Would spring would ever come to the high grasslands and chaparral of southeastern Arizona this year? I claim to be insensitive to color, but the truth is that the brownness was getting oppressive. That's why I changed the color scheme on this blog a couple days ago. I don't even like the new colors. But they made me think of spring.
My friend and host who lives here considers the sudden leafing out of thorny mesquite trees to be her operational definition of spring. Funny isn't it? We want to believe that spring looks like standard eye candy:
But these are the blooms of a non-native, ornamental tree in town. The real spring, as my friend defines it, isn't much eye candy at all.
On today's hike I noticed this for the first time. It was fun to agonize over this awhile before finally seeing...no not seeing...traveling is about experiencing things. Being enslaved to pretty pictures is for weekenders and vacationers.
Some readers won't agree. But Schopenhauer would.
At sunset last night a large group--it sounds ignoble to call them a flock--of raptors was kettling gracefully and languidly over my trailer. How could there be any thermals at sunset? Perhaps they were playing with ridge lift from a nearby hill.
There was a stateliness to their ascending spirals that made it seem like a social ritual. It was an early soirée for a soaring band of brothers, unbound to the petty concerns of the sublunary world. At one point in the spiral, the aft undersides--a bit silver--of their wings caught the sun. It was the only thing about them that wasn't black.
A couple of these birds got closer to me. Their noisy wings identified them as ravens. We have a tendency to see ravens as Malevolences on wings, just because of their color. But they were soaring so gracefully and playfully. I will never think of them the same way again. Nevermore.
They reminded me that I have the proclivities of a birder, but haven't quite fulfilled them, or so I told a couple at the coffee shop. They were birders, here to visit the famous preserve.
I told them I wouldn't become become a birder until they spiffed up their image. There is no group of people more dowdy than birders. Just look at them with their frumpy clothes of khaki and drab olive! Even their cars are embarrassing. You could stuff one of them little Honda CR-Vs or Subarus in the glove compartment of my Ford Econoline van as easily as a kestrel picks off field mice, or as easily as...
But I would be happy to overlook all that if only it weren't for those frumpy flop hats made by a certain Canadian company back east that starts with the letter T.
By now the woman was laughing at me. They were being awfully good about this. They asked me a simple yes-no question and I flew off with an essay. Maybe a recent commenter was right: men who travel alone do get too crotchety. But I think it's just a software problem with the blog software.
