Walking Arizona – collected thoughts on clouds, rain, and walking

CLOUDS

On my evening drive back from Sierra Vista, giant, opaque, blue-gray clouds were backlit, the edges fringed with bright white lace.

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This morning as I walk, the sky is covered by gray-blue clouds with an under-painting of pink that lends a purple cast to the eastern sky.

RAIN

Morning rain made the ground damp, so when we took an afternoon walk through the field, my shoes and pants cuffs collected mud. Not the mud from Georgia red clay that is nearly impossible to wash out of your clothes or your heart, but mud from the black alluvial soil of the flood plain of Sonoita Creek.

**

After a light afternoon rain, the colors of nearby grass blades and distant hills are richer and more distinct.

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After an afternoon rain, the next morning’s sky is so full of clouds that the sun doesn’t show through them. That makes my walk cooler because I don’t have to put on my sun hat. I feel the breeze through my hair. Love that.

**

9/9/09

Monsoons have come. Not day after day of solid rain like I’ve always imagined tropical monsoons, but intense short showers each afternoon. On our evening walks, the sky holds large, dark blue clouds. The hills are more distinct after rain. They seem to stand out from the sky, as if in an old time 3-D stereoscope picture, not blending to form a unified image.

WALKING

San Antonio Road begins at the highway as a sandy, pebbly one-lane road. It turns a corner and acquires a line of green grass down the middle between tire tracks, then devolves into a grassy trail between the field and the creek. It never gets to San Antonio.

**

Black beetles cross the road. As with chickens I wonder where they are off to. I sing to myself:

“Why does the beetle cross the road?

I’ll never know,

‘Cause he goes so slow.”

**

On a mountain walk with friends, I pass a cluster of cattle lounging beside the trail. All of them stare at us as we go by, except the largest bull. I think he owns the place so completely that he needn’t deign to take notice of us. But we certainly notice him; he is huge and beautiful. I’ve never seen a beast with such coloring—covered with close-together, thin curving stripes of white and brown, marbled all over like the yummiest part of Fudge Ripple ice cream.

A smaller bull starts toward us, bobs his head once as if to say, “I’m practicing to be the chief bull some day. Then when I come at you like this, you’ll be scared. So watch out.” But like all timid creatures, he’s waited until we’re out of range to show off.