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Desert Rain
- University of Iowa Press
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Chapter Five Desert Rain [3.238.79.169] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:15 GMT) Desert Rain Sometimes it does rain-and hard. This I always knew but did not really believe. Now, after my first weeks of perpetually cloudless sky, it seemed more improbable than ever. The soil was hard-packed for all its sandiness and bone dry. The cactus and mesquite, standing defiantly under the sun, seemed to survive without moisture. The weatherman , I found myself thinking, must have an easy time here. If he could only content himself with saying "Fair and warmer" every day, he would be bound, statistically, to be right more often than satire credits him with being anywhere else. The fragments of puffy clouds which one day dotted the sky could not pOSSibly mean anything. Two 69 DESERT RAIN days later, when a few of them developed black bottoms , that could not mean anything either. And then, twenty-four hours after that, with the sun still pouring down upon me, I rubbed my eyes. Fifteen or twenty miles away, across the still burning desert, a dark veil was descending from a cloud to the mountainside. It could happen there, so why not here? Not to hold the reader in suspense, it did. In this Lower Sonoran region, the average annual precipitation varies from four inches at Yuma to eleven at Tucson. That means approximately onetenth to one-fourth of what southern New England gets, and it also means many many more days of drying sunshine. The rain comes mostly during two brief periods, one in midsummer, one in midwinter. And when it does come, it sometimes comes copiously. In some places as much as one-third of the total annual fall has been known to come down in half an hour. Though that is unusual, Hooded streets in the city, impassable roads in the country, are normal and expected . A little later, on a trip south to the border, I was to be stopped time and time again by raging, unfordable torrents cutting straight across the unpaved road. Yet, after half an hour, each had shrunk until it was no longer dangerous; after an hour it had disappeared, leaving only a belt of damp sand. These«washes," as they are called here, or «arroyos," as they are called in California, trap both the ignorant 70 [3.238.79.169] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:15 GMT) DESERT RAIN and those who have grown contemptuously familiar . That drowning should be one of the commonest fatal accidents in the desert is only another of its paradoxes . What the winter rains are like I do not yet know, but those of the summer seemed to be invariably accompanied by thunder and prodigious strokes of lightning which, in the distance, crack open the great bowl of the sky from the horizon almost half-way to the zenith. Moreover, as I have discovered, they are very sharply localized. That first descending veil which I saw never reached me, never, as a matter of fact, moved far from where I first saw it. Later, I was to count as many as five completely separate downpours, spaced evenly around half the circumference of the horizon. Of course, such rains are more common in the surrounding mountains than here on the lower desert plain. The vivid and accurate name which the meteorologists have for such deserts as this is "rain shadow." The mountains, usually wringing the last drop of moisture from the air lifted up over the coldness of their summits, cast an elongated shadow of dryness to the leeward, exactly like the similar though shorter shadow of sunlessness, now to one side and now to the other of their bases. The mountains I see all around me are themselves ordinarily in such a shadow cast by the still higher mountains behind 71 DESERT RAIN them. What little moisture those higher mountains have failed to extract, these usually take. What we get here is only what they, in their turn, have left. No wonder it is not much, or rather not frequent. So limited in size are the few laden clouds which manage to survive the double wringing, that torrents may come down here, or in the city a few miles away, while no drop falls on the asphalt or the sand, as the case may be. Permanent residents, weary, as I not yet am, of brilliance and of dryness, grow bitter when they hear that a neighbor got...