Arizona – Susan Feathers

I meet Earth and Sky

I met Earth and Sky in Yuma.

Below is an excerpt from a time when I studied with two Native Americans. Gabe Sharp (aka Running Water) was a college professor with Arizona State University and a social worker at the Quechan Indian Reservation in nearby Winterhaven. Louise Etienne, his wife, was an artist and teacher known as Sundance Aquero. Gabe was born on the Mohave reservation in Parker, Arizona and Sundance was born in Montreal to a French mother and Mohawk father.

They offered workshops to individuals and groups about indigenous worldviews and tribal history. I had always been curious about Native Americans because our family includes a part Cherokee relative in my mother’s lineage. (For readers, my last name, Feathers, is Scotch-Irish.)

During my formal education, there was practically no information or simply wrong information about Native Americans in the U.S.A’s formation and history. I did not encounter the abundance of printed material from tribal nations until I became an environmental educator as my teaching career blossomed to new venues.

Science was my way of knowing, partly because my father was a big influence on me. He studied physics and loved all the sciences which he shared with me as I grew up. I knew about water cycles, turnover of matter, population dynamics, biodiversity, etc. but something about the sacred nature of God’s creation was missing from this way of knowing. Gradually, I turned to indigenous perspectives about living on the land as it was abundantly obvious to me that our capitalist values about land, water, sky and people could plunder a landscape when it exceeded some internal set of rules which I now understand to be species relationships described by Robin Wall Kimmerer as reciprocity, i.e. give and take that observes the limits of a particular place to maintain its healthy and enduring function. One of my favorite and most insightful American conservationists about the ethics of living well on a piece of land—Aldo Leopold—described the essential dichotomy between European and Indigenous perspectives:

Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we believe it is a commodity belonging to us. When we see land to be a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. ~from A Sand County Almanac, Foreward, Oxford University Press, Special Commemorative Edition, 1989.

But in 1990, I had yet to read Leopold’s great works. I just knew something was essentially wrong and out of balance about how we used Nature for profit. I’d personally witnessed the decapitation of mountains for mining coal in Appalachia, my home, and living near the Colorado River and Imperial Valley were living proof logic was not an underlying principle for intelligent use of our natural resources in the U.S.

Below are excerpt’s from a memoir, The Little Book of Wisdom, unpublished but under copyright law.

When I began my exploration of truth and justice with indigenous people, I began by examining the nature of these principles in my own life. This is the story of how I came to face the truth about my life and discover the true nature of Western culture as reflected by contemporary Native Americans whose nations had lived in North America for thousands of years. What I came to see first revealed itself in the English language. My teachers brought out a huge dictionary in my mother tongue as the first text in ultimately four years of intense study.

With guidance I first studied how my culture expresses dominance in its language, inherited from empires. After instituting values of equality and justice before the law, our government has preferentially applied them in practice. I kept a little notebook of this study which I gave to my teachers.

Next, they suggested I read three books: Basic Call to Consciousness, God is Red, and a novel, The Loon Feather.

Basic Call to Consciousness by John Mohawk contains an address from the Haudenosaunee to the Western World. The book is still in print and is the best comparison of indigenous perspective from European perspective that I have studied. It also contains the founding story of the Haudenosaunee (Oneida, Mohawk, Onondaga, Huron, and the Seneca) nations’ compact for peace and governance. You would know them as the Iroquois Confederacy, a name given by French fur trappers and continued in U.S. use for centuries. It is this body of law and principle that Benjamin Franklin studied with tribal leaders and later presented to the early colonial governments as a good plan upon which the 13 colonies might structure their new nation.

God is Red, by Vine Deloria, Jr., is considered the seminal work about Native perspective on religion. It repositions humans from the dominant species for which the universe was created to being just one among many species interrelated and dependent on each other.

The Loon Feather, written by Michigan author, Iola Fuller, is a classic story which takes place mostly on Mackinac Island as a system of wealth based on unlimited extraction ends with the collapse of the beaver nation population. The Mohawk chief, Tecumseh, has been successful in a Pan-American alliance among eastern tribes to oppose the European theft of their homelands. Tecumseh’s daughter, Oneta, lives among her own people and the French and European traders on the island. Eventually she must choose between the values of her Mohawk people and those of her stepfather, a French merchant with the Hudson Bay Company whom her mother married after the death of Tecumseh. While the author is of Euro descent, I believe my teacher, a daughter of a French mother and Mohawk father, believed the themes presented in Oneta’s story would work for my study of two starkly contrasting systems for living in the world.

