High Desert - A Word Picture

This is a shadowless land. There is an austere beauty here that demands respect, although to one accustomed to the lush greenery of a wet climate admiration comes slowly, tempered by the knowledge that there is no forgiveness.

The sky stretches taut from horizon to horizon, shading from a white that follows the sun to blue so deep it seems like space itself. Clouds are architectural wonders, stacked in brilliant towers that make unfulfilled promises of rain. The land shimmers in low waves of gold, touched by browns and greens subtly blended so that crests and hollows are defined by color, rising to pale yellow and darkened to dusty greens wherever water settles in minuscule amounts. Mountains slump on the western horizon, so confident in their grandeur that they have no need to stand tall. Buttes occasionally jut up lonesome in the plain as if they were misplaced when the mountains rose.

This landscape is defined by the absence of water. Travellers in times past mapped out tiny springs and moved between them like children on hopscotch boards. Missing one could mean death, scattered bones beside a trail the only marker. Some learned the thorny secret to pulling water from desert plants, but even the prickly pear is stingy; sage and grass give up nothing. The harshness of the plants is belied by the musicality of their names: ocotillo, agave, juniper, sage, broom, brush, yucca.

Waterways are hidden in gullies, arroyos, ravines, and gulches -- words that, like the clouds, evoke dreams of torrential rain. Rare creeks are scribed in dark green twists across the bright land: the brushy tops of trees that rise tentatively above the plain. There one can descend into the cool shade of hundred-year-old cottonwoods, unkempt grandfathers whose spring seeds fly like false snow. The moist air in a cottonwood grotto is perfumed by leaf mulch and the smell of ancient rain drawn up through ten million years of geology.

The asphalt bleaches to the light gray of old bones, running straight for a hundred miles. Telephone poles impose an angular regularity on the scene, the lines between rising and falling with meditative grace. Lordly hawks perch occasionally on the wires or swing in high circles on invisible thermal columns. Barbed wire fences -- no sharper than the cactus they separate -- line both sides, hemming in cattle in shades of brown, grazing industriously. Occasionally they are joined by startling black brethren that look like standing shadows. The same expanses sometimes conceal pronghorn, camouflaged with unpredictable bands of brown and white. They stand aloof from the domesticated beasts, masters of the land and dismissive of fences and human boundaries.

Occasionally thunderstorms sweep across the plain with cinematic drama. Clouds pile upon each other in a symphony of grays -- blue, green, pink, dove -- their shadows racing across the land faster than the swiftest of horses. Sheets of rain drop earthward, blown much like laundry on the line, concealing and revealing the land below. Lightning, jagged in every direction, highlights the landscape and brightens inside the clouds so that their glow is reminiscent of atomic blasts. The plains open up to the redemption of rain, and the water-carved channels fill quickly with roiling mud, racing as far as possible even as the liquid begins to sink into the sand below.

Within minutes the rain passes and again this antique land shines without shadow below the indifferent sun.

April Showers

Curtains of rain a hundred miles long 
billow
under a level gray valance
of clouds.


Blown by a cold west wind they
reveal
and conceal
wrinkled mountains
stark under fresh snow.


I am made dizzy
by migrating streaks of sunlight
Swooping across the foothills


Until
my view is obscured
by a flurry
which could be snow
or the first blossoms
of foolhardy apples
lost to the wild wind.

Change of seasons

Winter stopped by today. We have been graced with a slow fall, drifting from green to yellow and red, with a glorious blue background each day. Yesterday our front yard was a frenzy of leaf raking and neighborly child labor, with a brief break for homemade chocolate chip cookies to recharge. Today the cool gray sky warned us to break out coats and mittens, which my children willfully disregarded, much to their chagrin fifteen minutes later. We warmed up in a bundle on the couch, in front of a slow fire in the new wood stove and relishing a rare weekday movie. I have become sleepy with the cooler weather, slowing my frantic efforts to tidy the house and instead melting into my easy chair with ancient magazines which are no longer relevant but lightly pass the time. I can barely bring myself to go outside, preferring instead to peruse recipes for slow-cooked food like bread and hearty roasts. I get more time with my children, too, who are drawn reluctantly inside when it becomes too dark to distinguish one child from the next. Instead of digging up my front yard, my son sits in front of the fire, mesmerized by the flames. If I approach carefully, I sometimes can get quiet insight into his day, which is otherwise summed up with a careless "It was good" which leaves me aching for the hours I don't see. Winter is a time for reacquainting ourselves, I think, after sharing our days with the neighborhood. The intimacy of darkness brings us close.

Here comes the rain again

The rain clouds have blown in again. From the second floor windows I watched the western mountains fade behind falling gray sheets. I was startled back to home by swirls of new seeds rattling against the window, mimicking recent snow. Silhouetted by the storm, tree limbs, still bare, stood jagged like black lightning reaching upward. I waited, hoping for thunder.
My husband and I once drove across New Mexico, racing a distant storm. He, accustomed to the overhanging green tunnels of vegetation on the East Coast, found the desert empty and dull. I, in turn, reveled at the grandness of it all, breathing deeply as if my very being had been constricted by vines and leaves and was, for the first time in eight years, finally able to expand again. I find the obvious beauty of maples and oaks gaudy and ordinary; but the hues of sand and stone and prairie undulating over a hundred miles require attention to appreciate. That day, as the storm rippled across the horizon flashing clouds pink above bright threads of lightning and blowing golden oases of sunlight across the land below, Will finally saw through my eyes.

I always have loved a storm. When I was a girl I would wait anxiously for the late summer storms that rolled through, pushing the leaden summer heat before them. First the leaves of the cottonwoods would shiver over silver like can-can dancers throwing up their skirts, then tendrils of cool air would slip past, until the rain broke and I would make my way slowly to shelter, stomping momentary puddles whose mud oozed between my toes, to finally sit at the edge of the porch under the mist of deflected rain and count the number of times the thunder crossed the sky.