Some great songwriter likened the melancholy ballad of the lonesome, sun-leathered cowboy to the union of rose and thorn. But do cowboys really know the rose? Roses are fussed over and hybridized in English gardens for people who tea.
The rose of the American West is the prickly pear, pairing delicate pink and yellow blossoms with fiercely barbed and gnarled paddles as sensuous as big toes so corned up Dr. Scholl couldn't save them. These aren't the opuntia that led a search party to Tenochtitlan, that turgid, golf-course green perch for the snake-eating-eagle on Mexico's national flag. That third of the badass trifecta could dip its roots into the magma chamber of Popocatépetl and take a drink.
Plains opuntia are humble opuntia. They shrivel and fade into the surrounding savanna, inflating the cost of barefoot frolics. But don't let their false modesty fool you. They're like that person with low social value cause they grow corn or something, but online they blossom into something essential like a gamer or a brony. All year long they bank their botanical dogecoin until the cacto-clock hits flower hour, than they cash in, squeezing out an incongruously voluptuous glimmer, as outlandish as a counter-narrative in corporate media.
The petals, so fragile they're nearly translucent, pool their vivacity by huddling close, peeling back pastel tremolos on a gilt stamen forest glittered and quivering. "I have yet to look into one and not find a honeybee or bumblebee wallowing drunkenly inside," Edward Abbey observed, "powdered with pollen, glutting itself on what must be a marvelous nectar."
Your SDPB Outdoors correspondent has also witnessed bees writhing in exultation like a winged spirit of South Dakota splashing through the surf of a chislic sea.
If there is some force in this world, a higher moral or creative intelligence than even available on Instagram, capable of manifesting itself in symbols more mutable and glorious than even a swoosh, some unhashtaggable conduit to the multiverse on the mainline, maybe it's out here among the prickly pears.
Back to the trifecta on the Mexican flag. What do the searchers seek in Tenochtitlan if not beauty? A synergy of living symbols? If they found their way from symbol-want to that unlikely scene, can't we find our out of this musty basement we're in? Follow that drunken bumblebee.
Or the yucca moth. There's a symbiosis. "Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed" like the bowed lilies that bedeck a yucca stalk, waiting for this doe-eyed, fuzzy little ghost. Lost without each other, yucca and moth are coding their story across earth and sky, a symbolic map away from the dead world to something new.