And then I had an experience lifted out of time and space in a rundown, dusty thrift shop in Winterhaven, Arizona when Sundance suddenly asked to visit it.

There among stacks of old books and magazines, a cacophony of throw away objects from locals, Sundance found several volumes of the Stockholder’s Board of the Hudson Bay Company.

To be continued…

Resources:

Basic Call to Consciousness

Haudenosaunee Confederacy

God is Red

The Loon Feather Note that I have written a book review about the loon feather here.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

A River Divided

From 1990 to 2008 I called Arizona home.

I had accepted a teaching position at Crane Junior High School in Yuma, Arizona. In turn, this would be an education for me beyond my wildest imagination. My degree in special education for students with hearing loss was a rarity. The administration decided that I could teach any kind of learning disability as well. It was a rich if not chaotic teaching experience for me and my brilliant classroom aide, a Yuma local.

The Lay of the Land

The city had gained the name “the Crossing” when people traversed the Colorado River at Yuma into southern California during the Gold Rush. It was my first encounter with the river which is channeled to water America’s vegetables and grains in the Imperial Valley of California. Its precious water also flowed along quiet canals among date farms and citrus groves throughout the city of Yuma. My school was surrounded by broccoli fields and orange groves. The whole environment was blooming with diversity.

In many ways I felt at home in Yuma which is a sprawling western town with a mashup of cultures and languages. It is a major location for Marine, Naval and Army facilities. I thrived in the milieu and while there, I discovered the history and cultures of the region from my students and their families. They represented the Cocopah and Quechan tribal communities, migrant-farmer and military families, and locals whose families had lived in the region for generations. They grew cotton, dates, fruit and vegetables.

Most of my students spoke Spanish fluently but could not do so at the public school which observed a strict English-only rule. For some of my students, sign language solved the language gap, but for others it burned in their soul with indignation. The area’s history of settler dominance repressed Mexican and Indigenous cultures. Colorado River tribes were numerous up and down the river between Parker, Arizona near Lake Mead and down into Mexico to the Sea of Cortez. Their cultures had lived along the wild river for at least 20,000 years. They farmed in the rich silt left after the spring floods receded, leaving rich silt for planting. The ancient Lower Colorado River has been likened to a Nile culture. Curious about the river’s history and ecology, I spent my time exploring historical sites and learning from elders and regional scholars.

When I first encountered the Colorado, it was unrecognizable to me as it was sprayed at high velocity from circulating sprinklers across the Imperial Valley on the California side of “the crossing”. Precious water evaporated in the dry hot atmosphere before falling to the ground. Row upon row of lettuce, broccoli, and cabbages lapped up what water fell to the ground. As far as the eye could see, this preposterous apparition filled my windshield as I drove through the Imperial Valley at sea level.

My first sight of this phenomenon occurred as I descended from the Continental Divide atop the Laguna Mountains (6500 feet above sea level to below sea level at the base of the mountain and the vast plain of the Imperial Valley. I was driving my son’s El Camino, a great San Diego beach buggy but treacherous in a place as hot as the valley. By the time I pulled into a watering hole near Yuma, I was growing faint. My education in Yuma would include heat stress and heat stroke prevention and how to equip a car for travel through the desert.

In its natural state, the Colorado River began as melt water that ran down through the Rockies, gathering size and speed, carving deep canyons in the red sandstone of northern Arizona. The river ran red where it dropped suddenly down toward the Sonoran Desert, flooding its banks in the spring as it flowed down into Mexico and emptied into the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). Where it slowed and spread from its banks, a delta region of marshlands formed that were places of high biodiversity. Plenty of fish and game abound. Indigenous fishers and hunters found a wide margin of mesquite tree forests on the banks of the river, as did French fur trappers and Spanish explorers. During the Gold Rush, however, these trees were cut down to burn in the steamboat business that developed to ferry gold hunters back and forth over the river which was a mile wide near Yuma. Loss of this tiny tree forest meant fewer deer and loss of a foodshed. The mesquite trees release bushels of nutritious bean pods seasonally. Later, scientists discovered the pods, when ground and made into flour, provide natural immunity to diabetes by regulating blood sugar. Mesquite bread is still made and sold regionally. It is naturally sweet and easily digested. (I made pancakes from it). Legends record that people walked across the river on the backs of large fish.

