High Desert

There are a few phrases that you never expect to need when walking in the desert. One of them is “wear a jacket”. Somehow you never expect it to be overcast and in the low fifties in southern Arizona. Yet apparently, sometimes it is. It is not unpleasantly cold, but the wind continually blows across the sands enough to make me grateful for my old leather coat and canvas hat. Lunch was to be at One. I figured I had about an hour to explore the desert before I needed to return to the house I was staying just outside Tucson. I had the path pointed out to me and set off. Two blocks through a pseudo-pueblo suburb I came to a trail head into the desert. I trotted out onto the orange hued sands and onto a clear well trodden network of paths. Five minutes out the village disappeared behind a slight rise. The only evidence of civilization were the tracks of people, dogs, and cattle, the occasional shotgun shell casing and power lines. Walking here gave me an odd sense of proportion. The tangled trees are twelve feet at the tallest . Cacti appeared to be cross-bred with bushes or designed by an insane candelabra maker. Barrel cactus huddle to themselves with punk hairdos of yellow buds. The general effect is strolling through a forest in miniature. The illusion can be easily shattered easily by looking towards the horizon, where the Sierra Rita mountains tower into the clouds. A few tiny birds dart secretively through the shadows defying identification and breaking the overall silence. The only sounds in the desert are the creaking of bare branches in the constant wind and the crunch of sand underfoot. The only other life I encountered were a heard of about twenty bored looking cows lounging in an elderly open paddock. About twenty minutes after I set out, I decided that it was time to head back in because of another phrase you would never anticipate walking trough the desert: “It’s going to rain”. I made it back just before the downpour.
-J