I go looking for my watermelon outside of Albuquerque with Cameron, a friend from North Carolina. We end up at a huge Smith’s Supermarket, where he thinks we might find one, even smack-dab in the middle of the off-season. He’s right, but they’re not very attractive specimens—seedless things, smaller than usual, and underripe to boot. We buy three of them anyway (they’re on sale), plus a case of beer to wash down the kebabs he’ll make later that evening. Before dinner, we head for a walk in the mountains just outside of town with Cam’s dog, Rodeo. Cam is stuck in the middle of trying to feel better about a difficult relationship. We discuss his options on our way to an outcropping that he has geotagged in his phone as “parrotfish”—textured cleavage in the rock face looks akin to fish scales, and there’s a feature off to one side of the mass that looks like a beak—trading generic and occasionally heartbreaking stories about the previous year. One of the melons falls out of the bag on the way up, and Rodeo chases it down the trail, tripping over himself like a dung beetle.
Jacinto unrolled the blankets and threw the dryest one about the shivering priest. Then he bent over the pile of ashes and charred wood, but what he did was to select a number of small stones that had been used to fence in the burning embers. These he gathered in his sarape and carried to the rear wall of the cavern, where, a little above his head, there seemed to be a hole. It was about as large as a very big watermelon, of an irregular oval shape.
There are two competing theories as to how the mountains got the name Sandia. The first, more popular, interpretation is that the name refers to the pinkish hue that the range’s granite and feldspar takes on every night around sundown. The latter, more interesting, is that the name was given by the Spanish after seeing the vast, terraced fields of a green and yellow squash loping up the mountains dividing the valley from the western mesas. In 1923, the ethnobotanist Lyman Carrier proposed that indigenous communities in the Americas readily accepted watermelon because the fruit could be successfully cultivated with the same methods used for that native squash (Cucuribta spp.). The buffalo gourd (Curcurbita foetidissimaI) looks an a lot like a watermelon and seems to have been a popular cultivar in the region. The Isleta Puebloans boiled it to extract a liquid to treat chest pains, and the Tewa dried and ground it up for use as a powder laxative. At Zuni, the seeds and flowers were mixed with saliva to reduce swelling. It was also used as a purgative, a treatment for snakebite, an insect repellant and, later, a floor polish by New Mexican housewives.
Holes of that shape are common in the black volcanic cliffs of the Pajarito Plateau, where they occur in great numbers. This one was solitary, dark, and seemed to lead into another cavern. Though it lay higher than Jacinto’s head, it was not beyond easy reach of his arms, and to the Bishop’s astonishment he began deftly and noiselessly to place the stones he had collected within the mouth of this orifice, fitting them together until he had entirely closed it. He then cut wedges from the piñon faggots and inserted them into the cracks between the stones.
Watermelons probably originated in Africa. The Spanish word for watermelon, Sandia (or “sandilla”, a more modern spelling), comes from the Arabic and suggests a secondary diversification center in India. Moor D’Ibn-Al-Awam of Seville, Spain, in his Book of Agriculture written in 1158, describes six kinds of melons, two of which may refer to watermelon: “the melon in the shape of a jar, because it resembles this sort of vessel; the melon of Palestine, which is the melon of Constantinople, the melon of India or the Scinde, includes two varieties; the one has a black seed and the rind of this one is very dark green passing to black; the other one has a pure red seed and the green color of its rind passes to yellow.”
The character of the fruit’s evolutionary success is preserved explicitly in its name in English. Watermelons were historically store crops that could provide supplies of emergency water during periods of drought. The fruit got redder as breeders developed a taste for their sweetness (there’s a genetic link between the former and the latter), and desert melons, adding an s, became “dessert” melons, the name that botanists use to refer to the popular modern-day cultivar of the fruit. The book of Exodus chronicles the longing of the Israelites in the Sinai Desert for five particular vegetables that they had known in Egypt: snake melons, leeks, onions, garlic, and watermelon. The Hebrew name for the melon derives from its Egyptian name. In the second volume of On Medical Matters, Dioscorides wrote that watermelon rind should be applied to the brow of a child afflicted by heat stroke, Pliny called it a refrigerant maxime, an extremely refreshing or cooling fruit, and Galen described it as cold and wet—“rather chilling”—and that it could be used to cure freckles, facial moles, and epidermic leprosy.
Finally, he took a handful of the earth that had been used to smother the dead fire, and mixed it with the wet snow that had blown in between the stone lips. With this thick mud he plastered over his masonry, and smoothed it with his palm. The whole operation did not take a quarter of an hour.
It was a cold day in late April when we took our walk in the mountains, a little too chilly for watermelon. A storm had come through the night before, and it was still overcast, but the mountains up ahead of us still shone with a faint red glow, like coral. We didn’t eat much and instead ended up playing with the fruit, posing the melons between the scale-like folds of parrotfish rock.
Without comment or explanation he then proceeded to build a fire. The odour so disagreeable to the Bishop soon vanished before the fragrance of the burning logs. The heat seemed to purify the rank air at the same time that it took away the deathly chill, but the dizzy noise in Father Latour’s head persisted. At first he thought it was a vertigo, a roaring in his ears brought on by cold and changes in his circulation. But as he grew warm and relaxed, he perceived an extraordinary vibration in this cavern; it hummed like a hive of bees, like a heavy roll of distant drums. After a time he asked Jacinto whether he, too, noticed this. The slim Indian boy smiled for the first time since they had entered the cave.
As early as 1598, Juan de Oñate, the murderous conquistador and purported founder of Santa Fe Nuevo Mexico, observed Pueblo Indians of the Southwest cultivating watermelon. Later, archaeologists recovered two kinds of seeds (watermelon and muskmelon, a close relative) from the remains of the turkey pens at Abo Mission, at the southern edge of the Sandia mountains (they also found the remains of peaches, coriander, grapes, chili pepper, plums, pumpkins, corn, pinyon nuts, yucca, prickly pear, cholla, amaranth, and juniper). Two popular varieties that grow well under semi-arid conditions are “Hopi Red” and “Hopi Yellow,” named after the famous pueblo nations nearby.
He took up a faggot for a torch, and beckoned the Padre to follow him along a tunnel which ran back into the mountain, where the roof grew much lower, almost within reach of the hand. There Jacinto knelt down over a fissure in the stone floor, like a crack in china, which was plastered up with clay. Digging some of this out with his hunting knife, he put his ear on the opening, listened a few seconds, and motioned the Bishop to do likewise.
On the way back into town, Cam drives us past the Sandia National Laboratories, a nuclear weapons system research facility that is also named for the watermelon. It sits on 9,000 acres of land at the base of the Sandias and has an annual budget of $3.6 billion. The supercomputer Red Storm, originally known as Thor’s Hammer, is housed there, and so is the Z Machine, the largest X-Ray generator in the world. We snap a few photos before getting spooked—Cam is half-Iranian, and the day we do our drive-by is just a week after one of Iran’s nuclear sites was hit by a blackout attack that they suggested was sabotage by Israel, further imperiling the Vienna talks around reestablishing the 2015 nuclear deal. There is something about this associative chain that we’re chasing on that day—taking us from supermarket watermelons, to parrotfish rock, to Sandia laboratories—that primes us for ambient paranoia. We go home and make kebabs. The next morning, we blend the leftover watermelon with ice, a little salt, and an overripe mango for our hangovers, and I depart for North Carolina.
Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite the cold that arose from it. He told himself he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power.
“It is terrible,” he said at last, as he rose.
“Si, Padre.” Jacinto began spitting on the clay he had gouged out of the seam, and plastered it up again.