The Desert Year

In Search of an Autumn

Chapter Ten In Search of an Autumn In Search of an Autumn I have been told often enough that this climate knows no fall. Spring, they say, sometimes comes even more riotously here than elsewhere, but autumn has no drama. Most of the flowers stop blooming; most of the trees stop growing. The little annual plants wither and blow away; the long bean pods hang brown on the mesquite bushes. But there is no icy blast and no sodden rain to lay the world waste and then put it to sleep. The green earth, never quite so green as elsewhere, is never so brown either. Crowing things pause, but they do not surrender even temporarily to death. And what they wait for so quietly is not warmth but moisture. Very well then, I said, I shall expect no grand ef155 IN SEARCH OF AN AUTUMN fects. Autumn will slip quietly upon us, as the very earliest spring usually does in Connecticut. But where drama is absent nuances are all the more easily appreciated , and nuances there most certainly will be. Southern Arizona is not on the equator. It is not exempt from the consequences of the fact that the axis of the earth is inclined at an angle of twenty-three degrees. This is not Lotus Land, and it is not always afternoon. Many of the human inhabitants probably try, with some success, to forget that seasons exist, but no other animal, I wager, does. Something will tell the rest that some change impends and they will make for it whatever preparation is necessary. Then, one morning, well before even official, astronomical summer was over, I saw the first unmistakable sign of that preparation where I would not have thought to look. Around scores of the anthills which dot the desert and even the not overly frequented roads, little circles of brown chaff had accumulated until there was perhaps a pint of it in a heap about the main opening of the largest nests. Each pile was composed of the same stuff-the sharp little barbs of a grass which had sprung up after the summer rain and ripened in a few weeks. I bent over to look, and saw that some workers were busy carrying the spikelets into the nest while others, no less busy, were carrying them out again. Could Mark Twain, that great enemy of the ants' reputation for efficiency, be right, and were 156 IN SEARCH OF AN AUTUMN these little emmets foolishly busy at some sort of boondoggling invented to satisfy their mania for activity? But of course the explanation is simple and highly creditable. The one set was gathering the grain; the other, removing the chaff. Somewhere below ground, a threshing bee (or threshing ant) was in progress. No doubt, though I never got around to an investigation, the squirrel's granary, as well as the ant's, would soon be full. And that, on the unimpeachable authority of John Keats, is one of the signs by which autumn may be recognized. His criteria are valid in a latitude for which he never intended them. Ever since that day when I first realized what the ants were about, I have been on the alert. And now that the end of October has come, I have assured myself by many signs that the autumn, which might have come unnoticed if I had not kept my eyes and ears open, has arrived in its own quiet way. Though the midday temperature still gives no hint of the fact, I fancy that I can notice a diminution in the brilliance of the light now that the sun does not come so close to the zenith as it did in early summer. I think it is that diminished brilliance, rather than any change in the color of the landscape itself, which makes one aware that the color is, indeed, the color of October, not of July. The thermometer still climbs daily into the middle nineties at noon, and at that moment the sun refuses 157 IN SEARCH OF AN AUTUMN to admit that it has lost any of its power. The nights, on the other hand, have a different story to tell. Hardly has the sun set than, at this elevation and under skies which seldom have even a light blanket of cloud, the...