First entry. It’s June 21, the Summer solstice.

The Fool on the Hill.

It’s early after­noon on June 21, the sum­mer sol­stice. It’s already 107˚F this after­noon, 5% humid­ity. It’s expected to get up to 110. It’s been 73 days since the last mea­sur­able rain.

Only the saguaros seem unaf­fected. They are fat and send out lush flow­ers and are cov­ered with fruit in dif­fer­ent stages. Yet, some of them may still be dying from last winter’s pro­longed freeze and not know it yet. These gen­tle giants can take months or years to show dam­age, liv­ing on their own stored resources.

Encelia, the brit­tle bush seem to all be dead or barely hang­ing onto life. The prickly pear cacti are shriv­eled and sag­ging onto the ground. The mesquite flow­ers , now become beans, are tiny com­pared to the plants in town that get irri­ga­tion. The prickly pears in town too are fat and cov­ered with fruit. It seems a won­der that all these plants have sur­vived for so many cen­turies out here in the wild with­out land­scap­ers or gar­den­ers to care for them.

.…

When I walk out of the air-​conditioned build­ing, it’s like stick­ing one’s face into an oven. It’s silent, except for an occai­sional cac­tus wren, sound­ing like some­one is try­ing to unsuc­cess­fully start an old motor­cy­cle and the con­stant hum of I-​10 a cou­ple of miles away. The stones are too hot to pick up. Every­thing seems to be hold­ing its breath, afraid of los­ing mois­ture by exhal­ing; all slow cook­ing in their own juices, if there still is any. Maybe it will all be well done by October.

Often I am the only one up here on Tumamoc at the old Desert Lab, a fact that I only par­tially under­stand, but which gives me a feel­ing of being inside a true sanc­tu­ary, both for nature and for the human mind.

One has to be here every day and at dif­fer­ent times of day to notice all the per­ti­nent details. Then there are the insignif­i­cant and mun­dane details. I pay as much atten­tion to them. I explore this per­fect micro­cosm of the Sono­ran Desert like the body of a well-​known lover. Each time I see some­thing I never noticed before.

The office build­ing I’m in is like a sealed colony on Mars. I can go out for­ag­ing for a few min­utes or half an hour, then return to the com­fort of a climate-​controlled inte­rior. If one were to walk up here from the bot­tom of the hill, there would not be time, water, or shade enough to get much sight-​seeing done. You’d be wor­ried about sur­vival, not aes­thetic philosophies.

In short, it’s prac­ti­cally a par­adise for an Earth explorer.

Being here, I can be sur­rounded and embraced by the sum­mer desert in all its authen­tic­ity every day, some­thing I’ve never dona in over 30 years liv­ing here. But one needs to be here every day to observe the details. Get­ting some see­ing done is the task at hand.

I go out­side for short expe­di­tions. To see how the light falls in spe­cific places at dif­fer­ent times of day, to check on a low-​lying saguaro bud that will burst into bloom any morn­ing now.

I bought a sketch­book ded­i­cated only to draw­ing up here on the Hill. Right now, it’s too hot to sit out there and sketch much, so I take pho­tos, some­times with my phone, for ref­er­ence. I have started a draw­ing of the plants out­side my window.