Roadside Rest

ROADSIDE REST Springtime Is the Season of the Peepers

Months ago rumbling ranks of soaking winter storms slogged across Arizona's tumbled topography, promising yet another Season of Peepers.

Yes, peepers. That was the term of choice of Dr. Joseph Wood Krutch, who before his death two decades ago earned a nickname for himself: “the David Thoreau of the Desert.” A New Englander transplanted to Tucson, Krutch from his youth recalled the tiny peeping frog that assists the robin and crocus in announcing spring's arrival Back East.

Krutch observed that even on Easter Sunday, his Connecticut neighbors were too reserved to exclaim, “Christ is risen!” Yet they easily gushed to one another, “Last night I heard the peepers.” When Krutch moved to the desert, he harkened to another host of peepers. Here he heard them as early as February and never later than mid-March. The naturalist looked about and marveled at the plants that burst out to blanket the slopes from sandy wash to craggy upland.

The night-blooming sand verbena sensuously perfumed his mornings, and the splashy white primrose decorated his evenings. Between bloomed purple locoweed, yellow bundles of brittlebush, spears of scarlet penstemon, hosts of exotic filaree, and miles-long smears of indigo lupine and salmon mallow. As his desert spring matured, Krutch took delight in poppies, clovers,milkweeds, pin-flowers, blue dicks, four o'clocks, mustards, buckwheats, fiddlenecks, gilias, goldfields, and bladderpods.

Today, as then, all of desert Arizona is blessed. Phoenix's Desert Botanical Garden sponsors its Wildflower Hotline to inform the public of current and impending blooms. The garden itself exhibits specimens of goldpoppy, Canterbury bells, desert daisy, and tidytip. North of Phoenix and Scottsdale toward Cave Creek and Carefree, signs along Desert Foothills Drive identify blossoming trees, shrubs, and cacti.

More ambitious drives reach out to the Superstition Mountains (sugar sumac, Indian paintbrush, wolfberry) and up the Apache Trail (ocotillo, mesquite, barrel cactus). Farther east of Phoenix on U.S. Route 60 near Superior, the Boyce Thompson Southwestern Arboretum daily opens its gates for tours of plants from all arid regions of the world. And a bit delayed by a higher altitude, there will bloom wild cucumber, tomatillo, and firecracker penstemon.

Bypassed by the freeway is the long-ago favored alternate route to Tucson, U.S. 89, now dubbed the Pinal Pioneer Parkway. Such a jaunt across floral slopes may lead to the ArizonaSonora Desert Museum, 14 miles west of Tucson, where a friendly guide will point out examples of crimson monkeyflower, anemone, pincushion cactus, and popcorn flower.

For Krutch, the budding plants were but a beginning of wonderment in the land of little water. In his widely acclaimed classics The Desert Year and The Voice of the Desert, he concluded that the most serious charge that can be brought against his old home, New England, “is not Puritanism, but February.” Krutch turned his attention to essays about “The Mouse That Never Drinks” and “The Contemplative Toad” and “What The Desert Is Good For.” Wherever the philosopher meditated, the desert presented yet another astonishment:

We humans, too, occupy the desert. Krutch reminded us of our extraordinary powers to explain, protect, and heal. He preached, “That courage is admirable even in a cactus; that an abundance of good things is perfectly compatible with a scarcity of others; that life everywhere is precarious, man everywhere small.” So when I hear the Arizona peepers, I exclaim, “Spring is come!” and in the spirit pirit of Dr. Joseph Wood Krutch, “We are all in this together.”