SOMETHING TO CALL OUR OWN

Sonoran Desert National Monument, east of Gila Bend in Southern Arizona, is home to an extensive forest of saguaros. Several hiking trails pass through the monument, which is best visited from late October to mid-April due to extreme summer temperatures. | PAUL GILL Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark II; Shutter: 0.4 sec; Aperture: f/11; ISO: 100; Focal Length: 24 mm

SOMETHING TO CALL OUR OWก

AN ESSAY BY CRAIG CHILDS

THEY ARE LEGENDARY BEINGS, part plant, part human, part god. On their coldest nights, sometimes the great arms of saguaros will sag and sway, and then slowly grow back into absurd, sometimes lewd positions.

Saguaros actually make a unique sound. As wind passes through their high needles, you'll hear it. You've got to stand up close and take off your hat. In 5 mph or 10 mph wind, a tall, narrow, armless Carnegiea gigantea will sound like a single, breathy whistle. The many-armed cactuses sound more symphonic. Those scarred with "cactus boots" can almost moan at the very edge of human hearing.

I grew up half in Colorado, half in Arizona, and it was always a mark of return when I saw the first saguaros. Every two or four years we'd move back to the des-ert, and I remember looking for the very first one, the real sign of change. It would appear along Interstate 17 southbound in some steep, rocky arroyo watering down toward Bumble Bee, Arizona. We often came through in the evening, catching the last light on our way to Phoenix. It felt like good luck spotting the first one: Star light, star bright, first saguaro I see tonight.

This ecological margin between the northern highlands and the Sonoran Desert, where saguaros live, is where the grassy, bouldery plain of Perry Mesa plunges into the canyons of Agua Fria National Monument. Below is the Agua Fria River, flowing down to Black Canyon City, where you are deep into saguaro country, hardly able to walk a hundred yards without getting

Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark II; Shutter: 1/500 sec; Aperture: f/8: ISO: 1250; Focal Length: 85 mm Camera: Arca-Swiss F-Line 4x5; Film: Fuji Velvia 120; Shutter: 2 sec; Aperture: f/45; ISO: 50; Focal Length: 300 mm Into a gaggle of them. North of here is a different kind of desert: sandstone and frozen winters. Northern Arizona has no saguaros. They can't take the cold and the dry above here. It's better to explore this transition into warmer, wetter desert by foot, rather than the four-lane interstate. Go into Agua Fria National Monument and walk to the edge of the mesa looking down into many rough canyons that fall off the southern margin. You can sit right on that edge, among boulders some of which are decorated with elaborate, animal-figured petroglyphs where you look both north and south into two very different worlds. To the north is a rolling hard-dirt grassland sprouted with yucca and basalt. It looks like a sort of Central Arizona prairie. To the south, the edge of the mesa drops abruptly into the Sonoran Desert. Gullies open into wide-mouth canyons and overhanging cap rock where you see among tumbled boulders the first, northernmost saguaros.

Narrow, dry washes lead down through agaves, catclaws and thorny brambles of mesquites. Sycamores and cottonwoods form winding, winking canopies at the bottom. Their leaves sound like water clapping whenever the wind blows. The sound I love most, though, is wind hissing through saguaro needles. It sounds like home.

His corner OF THE SOUTHWEST Arizona, two small areas of California, and the Mexican states of Sonora and Baja is the only place on Earth where saguaros live. Other desert areas don't have them, the perpetual dryness uninviting to water-heavy succulents. The Sonoran is a monsoonal desert. Hot summer air shimmers off the ground, colliding at high altitude with cooler, Gulf-wet layers, resulting in copious bouts of rain. In the winter, big weather comes in waves heavy with maritime moisture, which delivers a second punch of rain every year. This makes the region an arboreal desert, a desert of trees.

Other columnar cactuses similar to saguaros are known down past the equator, and as far south as the subtropical deserts of South America. Mexico has the very similar cardón cactus, larger even than the saguaro with a big, oak-sized trunk and fat, numerous arms. The cardón, however, does not have the spare, commanding elegance of a 40-foot-tall saguaro. Some saguaros will have so many arms they appear to be carrying baskets of

themselves. Others shoot straight up and are as armless as candlesticks. Arms, like I said, are known to sometimes droop and twist, aiming every which way like scarecrows pointing in all directions.

