Summertime and the direction is easy

Ever onward

They say elephants can smell clouds. I believe it. I’m not smelling any clouds, just the desert life roasting around me in the morning sun on another day when clouds are on my mind.

The Cholla cactus’s tiny cucumber-shaped limbs are turning brown and gold, drooping in grotesque chains and falling. The hang like tinsel off the cholla forest. Many Palo Verde trees are leafless. The tips of some green arms are turning gold and dead skeletal white. Giant well armored grey agaves are shriveling, their dead sharp pennant-shaped spokes burning in the heat, leaving behind a bare unicorn-horn of surviving vulnerable green in their centers. The usually lime green Englemann prickly pear look like fallen stacks of yellow overcooked pancakes crossed with arteries. The Brittle Bushes, modest beauties with fuzzy gray leaves and Daisy-like flowers, are but naked brown sticks waving in the hot summer wind like patches of tiny Ocotillos in July.

Everything everywhere is kindling waiting for the chupacabra to unleash lightning and send down its flare announcing its arrival.

Even the plentiful burrows are still. Not that many hawks. Not that many prey.

By contrast, most of our yards, populated with desert natives are green because we feed our privileged landscape plants the Colorado river while we watch our desert die back.

The ground squirrels and hummingbirds are skinny. I keep the bird fountain stocked with water. Ellen has set a water bowl out behind our home in the desert in shade. I assume thirsty creatures can smell water. Or they know an elephant who can help them out.

Walking down a long street in my neighborhood past a tin mailbox on an old wooden post distressed by too many summers I pause to study the survivor of so many blowtorch seasons. The sun has shredded its paint leaving strips of its old dried skin hang down in sorrow.

Nothing lasts in this heat made of wood. I replaced our poor exhausted wooden fence with a steel one. Corrugated steel survives the heat. I think that would be a great motto for our city.

Come to Tucson where corrugated steel is the thing that survives our hot summer.

I can feel the surface of the sun radiating up from the asphalt path as I walk past patches of dead grasses on the roadsides and in the arroyos, our sarcastic “rivers” of burning sand.

This is the season when this old desert rat and every dying thing looks up to a clear cloudless sky, dying for the O’Odham gods of thunder and lightning and wind to bring water back to our struggling Sonoran Eden. We prayerfully wash our cars and light our candles and set out our buckets and out west our brothers drink Saguaro wine and vomit the beautiful billowy white clouds into being.

We are descended from organisms born in the oceans and we have gotten about as far as a species can get without easy access to water. My throat is parched. I can barely part my dried lips to gulp the water I brought with me on my stroll. On the horizon I can see our blue sky goes on forever and even in that distant place there are no clouds, only the hot summer wind.