The Lower Colorado River was once a thriving place of wildlife and river cultures. In our Anthropocene era, the river is most recognizable at its highest elevations where it continues to cut the stone of Colorado and Northern Arizona and carry it tumbling south. Lake Mead collects the lion’s share of water, but starting at Parker, Arizona, water is pumped 700 ft into the air where it falls into an open canal system (Central Arizona Project or CAP) and travels by gravity toward Phoenix, then shimmies through and on to Tucson and drips into Mexico. The rest goes to Nevada and California. All these artificial truncations are due to something called The Law of the River. In short, this is the pact formed originally in 1922 between states on how to parcel out water to each.

Over decades and extensions of the canal system to accommodate burgeoning populations and infrastructure, the river no longer reaches the Gulf of California. It peters out above the marshy delta region and slowly dries up. Recent efforts by federal, state and tribal nations have managed to restore enough river flow to fill key areas of the marshland again. However, a regional 100-year drought is drying the land, while increasing temperatures from climate change have robbed the Rockies of its snowpack and thirsty alpine soil soaks up more river water reducing flow from the source.

At this writing, Hoover dam and Glen Canyon dam and their respective reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are at historically low levels. Hoover dam was built in the first decade of the 20^th century on faulty predictions of average flow. Calculations were made during an unusually high snowpack in the Rockies. This did not become apparent for many decades. Conservation of water did not start in earnest until about 25 years ago. Development pressures continued until, at present, 40 million people rely on the Colorado River for drinking water, farming and ranching, electrical generation and industrial uses parceled out among the seven western states in the Colorado River Compact. A prolonged drought, increasing temperatures, and changing precipitation patterns threaten this broad area of the United States.

Water is the limiting factor in a desert. My students and I gained insights about overharvesting a natural resource—the river in their backyards.

To be continued …

More on heat …

Grist Magazine published an article about the impact of heat on the human body’s systems and organs. I think this is a good time for everyone to understand the risks we face as the world continues to warm, mostly due to human made climate change. Here is the Link to the Article in Grist.

Below is an essay I wrote in 1999. I lived in Tucson, Arizona then but had recently moved from Phoenix where I worked at Arizona State University at the Center for Environmental Studies, now the Global Institute for Sustainability and Innovation. This shows how I tried to deal with the heat island effect.

midsummer-nights-dreams Download

A saguaro in the Sonoran Desert swollen with collected rain water which it can hold with expanded flutes on its limbs and trunk. Very shallow roots that run out from the giant extend for up to 100 feet or more to collect precious water.

The Land and Waters Speak

At present Lake Mead and Lake Powell on the Colorado River distribution system are at record lows (Lake Mead 34% and Lake Powell 27%).

From 1990 to 2008 I called Arizona home. I lived first in Yuma where the Colorado River channels into myriad canals to water America’s vegetables and grains in the Imperial Valley of California.

It was in this vast valley that I first encountered the Colorado, unrecognizable to me as it was sprayed at high velocity from circulating sprinklers. Precious water evaporated in the dry hot atmosphere before falling to the ground. Row upon row of lettuce, broccoli, and cabbages lapped up what water fell to ground. As far as the eye could see, this preposterous apparition filled my windshield as I drove through to Yuma at the confluence of Arizona, California and Mexico borders.

In its natural state, the Colorado River ran down through the Rockies, gathering size and speed, carving deep canyons in the red sandstone of northern Arizona. The river ran red where it dropped suddenly down toward the Sonoran Desert, flooding its banks in the spring as it flowed down into Mexico and emptied into the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). Where it slowed and spread from its banks, marshlands formed that were places of high biodiversity. Plenty of fish and game were found by Indigenous peoples and later explorers. All along the river near Yuma, forests of mesquite trees released bushels of nutritious bean pods. Later, university scientists discovered the pods, when ground and made into flour, provide local people with immunity to diabetes. Mesquite bread is naturally sweet and easily digested. River peoples grew crops in rich deposits of mud left by the receding waters. Legends of fish so large and numerous the people could walk across the river.