These are old creatures. They won't even sprout their first arm buds for 70 years, which makes some well over 200 years old. They grow on mountaintops and along the steepest ravines. Bajadas and basins wear them like bristling capes.

I went with my wife and kids to Ironwood Forest National Monument, between Phoenix and Tucson. Two little boys in the back seat counted arms on saguaros as we passed, while my wife drove and I sat in the passenger seat thinking we must have gone by 10,000 arms by now. For years, these boys have been looking for what they call the “saguaro stereotype,” the ones on the Arizona license plate with exactly two arms, one slightly taller than the other. Rarely do they find a cactus with two such perfect arms. Usually four or seven, sometimes eight, even 10 on the biggest. But two architecturally perfect arms are rare, and so they kind of sneer at the license plate for false advertising. Saguaros are more lively and complex than most people would have them.

This monument is called Ironwood Forest, but you come to think of it more as a saguaro forest. The monument does, indeed, have many ironwood trees, their long, bony arms weeping across waterless arroyos, but saguaros are even more numerous, fields of them marching around rocky hills and ragged-topped mountains. We set our tent at the collective base of three saguaros from 20 feet to 30 feet tall. Around us grew creosote, chollas, ocotillos and big, fish-hook-spined barrel cactuses.

This place doesn't feel like a desert, not the kind that readily comes to mind. There is too much life here. The ground is parched and the air tastes clean in the heat, but things are alive everywhere.

At night, as my family settled into sleeping bags in the tent, I stayed outside on quiet watch. The moonless sky was full of stars. Orion was cradled in the arms of a couple of saguaros standing side by side. It looked as if they were holding up constellations, their arms raised into the night sky as if acting out some ancient legend: Saguaro gives the sky its stars.

VISITED A FRIEND on the outskirts of Tucson, his modest home hemmed against low, rough mountains. We sat on his porch at sunrise, mugs of tea in our hands. Our morning talk show was five doves pecking at bugs and seeds, and one bob-headed quail riding roughshod over the scattering doves. In the background, cactus wrens and thrashers rattled and sang.

His front yard is a good piece of desert, very little sign of disturbance, no strange plants like hollyhocks or shady elms, only desert plants: creosote, datura, cholla, saguaro.

First sunlight struck the tops of the saguaros, capping them brightly before coming down their arms and stout trunks and gnarled, exposed roots. Tea finished, my friend got ready for work while I took a stroll through his yard. Unfair to call it a yard, really; it is a patch of desert, a place more nature than not. Even with the city crawling right up to the edge of his property, desert stripped away and replaced by marching rows of houses, this was a little piece of wildness.

One saguaro near the corner of the house had wires and small instruments attached. They were gathered around a hole in which at least 26 bats roost. Down inside a hollow within the cactus, inside one of these “saguaro boots,” the bats shelter from the light and heat of the day. The equipment is used by researchers to take humidity and temperature readings at the mouth of the roost. This is the only saguaro in the state known to be used as a bat roost. There are probably many more; you just don't see them. I spent two mornings next to this cactus, and the 26 bats would have flown back in from their nightly insect feasts, yet I saw not one. They were too small and too swift for me to spot.

My friend harvests rainwater off his roof and stores it in barrels and culverts he set upright. He keeps the desert around his house mildly watered, just enough to give it that much more life. It is not an obscene oasis of water features, but simple, beautiful ground. It is a desert refuge. Thus the birds and the profusion of wildlife, the javelinas who come and go, the sleek-whiskered wood rats, and the rare but occasional desert tortoise showing up red-faced from eating cactus fruit. The bats are here because this is a healthy place, a good desert.

My friend hopped on his bicycle and headed to work, managing an art gallery in the city, while I continued my stroll, sizing up his saguaros. I paused to listen to the soft hiss of morning breezes through their needles. Wildly shaped, like something out of a dream, a succulent given rein to become a tree, the saguaros seemed like a blessing. You'd want them growing where you live, too. Looking up into their arms, I thought they looked like people, like plants, like gods. AH