A Day in the Desert

The sun is getting higher. The air and the ground are heating up fast. You notice some of the plants around you. As you lie in the shade of a mesquite tree you observe how spread out it is on the desert floor and how tiny are its leaves. The saguaro, cholla, prickly pear, ocotillo, and palo verde are all spread out with spaces of open ground in between as if to say,"This is my property. Stay out." Their seeming isolation is due to lack of water. It is first-come, first-served on the desert, and when a seed is lucky enough to sprout and take root in a particular patch of clear ground, it usually has priority on the water in that spot until it dies.

Your gaze goes from the distant horizon of endless cacti to the ground in front of you. You notice a strong-jawed, spiderlike solpugid excavating a burrow. You watch a bright scarlet velvet ant, the adult female of a certain species of wasp, racing toward her home underground. These insects, like rodents, lizards, spiders, and other burrowing creatures, aerate the hard desert soil to allow the infrequent rainstorms to penetrate the tough ground and provide plant roots with water. By the way, those pretty, multicolored velvet ants are supposed to have the worst sting, gram for gram, of any member of the wasp family.

A swift movement catches the corner of your eye. It stops cold. It is the cocky, fearless roadrunner. He has a lizard dangling from his beak. That reminds you of lunchtime. It is close to 11:00 a.m. and the heat is getting heavy. You pick up your day packs and head back to camp as the sun approaches its zenith.

After lunch you feel sleepy. You take one last look out at the shimmering, glaring desert floor. No shadows now. No movement, no sounds save a few birds, cicadas, and harvester ants.

Everything seems to have decided that it's siesta time. So do you. It felt cool and comfortable in the early morning, but now you would just as soon sleep through the heat in this nice, shady spot because you know the highest temperatures are yet to come. By 2:00 or 3:00 p.m. the heat will be at its maximum and you wonder how you can survive the 100-plus-degree temperatures out there. But then everything is either underground, in a tree, under a rock, in the shade of a cactus or cave, or, like you, in the shade of a mesquite tree. You, along with the rattlesnake, horned toad, moth, gila monster, gecko, tortoise, and rabbit, are safe from the sun.