Heat

Laurie
Heat
Coffee Plantation, June 15, 2007

Afternoons, I walk to the mailbox. The blond woman in a blue bikini floats in the pool on her belly, her back to the blaze. I angle my umbrella, slipping into patches of shade. Today in The NY Times, an article describes Phoenix as the first doomed city, a place that doesn’t belong in a desert and will prove untenable as temperatures climb, as they already do summers, to 120 and beyond. In the shade. In the sun, add another 10 or 15 degrees. This past week, it’s been 110 every day and cooling to 85 before the sun rises again. Richard says we will have 100 days above 100. He’s adjusted, doesn’t sweat. It’s so dry here—on average 8% humidity—moisture is leached from your pores as you walk.

Saturday morning, we hike a trail called Dreamy Draw. It’s 95 by the time we get there: windless, hazy, and dry. The trail’s name derives from the mercury mined there in the 19th Century, “dreamy” referring to the effects of mercury poisoning—the madness of hatters who used the element to mold felt. We walk through scrubby pines until emerging onto a familiar scene of blooming cacti, thorny ocotillo plants with licks of flame shooting from their tips, slithering lizards, and brown rabbits whose long ears have adapted to circulate blood and keep them cool. Mountains in the distance look like giants around a feast, their backbones and rib cages jutting into the sky. The desert comes to life after a period of coolness and rain, but it doesn’t really happen this year.

As we walk, dust gives way to red soil and everywhere are rocks burnished black with desert varnish: sun-baked bacteria, the oldest living things containing DNA. I collect rocks with colorful markings to cheer up our cement patio. Richard arranges them in sinuous patterns, complaining about my “shopping” in the desert.

I’m carrying my umbrella and covered in a silk shirt, but sweat trickles down my sides. I like trailing behind, taking in the beauty and strangeness. When I catch up, he talks about the scientific method—the recording of facts that can be tested and measured—replacing “knowing” through the body. When we sit for a while at the top of a hill, sit in a bit of shade under a tree, I say that numbers can’t convey this heat. You have to experience it in the flesh. Every year hundreds of Mexicans die crossing the border. Traversing fifty miles of desert, they become dehydrated, fall unconscious, and expire fast.

Later, as the sky darkens, we sit beside the pool at our complex. Birds warble and ducks wander up from a nearby park. Compared to New York, Scottsdale is bucolic. I don’t miss the city’s anxious energy, don’t miss my mother. When I call her, I hear the dreamy draw in her voice. The call has pulled her back from somewhere else. She asks if I talk to neighbors, if I’ve made friends, if I’m lonely—as if I am a bride without work come to live in her husband's world. She must have felt that way when we moved to Long Beach and she left the streets of New York that gave her a reason to get out of bed. I talk to no one and don’t care. When Richard leaves for work, I write in our little rented house. When I think about New York, I see my mother’s body.