In our Anthropocene era, the river is most recognizable in its highest elevations where it continues to cut the stone of Colorado and Northern Arizona and carry it tumbling south. Hoover Dam at Lake Mead collects the lion’s share of water, but starting at Parker in Arizona, water is pumped 700 ft into the air where it drops into an open canal system (Central Arizona Project or CAP) and travels by gravity toward Phoenix, shimmies through and on to Tucson and then drips into Mexico. Over decades after the canals grew with a burgeoning population and larger farms, the river never made it to the mouth of the Sea of Cortez. It petered out above the marshlands of northeast Mexico which slowly dried up. Recent efforts by environmentalists and indigenous communities managed to restore the flow enough to fill key areas of marshes again. The once rich biodiversity is returning.

At this date, two dams and their respective reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are at historically low levels. Hoover dam was built in the ’30s of the 20^th century on assumptions made during an unusually high snowpack in the Rockies that was not the norm. The dam at Lake Powell was later built to collect water and generate electricity for business, farming and cities. Desert lands where the canals distribute water are biomes with limited water. Turns out that the Colorado River flows are normally lower than the projected. Long-term tree ring studies show regular drought periods of up to 100 years. The area is in one now.

Warming from climate change is causing snowpack changes – faster melting rates and new evaporation of ice crystals directly into a gaseous state.

As American food security, economy, science and culture face a potential crisis, how will 40 million people live in a hot, dry desert? From LA to Phoenix to Tucson and points between, much will be unsustainable without reliable Colorado River water. Cities have mostly drained their ground water. Some like Tucson are replenishing it with CAP water but that, too, is a scenario with a short horizon.

Now the powers that made the Law of the River (Upper and Lower Colorado coalition of states, municipalities and tribal nations) are talking about draining Lake Powell and sending water to Lake Mead. All partners will see reduced acre feet per year, and some will no longer receive any water from the river. Ongoing talks and mediation have reached no agreement yet. Arizona’s tribal nations are adamant that they must be part of that negotiation.

Lake Powell in southern Colorado was constructed under a huge outcry by residents and tribal governments who ultimately suffered the sacrifice of their homes and property and traditional homelands to fill the huge reservoir. Traditional lands of Indigenous nations must be returned. What about all the people who lost their homes and farms?

Will humanity learn anything from this tragic miscalculation? I’m skeptical given history.

When Congress commissioned John Wesley Powell to survey the West and determine its potential for farming and building cities, he traveled extensively in the West and was one of the first expeditions to make the wild trip down the Colorado River from the headwaters to Yuma. Result? He reported to Congress that the area held limited water for most of the land mass and that if the government should sell lands to enterprising ranchers, farmers and speculators, they should bear the financial burden of providing what water supply they could find. Imagine if they had followed Powell’s advice. Many fewer people would reside in the Western deserts; the food supply would be regionally grown, and the international food markets would be in places where rain naturally falls. The River would run free, nourishing human and natural communities to the sea.

I once wrote a speculative fiction novel in which, due to changes in climate, local communities formed enterprises that fit the bioregions where they lived. Later, they became small nations with a shared ethic that recognized the ecology of place and innovated within natural limits.

Resources:

Colorado River Management: https://www.azwater.gov/crm/dashboard#
Bioregionalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioregionalism
The American Southwest: video on YouTube – https://youtu.be/K96ly_uLAPk

The American Southwest is a 2025 award-winning documentary with updated information and spectacular photography. It shows the biodiversity and the role of many animals, plants and insects adapted to the river, and how their lifeways provide sustainable strategies for human life in arid lands.

It traces the original agreements (The Law of the River) on how the Colorado River water would be allocated, the construction of Lake Mead, and subsequent construction of Lake Powell. I recommend the film for citizens and students of ecology and bioregionalism as we enter a defining period when we will all need to work together to mitigate and adapt to a changing climate. If we consider the land and water in that partnership, I believe we can live within the limits of the Earth while innovating in our communities.

Water Is A Basic Right – Right?

Not so according to five of nine U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Read how they consider “trust” established in treaties between the Navajo Nation and the U.S.

navajo-nation-rights-of-water Download

Listen to Thirst Gap Podcast on KUNC National Public Radio, Episode 5: First in Time. This Episode features the Navajo Nation (The Dine’ People) water issues.

