High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [8]
CREATION STORIES
June is the crudest month in Tucson, especially when it lasts till the end of July. This is the season when every living thing in the desert swoons south toward some faint salt dream of the Gulf of Mexico: tasting the horizon, waiting for the summer storms. This year they are late. The birds are pacing the ground stiff-legged, panting, and so am I. Waiting. In this blind, bright still-June weather the shrill of the cicadas hurts your eyes. Every plant looks pitiful and, when you walk past it, moans a little, envious because you can walk yourself to a drink and it can’t.
The water that came last winter is long gone. “Female rain,” it’s called in Navajo: the gentle, furtive rains that fall from overcast skies between November and March. That was weather to drink and to grow on. But not to remember, anymore than a child remembers last birthday’s ice cream, once the months have passed without another drop. In June there is no vital sign, not so much as a humid breath against a pane of glass, till the summer storms arrive. What we’re waiting for now is male rain. Big, booming wait-till-your-father-gets-home cloudbursts that bully up from Mexico and threaten to rip the sky.
The Tohono O’odham have lived in the Sonoran Desert longer than anyone else who’s still living; their answer to this season is to make frothy wine from the ripe saguaro fruits, and drink it all day and all night in a do-or-die ceremony to bring down the first storm. When it comes, the answer to a desert’s one permanent question, that first storm defines the beginning of the Tohono O’odham new year. The storms themselves are enough to get drunk on: ferocious thunder and raindrops splatting so hard on the cooked ground you hear the thing approaching like mortar fire.
I saw my first of these summer storms in 1978. I hadn’t been in Arizona long enough to see the calendar open and close, so I spent the early summer in a state of near panic, as the earliest people in any place must have done when they touched falling snow or the dry season’s dust and asked each time: This burning cold, these dying plants—is this, then, the end of the world?
I lived in a little stuccoed house in a neighborhood of barking dogs and front-yard shrines to the Virgin of Guadalupe. One sweltering afternoon I heard what I believed must be kids throwing gravel at the houses, relentlessly and with feeling. It was hot enough so that the neighborhood, all of it, dogs and broken glass on the sidewalks included, had murder in mind. I knew I was risking my neck to go outside and scold kids for throwing rocks, but I went anyway. What I saw from the front stoop arrested me in my footprints: not a troop of juvenile delinquents, but a black sky and a wall of water as high as heaven, moving up the block. I ran into the street barefoot and danced with my mouth open. So did half my neighbors. Armistice Day.
Now I live on the outskirts of town, in the desert at the foot of the Tucson Mountains, where waiting for the end of the drought becomes an obsession. It’s literally 110 degrees in the shade today, the kind of weather real southwesterners love to talk about. We have our own kind of Jack London thing, in reverse: Remember that year (swagger, thumbs in the belt) when it was 122 degrees and planes couldn’t land at the airport?
This is actually true. For years I held the colorful impression that the tarmac had liquefied, so that aircraft would have plowed into it like mammoth flies bellying into ointment. Eventually an engineer gave me a pedestrian, probably accurate, explanation about heat interfering with the generation of lift above the wings. Either way, weather that stops modern air traffic is high drama in America.
We revel