This Other Desert

By Mia Burcham

Published October 31, 2022

On the wash, green brush begged the heavy sky, opening, palm-like, across the vacant ground. It was the memory of last summer, when the monsoons came and did not leave till October’s late chill. Seeing this green in my way was a prayer—here was life and here I was, too, a year after any water. Here was a reminder in the Arizona desert to wear your evidence of a good year for the little passing things to see.

I had come home a year ago to Tucson, often fallow as a bean field, now bursting with all its secret glory after rainfall. We saw it from Phoenix, from the freeway, hungry and tired. We called family as the sun set gold at the feet of the mountains, and said we are coming for dinner—set us places, dad and me. Driving from Oregon down to this desert, moving out for law school, I was giving into the gentle direction of my life, faint but insistent like wind that bears the storm in, heavy and changed.

It was only luck that we got rain that year, and we all knew it. A person doesn’t take rain for granted, in no small part because the swell of life will disappear and maybe no one will believe us—but it happened. In summers like those, the saguaro skins creak and groan like ship hulls, bearing all the water they will need to survive tragedies to come. Strange colors tinge the modest brown of low plants, well-hidden animals, and the rise and fall of rocks that become mountains. This other desert is brief and glorious.

But even days that drop magic and move our little corner of the universe to welcome us more tenderly may be too often, too familiar. There are things beyond wonder. On the other side is life, plain as it must be, even among this splendor. I passed a year in the desert–through two semesters of law school, learning to live beyond my parents’ house after sheltering, wondering whether I was doing all I should in this new world, spun back. We sometimes bear normal joy by digging up heartache.

I’m in my second year of law school now, and we have passed a year of meager blessings—monsoon seemed to end as it began, gentle and vanishing. This year, the storms were just heat-lightning on the mountains. We felt the weather build, but there was no trouble behind it—no downed trees or submerged highways. There was a held breath, a static line, a call from mom and dad, coming home at last, worrying after the water here. What happens, they wonder, when we draw water from the desert and there are no more hidden places—the cactus folds tight and hollow, the rivers run dry—just wind babbling over dust. I tell them that here, even the dust bears next year’s plenty in drifting seed banks waiting for water and mineral. Beneath even bald sand is possible life, folded impossibly inside its kernel. I tell them that the desert waits a long time. But what happens, I wonder, when we all move home.

The rivers are drying up. They aren’t like the wash that fills and empties with heavy rain, sometimes a river, then a shallow valley. They aren’t like the low barrel of the cactus, drinking from last year’s plenty, waiting for more. We fear that we aren’t living in the held breath of a dry year, but a more permanent lack—strange to the desert.

I tell my parents as they drive from Oregon to Tucson that it feels possible, even now, to come back. Here, we are always being taught to use less, to stand still, to let our rivers rest awhile. The desert lives in longer cycles of need and excess than we bear ourselves, distrustful as we are of the rain that comes, at last. We may know all we need to have our home and to keep it.

That night, a late October storm announced itself in low clouds that grazed the foothills. We didn’t know to expect it and thought we had passed monsoon without much to take with us. The rain was heavy on a cool breeze, calling forth the desert that waits behind everything—greasewood oil, buzzsaw cicada song, purple sage on the street corner. The desert dies and lives again—if we will only let it.