Following the Trail of Water

A friend of mine, Mark Hainds, is a forester and author, who has challenged himself to walk the entirety of the U.S. – Mexico Border. In doing so, he is noting the conditions of the landscape, meeting the people who live there, the people who are passing over the border in hopes of a better future, and experiencing the deep peace from long hours of silent walking. Be sure to visit his site above.

On Friday morning I dropped him off at mile marker 40 on highway 82 near Sonoita, Arizona. This is grasslands – basin and range territory – home of historic ranches, antelopes, and hardy people who love the land.

To a visitor is can seem very still but to locals who know its subtle changes, it is an exciting place to call home.

Luckily, the Nature Conservancy and the Bureau of Land Management had foresight to preserve large tracks of riparian habitats (those areas where water flows near the surface of the ground, and in wet seasons, runs in streams and rivers). When you gaze out across expansive grasslands and see a line of bright green trees, you have found water.

Today I followed the traces of water across the landscape by looking for those trees. While I walked the fields and paths, small herds of tawny pronghorns on far hills bounded in the high grass, white rumps flashing in the sunlight.

At the historic Empire Ranch, I listened for the voices of families, ranch hands, and cowboys lingering in the old structures of the house, cottages, corral, and barn.

Empire Ranch Grounds circa early 20th century

Wandering the paths into a cottonwood gallery, I felt spirits walking next to me. A time gone but with lingering energies, whispering to us modern day visitors.

What are they telling us?

Would it be a cautionary tale? The ranch was passed through many hands, each family working it for 35-50 years, then to developers, and finally into the protection of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

The ranch and 42,000 acres of riparian corridor and grasslands is now Las Cienegas National Conservation Area which we all can visit.

Yet these images show a time gone by, when the big cattle ranches reigned, and then died as water receded, and the demand of beef declined.

Perhaps we live in a more enlightened time. But, that remains to be seen. Will we remember the lessons of the past, or are we doomed to repeat mistakes with forgotten memories?

The ghosts of the land whisper to us. What are they telling us?

One whose spirit speaks to me is Aldo Leopold: “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

And just like that, a second novel

Well, that second novel has been “cooking” in my mind for many years, and builds on years of experiences that reach back to 1990. That year I moved to Yuma, Arizona to teach middle school students at Crane Junior High School. Yuma first introduced me to the Sonoran Desert, and naturally, I experienced the hottest part of it first. Yuma temps that first summer hit 122 degrees Fahrenheit. My friends and neighbors taught me how to stay safe while traveling, and how to get out early in the morning before the heat made it impossible.

All around the school and neighborhoods where I lived, agricultural fields stretched out in long even rows with canals as borders, while row upon row of blue water soaked into the ground, evaporating in the intense heat. Surrounded by a sea of broccoli, my school was embedded in the large-scale industrial farming operations in which many of my students’ parents labored. On these intensely hot days, I wondered at the ability of human beings to endure hard labor in those fields.

Then, the fact that the water came from the high Wyoming plateaus and Rocky Mountains was only vaguely in my awareness. Precious river water poured down through deep canyons into the dams that controlled the North American Nile, and by a complex system came to Yuma and the Imperial Valley to grow 90% of America’s leafy produce between November through March. Then, I was focused on my students’ daily struggle to learn and grow up under harsh conditions of poverty and discrimination. But, all around us was a BIG STORY about a river, its people, and how it came to be the most controlled and overused body of water in North America. Indeed, the Colorado River is so over-allocated that it no longer winds its way to the Gulf of California as it did for thousands of years. The magnificent delta region, one of the world’s largest and most productive wetlands, literally dried up and died.

This is the subject of my second novel, The American Nile: Voices of a River and Its People. I am working with a talented editor and should have a solid draft completed before I return home from Tucson in late April.

Tucson – My Military Life

Tucson became my home from 1999 to 2008, but I had been a resident in the Old Pueblo when I was just a babe. Dad (Major E. B. Feathers at the time) was stationed at Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. I was 2 years old when we moved there. I remember photos of my mother, sister and me in sundresses and sandals in front of a house with a large shaded porch, cacti and sand.

Little did I know that I would one day return to Tucson as an adult. When I was just getting started in life, I had an early encounter with the desert by falling into an Opuntia (prickly pear). Mom recalled she was pulling needles out of my arms and legs for a month.

