“We’re moving earth to bring you heaven!!”
…..aah, where is Doc Sarvis when you find an audacious wood supported billboard so impudently beckoning destruction into the perfectly balanced beyond. Isn't it heaven already?
The desert ecosystem is a very static environment. There is always a sense of waiting. The plants are waiting for rain and the entire ecosystem is held in a stasis, surviving until there’s a return of resources. This is an environment which is rarely disturbed and recovers tremendously slowly if something has happened.
It’s meant to be an eternal lingering for all life forms. The taught, stringy animals feverishly stalk, searching the environment for each other, water and edible, less threatening plants. The fine adaptations enabling survival is acutely felt in the hills and communicated with every structure. From the spherical cacti with shallow root systems to the slender, delicate Palo Verde leaves, they all boldly proclaim the necessity to tread lightly through this place and keep moving.
Where the desert has been left alone, a subtle feeling of age permeates the landscape. The tall saguaro, thick trunked mesquite and any visible cacti exist simply because they’ve been left alone to grow for unknowable ages.
A saguaro needs at least 75 years before it grows the buds eventually creating the cliché arms. A mesquite tree can live 200 years without ever demanding the presence of a similarly aged oak tree. Size in a desert communicates age and human disregard. And yet a desert landscape can make a human of modest height feel gigantic, towering over the stout organisms. Disturbances can be detected decades after their damage occurred. Here, time is captured and sustained.
