God’s testing grounds?… Where Moses went…. And Jesus.. And Paul. Where one can find little to distract from their pilgrimage?… save the heat, the sun, and the sand…. blinding sunlight on white rocks and white sand? where even the “swamp” coolers in the trailers give little comfort in the soaring desert heat that we work out on a daily basis… until like Mad Dogs and Englishmen, you don’t know if it’s you now or the heat? Because you actually start to like it, when logically it has nothing to recommend it.
…not the desert.
The mountain surrounding you, yes the green valleys where the rivers or streams run through it yes, but the desert?… it can be the most oppressive place on the face of the earth!… particularly at noonday.. and yet once you get past a certain point, even there, there’s a certain transcendence… if your mind’s right.
But if it’s not… you live for the evenings or the indoors… evenings, because once the sun goes down the change is immediate where it can dip to 60 before morning and up to 110 by midday… indoors because the only continuity is indoors where there’s some measure of protection both from the heat and the blinding sunlight, forcing even mad dogs like myself indoors by high noon until the sun sets once again.. when you’re outside you’re looking forward to going inside.. and yet when you’re inside you’re always looking outside, wherever whatever beauty the desert has to offer In the heat of the day can finally be appreciated. On a postcard or Arizona Highways where all it is is a picture on the page, it’s easy to see but to be standing in a hundred degree heat with the sun so blinding it’s almost like an atomic blast?…
No, it’s only when your mind changes does your perspective and that’s almost a daily battle best started out before it’s hot… like the lobster that starts out in the pot of cold water.. so is your day. We get up before sunrise and start when it’s still cool so that the shock doesn’t hit us all at once and by eleven when I hit my stride whether it’s swinging a pick or digging a hole, it’s like the end of a workout and I’m on an endorphin rush, with the rest of the day just a means of coming down. So between the most physical, outdoors, to the relatively sedate indoors, my world consists of extremes: hot and cold, light and dark, solitude and madness – depending on whether it’s day or night… outside or in… off duty or on…
…because getting back to the desert – indoors becomes as much a way of life as outdoors – indoors consisting of small seedy trailers to run down doublewides at best and one cement block building called the dining room – your only protection from the oppressiveness of an environment that sometimes can only be taken in small doses. And yet ironically maybe less than a mile away are areas with towering cottonwood trees and fertile green pastures that benefit from the shade of the cottonwoods and the river’s irrigation or mountains only a few more miles away rising sometimes over 8,000 feet where on the hottest summer day it’s still cool and green and lush. So somehow in all this it never seems unattainable… it’s just not here…