I am fascinated by the wide skies in this place. Having grown up in the midwest, where deciduous trees do their darnedest to cover up the space of the sky and conceal pending changes in the weather, I am enamored by the way the open sky stretches for miles in every direction here. Sure, there are occasional palm trees that add exclamation points to the sky drama, and once in a while the peaks of various mountains conspire to create a barrier to the view, but palm trees have to point somewhere and those mountains are a pretty impressive view on their own.
I am intrigued by this place, in part because I don't know that much about it. Any time I have moved to a new location, I have arrived there with only a modicum of knowledge about its better known features. I have had to learn about its lesser features through observation and experience, as it should be. A person does not, or perhaps should not, enter a place expecting the place to explain to the person within 48 hours of arrival everything the person has to know. It is up to the person to observe and experience the place in order to understand how its elements fit together (or don't, in some cases). That takes time, and work, and usually more time and more work to understand the relationships between all of the things.
For example, I have lived in Tucson previously during two summer monsoon seasons. I recall standing or sitting in the yard of the places where I was living and observing how the sky changed at the start of each season, becoming less filled with puffy little cumulus clouds and making room instead for more cirrus and nimbus clouds of various types. The sky's blue color became richer and deeper; its texture, less translucent. I recall looking out of the window of my brother's house to watch the monsoon rain runoff flow like a river down the street, swelling outward from the curb until it reached the center line of the street. I remember rushing out into the rain to move my parked car so that the engine would not be flooded by the runoff and then just sitting in the car for many minutes at an intersection because the water wasn't as deep there and I was confident the water wouldn't reach the engine. I remember another time, shortly after a monsoon rain ended, when I thought it would be okay to drive a couple of miles to the Safeway store to get groceries – only to discover that the rainwater had not receded on the main thoroughfares and I still had to drive through standing water to get into the parking lot of the store. I thought at that time that there was something wrong with the city's sewer system. But those were the only times I observed the effects of the summer monsoons here.
Until yesterday. Yesterday my daughter and I drove to DeGrazia Gallery in the foothills on the north side of town. Rain and rainclouds lingered over the Catalinas and the Rincons, but they seemed stuck in place. While we were in the gallery, they started moving. Rain fell hard and drenched many parts of town. We didn't know that, though, as we got into the car and left the gallery to head back home. We soon found out.
Driving during a monsoon is a dangerous pursuit: The streets fill with water, low places where washes cross swell with rushing water, cars drive wherever and however they can to avoid driving into said water, traffic lights go dark, people speed to get out of the water zones, and chaos ensues. I was worried initially about hydroplaning; I quickly piled on additional worries as we traveled farther. We eventually pulled into a parking lot filled with rushing, swirling ankle-deep water and found a parking area on a slight incline where we could get out of the "lake" that filled the lot. My daughter pointed out a grocery store customer who was wading through the ankle-deep water as she pushed her grocery cart full of bagged groceries to her car. We waited a long time before the rain stopped and we thought it might be safe to drive the rest of the way. It wasn't. Traffic was a mess. We made it home eventually but not without becoming wiser for the observations and experience.
That's what a new place is about. That's part of the fascination, part of the intrigue. I am looking forward to it.
