because they do, and because they were here first, and because no one has yet tried to put their picture on an eighty-dollar card and call it a tribute to America’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday.

The desert is armed. The desert is dangerous. The desert is not taking questions. It built itself for no one’s benefit but its own and it has the thorns, the teeth, the geological record, and the bottomless indifference to prove it.

Put that on a pass.

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