Going south from Flagstaff on the Interstate, one has about thirty miles where one is still up on the Mogollon Rim, pronounced roughly (MOE-gee-yon) by locals, with a strange elongation of the first syllable, as if it is almost MOE-OE-gee-yon). It is ok to simply call it the Rim.
Along the road one sees pine trees broken only by small roads into tiny communities. These communities are being developed quickly. Land is precious here. So much is off limits because it is national forest. Flagstaff is filling up quickly.
I know exactly the milepost on the Interstate where the Rim reaches its edge. At milepost 313 ones comes around a bend and sees a vista ahead, as if one is on the edge of a cliff. The pines suddenly slacken and give way to drier trees. It will be the last pines one sees along the Interstate going south.
One quickly descends over the next twenty miles several thousand feet, coming down and down, past truck emergency ramps and warning signs to check ones breaks. It is not coming down off the mountain passes in Colorado. It is most gentle, less mountainlike. But is longer. It keeps going on and on. At the bottom one reaches the Verde River. By then one is unmistakably in the desert. The air temperature is at least twenty degrees warmer. One can feel it in the car in summer. One feels the heat.
It only gets hotter from there south. We have not even descended all the way, into the Valley of the Sun. We have not reached the low desert where the saguaros grow, and wild burros stray onto the highway. We have not reached the land of triple digit temperatures all summer long.
Reaching home, we can only sigh, "Why do we live here?"
No comments:
Post a Comment