Green
In the place where I live, in the desert, some people find beauty hard to come by. No tall oaks or elms or maples line the boulevards the way they do in the East, where I used to live, or in the Midwest, where I spent my youth.
The desert has it's trees, though with their scratchy bark and spiked and thorned branches, you climb them at your own risk. No, mainly it's the ground that startles the eye. When you look at the earth here, what you see is earth. There's no grass , not the deep greens of North Carolina or Kentucky, or even the pale, sun-scorched yellow of the Kansas plains in mid-summer. And this isn't the dark soil you find in turned farm fields of a place like Iowa, deep brown to black.
Here there's only dirt, light brown, cracked, clay-like earth when it hasn't rained for a time. Clods of dirt, or sandy soil, or dirt ground fine enough to look and feel like powder. Fissures and gullies line the bare ground like age lines. They have been carved by the rains that do come suddenly, sending water racing over the earth and cutting deeply into it, and then leave the ground open to be baked by a dry sun.
No, you don't find the desert bathed in green as you do other landscapes. But the green is here. It surprises me, like the palo verde, a plant so hungry to gather every scrap of life that the very bark on the tree is a bright green, from trunk to limb. There is green on the varieties of cactus: the tall saguaros with their arms reaching straight up to the sky, the rounded prickly pear with flat ping-pong paddle surfaces, or the stubby barrel cactus always leaning to the south and often topped with bright yellow fruit.
What lives in the desert seizes life and clings to it tenaciously, ingenously. It grabs hold of the sides of mountains that shoot up precipitiously from the desert floor. And over everything, the sky stretches itself like a wide, pale sheet, like a canvas giving shape and tint to everything that lives beneath it.
Some people, as I said, struggle to find the beauty in this landscape. They bring the East with them, laying thick pallets of grass over the dirt and flooding it with irrigation. Some subdivisions require that homeowners keep a green lawn, even in the face of high water bills and drought. They plant trees and shrubs and put up vines to creep up the sides of their homes. I've lived in rain forest and loved it, and on the prairie and spent time by the ocean and loved them too. But something about a landscape that seems so stripped bare yet holds so much life keeps me in its thrall.
Sometimes beauty looks so little like what you'd expect, maybe always. Maybe surprise is part of what makes beauty--real beauty--and part of what keeps you looking again and again. In the middle of summer, when the temperature has gone over 100 for the twentieth consecutive day, when I'm thinking about October or December, I turn a curve along the belly of the mountains north of town and I see it. I see the desert again.
The desert has it's trees, though with their scratchy bark and spiked and thorned branches, you climb them at your own risk. No, mainly it's the ground that startles the eye. When you look at the earth here, what you see is earth. There's no grass , not the deep greens of North Carolina or Kentucky, or even the pale, sun-scorched yellow of the Kansas plains in mid-summer. And this isn't the dark soil you find in turned farm fields of a place like Iowa, deep brown to black.
Here there's only dirt, light brown, cracked, clay-like earth when it hasn't rained for a time. Clods of dirt, or sandy soil, or dirt ground fine enough to look and feel like powder. Fissures and gullies line the bare ground like age lines. They have been carved by the rains that do come suddenly, sending water racing over the earth and cutting deeply into it, and then leave the ground open to be baked by a dry sun.
No, you don't find the desert bathed in green as you do other landscapes. But the green is here. It surprises me, like the palo verde, a plant so hungry to gather every scrap of life that the very bark on the tree is a bright green, from trunk to limb. There is green on the varieties of cactus: the tall saguaros with their arms reaching straight up to the sky, the rounded prickly pear with flat ping-pong paddle surfaces, or the stubby barrel cactus always leaning to the south and often topped with bright yellow fruit.
What lives in the desert seizes life and clings to it tenaciously, ingenously. It grabs hold of the sides of mountains that shoot up precipitiously from the desert floor. And over everything, the sky stretches itself like a wide, pale sheet, like a canvas giving shape and tint to everything that lives beneath it.
Some people, as I said, struggle to find the beauty in this landscape. They bring the East with them, laying thick pallets of grass over the dirt and flooding it with irrigation. Some subdivisions require that homeowners keep a green lawn, even in the face of high water bills and drought. They plant trees and shrubs and put up vines to creep up the sides of their homes. I've lived in rain forest and loved it, and on the prairie and spent time by the ocean and loved them too. But something about a landscape that seems so stripped bare yet holds so much life keeps me in its thrall.
Sometimes beauty looks so little like what you'd expect, maybe always. Maybe surprise is part of what makes beauty--real beauty--and part of what keeps you looking again and again. In the middle of summer, when the temperature has gone over 100 for the twentieth consecutive day, when I'm thinking about October or December, I turn a curve along the belly of the mountains north of town and I see it. I see the desert again.
posted by A Pilgrim at 5:57 AM
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