High Tide in Tucson Read Online Free Page B

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 in our misery only because we know the end, when it comes, is so good. One day there will be a crackling, clean, creosote smell in the air and the ground will be charged and the hair on your arms will stand on end and then BOOM, you are thrillingly drenched. All the desert toads crawl out of their burrows, swell out their throats, and scream for sex while the puddles last. The ocotillos leaf out before your eyes, like a nature show on fast forward. There is so little time before the water sizzles back to thin air again. So little time to live a whole life in the desert. This is elemental mortality, the root of all passion.
    Since I moved to this neighborhood of desert, I’ve learned I have other writers for neighbors. Unlike the toads, we’re shy—we don’t advertise our presence to each other quite so ostentatiously. In fact, I only found out I’d joined a literary commune when my UPS man—I fancy him a sort of manly Dorothy Parker in uniform—began giving me weekly updates. Visitors up at Silko’s had been out looking for wild pigs, and Mr. Abbey had gone out in hisbackyard and shot the TV, again. (Sad to say, that doesn’t happen anymore. We all miss Ed.)
    I imagine other neighbors: that Georgia O’Keeffe, for example, is out there walking the hills in sturdy shoes, staring down the UPS man with such a fierce eye that he will never dare tell.
    What is it that draws creators to this place? Low rent, I tell my friends who ask, but it’s more than that. It’s the Southwest: a prickly land where mountain lions make bets with rabbits, and rabbits can win. Where nature rubs belly to belly with subdivision and barrio, and coyotes take shortcuts through the back alleys. Here even the rain has gender, the frogs sing carpe diem , and fast teenage girls genuflect quickly toward the door of the church, hedging their bets, as they walk to school in tight skirts and shiny high heels.
    When I drive to the post office every few days to pick up my mail, it’s only about twelve miles round trip, but I pass through at least half-a-dozen neighborhoods that distinguish themselves one from the other by architecture and language and even, especially, creation myth. First among them is the neighborhood of jackrabbits and saguaros, who imperiously tolerate my home, though I can’t speak their language or quite understand their myths.
    Then, just inside the city limits, a red cobble of just-alike roofs—paved air—where long strands of exurban condominiums shelter immigrants from Wisconsin, maybe, or Kansas, who dream in green and hug small irrigated lawns to their front doors.
    Next I cross the bridge over the Santa Cruz, whose creation story bubbles from ephemeral springs in the mountains of southern Arizona and Mexico. In these lean days she’s a great blank channel of sand, but we call her a river anyway, and say it with a straight face too, because in her moods this saint has taken out bridges and houses and people who loved their lives.
    Then I pass under the artery of Interstate 10, which originates in Los Angeles or Jacksonville, Florida, depending on your view of destiny; and the railroad track,