William Thornton: Helping a species and hoping to be heard

“This is a special place and it’s worthy of protection.”
The rocky ravine was too dangerous for William Thornton to cross with his buckling legs. But the 73-year-old was on a rescue mission.
He was on an incline inside Ironwood Forest National Monument, a rocky and treacherous landscape where everything beautiful wants to stab you. Thornton, retired from the insurance industry, active in the group Friends of Ironwood Forest, has a back bent with age. Still, he trudged with his walking stick clacking through a gauntlet of thorns: ocotillo, cats-claw acacia, jumping cholla… Whip-tailed lizards scurried by his ankles. White-winged doves and gila woodpeckers whirred over his head…A Mojave rattlesnake lay somewhere, coiled, camouflaged, by his feet…
He came upon something he had spent decades looking for in deserts across Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. It was a patch of endangered Nichol’s Turk’s Head cacti — in bloom! Their vivid, magenta blossoms were like peonies atop melons latticed with spikes. His wet, blue eyes smiled and his dry lips cracked into a grin.
The Nichol’s Turk’s Head remains only in a few places in the southwest. One place had been on a flank of Silverbell Mountain, just outside the monument, over Thornton’s right shoulder. But the company ASARCO bored an enormous open-pit copper mine there. It’s visible from all around the monument. Nothing will ever grow there again.

Thornton’s joy turned to deep concern when he saw one of the special cacti toppled on its side. Connected to the thin, brown soil by a thin umbilical root. Without asking for help, he immediately began the half-mile hike back to his pickup to fetch the tools of cacti-rescue. A shovel, and thick welders’ gloves.
Seeking his way back, the ravine spread out before him. A treacherous trench of sharp and jagged rocks pitched at a steep decline. He started down with small, ginger steps, but his legs turned to sewing machine arms. He hasn’t been the same since he fell off his pickup truck, he explained as he collapsed to the ground.
A man of his age could be forgiven for going no farther … maybe shouting for help. After all he had done for cacti through the years, who could blame him for cursing? The hell with this plant — probably dead anyway — back to the truck.
That wouldn’t be him, though. He was on his seat on sharp, rough rocks and like a toddler on stairs, or a cold and upside-down lizard, he scooted his way down the ravine on his backside. Rising to his feet again, a spiky bramble administered a last indignity and tore at his hat.
He made it back to that downed cacti. He pulled on his gloves and lifted it like a baby. His cheerily-named friend, William Peachey stacked around it a cylinder of granite stones. There was another downed cactus nearby and Thornton repeated the process, with willowy Kelsey Yule administering the rocks to keep it from falling back down.
“We did a little bit of a good deed,” he told her. “I hope at least one of them makes it.”
“We did our best,” she replied.
The sight of an old man caring nothing about injury to body or pride for the sake of a single, mostly-dead, mostly-extinct cactus came across as a simple act of heroism. It’s hard not to see the metaphor between the cactus clinging to life by a thin root, and Ironwood Forest National Monument under review by the Department of the Interior.
It begs the question: If this is what William Thornton is willing to do for one cactus in the monument, what’s Secretary Ryan Zinke willing to do for its entirety?

