A squadron of cicadas is chirring and shrilling in the mesquite trees outside my office. On the patio, as I look out the screen door, little bands of wavy horizontal light rise from the brick, miniature mirages forming their trickster visions. The sky over the Santa Catalina Mountains to the north has gone from the piercing blue of morning to a kind of washed-out white, the look of a chambray shirt that’s been through one too many wash cycles, while at the lower reaches of the mountains, the air glowers with the brown grit of windblown sand and dust and automobile exhaust.
Thus the arrival of summertime in Tucson, the best season the Sonoran Desert has to offer.
That arrival announces itself like an archangel’s trumpet: Against the calm beauty of spring in the Sonoran Desert, summer arrives all of a sudden, and with an authority that’s not to be argued with. At the solstice last year, the temperature reached 118 °. I was suffering from a sinus infection, one of the side effects of having air conditioning, it seems, and recall standing under a broad-spreading paloverde enjoying a whole host of mirage-like hallucinations. I finally got myself to a doctor when a bowl of steaming hot cocido down the hill at the Mosaic Café seemed as cool as a chilled gazpacho, the better to survive for this year’s event, which, at the moment, promises to bow in at a much more civilized 102°.
It was just the right beginning for summer, the doctor’s bill notwithstanding.
When a writer and ne’er-do-well Irishman named J. Ross Browne passed through here more than 150 years ago, he was astonished by the summer heat. Fortunately, he had a sense of humor about it, writing of the military outposts in the desert,
Officers and soldiers are supposed to walk about creaking; mules, it is said, can only bray at midnight; and I have heard it hinted that the carcasses of cattle rattle inside their hides, and that snakes find a difficulty in bending their bodies, and horned frogs die of apoplexy. Chickens hatched at this season … come out of the shell ready cooked; bacon is eaten with a spoon. . . . The Indians sit in the [Colorado] river with fresh mud on their heads, and by dint of constant dipping and sprinkling manage to keep from roasting, though they usually come out parboiled.
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