Charles Lindbergh dedicates Davis Monthan Field: September 23, 1927

In 1925, Tucson’s City Council purchased 1,280 acres of land southeast of town to relocate the city’s municipal airport. Unknown at that time this new site would become the nucleus of Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. Six years earlier Tucson had the proud distinction of opening the first municipal-owned airport in the nation. Located four miles south of the city on Nogales Highway, the present day location of the Rodeo Grounds, the 82.64 acres was designated Tucson Municipal Flying Field after several name changes. Following years of stalled negotiations with the War Department, city planners elected to purchase the larger site and transfer airport operations in hopes that the military would reconsider establishing an aviation branch in Tucson.

Construction at the new site was completed in late 1927, and on September 23 of the same year, Charles Lindbergh, who months earlier crossed the Atlantic in the “Spirit of St. Louis”, formally dedicated the site in honor of Lieutenants Samuel H. Davis and Oscar Monthan, two Tucson aviators whom died in separate plane crashes after World War I. The city shared another proud moment with the opening; Davis-Monthan Field immediately became the largest municipal-owned airport in the nation.

Military presence at the new Davis-Monthan Field began October 6, 1927 when Staff Sergeant Dewey Simpson transferred the military aircraft refueling and service operations from the old municipal airport. He also brought something very unique with him, a log book that was signed by the field’s patrons. Early aviation greats such as Foulois, Arnold, Spaatz, Vandenberg, Earhart, and Doolittle took the liberty of signing the registry as a record of service. (Currently the Registry is on display at DM’s Base Operations). With only two military personnel assigned to the field, negotiations between the War Department and Tucson would remain at a stand-still until 1940.

My Dad was stationed at Davis Monthan AFB in 1947. He had just rejoined the USAF after it formed from the Army Air Corps after WWII ended. Dad flew B-29s in the Air Force. Davis Monthan AFB began its revival after the war as a location for the successful Super Fortress (B-29 Bomber). The very dry air provided an ideal location to store the Superfortress, and other air craft accumulated during the 2nd World War in the desert.

In another amazing connection with Tucson, the daughter of Dad’s co-pilot was instrumental in locating the Z-49–the B-29 my father and her father had flown 35 missions over Tokyo from their base in Saipan. It was found in an aircraft graveyard in the desert. The Z-49 was restored and is now on exhibition at March AFB in California:

The B-29 was dubbed the Three Feathers, originally complete with three nudes on clouds following the pilots’ tradition of painting sexy women on the nose of their aircraft. The Three Feathers had a prestigious life. Read its history here.

Dad talked about flying in the desert. The pilots rose very early to beat the heat, and then cruised above the desert with a view that stretched for hundreds of miles. He recalled the heat and the electricity on the metal and how it gave them all a huge bolt of energy whenever they touched metal on a very hot, crackling dry day.

We soon left for Los Angeles where Dad studied meteorology, a fateful study which later sent him to Fletcher’s Ice Island T-3, a floating iceberg in the Baltic Sea. He was part of a global study, for his team it specifically encompassed ice flows in the arctic. I was 14 when Dad was featured in Time Magazine after being attacked by a polar bear on T-3. Now in 2016, my first book (Threshold) includes a polar bear–in Carla Conners’ nightmare. I think all this qualifies as the circularity of a life’s path.

It’s Raining on the Desert

If you have never visited or seen the Sonoran Desert, it probably seems an oxymoron to call this desert a place of lushness, but, it truly is such a wonder.

The adjacent photograph was actually taken in 2007 before I left Tucson, AZ for Pensacola, FL. The location is near my friend’s home in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains that form one boundary of the City of Tucson.

Today I am writing from the Baker’s home on a September afternoon and once again the monsoon rains are falling on this high desert. The desert’s flora is in full glory, cacti swollen plump with water, blossoms forming in colors of lemon and peach, and aqua blue prickly pear pads sprouting cherry red fruit. If you have never visited or seen the Sonoran Desert, it probably seems an oxymoron to call this desert a place of lushness, but, it truly is such a wonder.

Barrel Blossoms — Barrel Cactus Blossoms Ready to Bloom

The Southwest is experiencing a late and strong monsoon season that some expect may go right on into the rainy winter season. If so, that will be a huge blessing for a region in a long-term drought. Rain on, oh great monsoon clouds! Let the liquid wonder work its magic down into the desert pavement, and travel into the arteries of the giant saguaro, and down the throat of desert critters, and gather below in rock lined aquifers. Rain on! Rain on!