Desert Moods

Our desert can be, to many people, the most forbidding, the harshest, the most uninviting portion of all God's not-so-green acres. It never has been nor ever will be the most comfortable and easiest portion of our planet on which to work, loaf, ruminate, dream, achieve ambitions, or build castles in the sky! It is not a pretty, pretty wonderland! It is a land that takes knowing!

Now how do you come to know a desert land? Well, it takes living in, a lot of living in, that's how! It is not an easy land to know, as far as that is concerned. It is not a chummy-chummy land that gives its favors with gay frivolity or can be wooed with a careless toss of the head and an empty smile. It's hot, prickly, dry, ugly, repulsive, unkind, dangerous, rocky, totally without rhyme or reason! It is all of that unless you know it well. As we said, it takes a lot of knowing and then the desert is a different story.

A person coming to the desert for the first time from such places as the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the New England states or the deep South comes almost as if from another planet. Nothing in that person's experience has prepared him for the strange and arid land, warned him, we might say, of the weird and startlingly fantastic flora, so unlike anything he might have known in other climes, all shaped by the sun, all equipped with the necessary armor not to defy the sun but to live and flourish under all the strict impositions of that very sun itself. (Funny how a planet some 86,400,000 miles away, linear distance, can have such a profound influence on our desert, but that is the way it is.) These plants, who find themselves so well adapted to desert ways, are xerophytic meaning, literally, the drier it is and the hotter it is the better they love it.

These are the things the visitor should know: the desert itself is of the sun and the creatures living therein are ruled by the sun.

The visitor for the first time should learn that desert soil is not poor soil. Arizona's Salt River Valley, Casa Grande Valley, the Valley of the Santa Cruz, Harquahala Valley, and lands around Yuma and Parker are, perhaps, some of the richest and most productive agriculture areas on earth. Only a few decades ago, though, all this was part of the desert, barren, dry, unproductive, awaiting only the magic touch of water.

Now, how do you come to know a desert land, we ask again? Well, an easy way is to visit our National Monuments, Tonto, Casa Grande, Saguaro, and Organ Pipe Cactus. (Consult your map!) Then, visit our great desert gardens, Desert Botanical Garden near Phoenix, Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum near Tucson, and the Southwest Arboretum near Superior. All are interesting and informative.

These places are show windows of the desert. Here, you might say, are beginning textbooks for the newcomer who wants to learn of desert ways. Here are trained, learned, interested and interesting people, whose mission in life is to initiate you into that mystery we call the desert because with your knowledge of that mystery you will learn to love the desert as they do. You will learn why the saguaro can go for years without a drink of water; why the ocotillo, almost like a fairy wand of the desert, will shed its leaves during the dry spell, and with the first touch of moisture bust out all over with leaves and blossoms; why the tough old mesquite, one of the noblest of all desert trees, has a root structure more imposing than what you see on the surface. We promise you that what you learn will only whet your appetite for knowing more about desert ways. And we promise you, too, that once you have made an acquaintance with the desert you will want to turn that casual acquaintance into a love affair, as so many before you have. Then you will be attuned to desert moods and in them find a solitude, solace, and serenity of mind you might not have known existed. As we said before our desert takes a lot of knowing and living. If you are willing to take the effort, we assure you, you will find that effort most rewarding.