The Listening Game

Today we played the Listening Game while hanging out in the desert under a palo verde tree. Here are the sounds we heard:

1. Gambel's quail call

2. Verdin call

3. airplanes

4. car traffic

5. breathing

6. Cactus wren call

7. Farting

8. insects buzzing

9. Curve-billed thrasher call

10. people talking on the trail

In between all of that was quiet. Pure quiet.

Green Time

Whenever we can, my son and I go out into the desert and rest inside the canopy of a palo verde tree where we can breathe air freshly made from its green bark and peer out through branches to the cactus and blue sky. This is our "green time," an anecdote to "screen time," which seems to keep us in its glowing grip too many hours of each day. In this shelter I teach my son the fine art of hanging out, listening for birds and lizards, watching the sky change colors, and smelling the dry earth and creosote. He always wants to bring along a book to read, which I generally encourage at home, but here, I want him to put it away and just be in the desert. It startles me that this is so hard for him. Screen time has taught him to need constant noise and action. The natural quiet and stillness bores and somewhat disturbs him. This fact disturbs me even more.

I'm going up into the desert to sit under a palo verde tree and think about this.

Inside Outside

Our New Years Day was highlighted by a visit to Taliesin West, home of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, where we spent two hours touring student designed housing on the founder's spacious estate. A great deal of Wright's legacy is the idea of integrating architecture with the natural outdoor landscape and vice versa. To help young architects develop some personal experience with the unique Sonoran desert environment, they are housed in "shelters" that have been designed and built by former students.

Each structure had its own artistic signature, underscored by airy theoretical concepts of contemporary architecture being taught at the school. One integrated a reflection pool. Another simulated a ship. Several used shade cloth stretched in abstract ways. Many had fire pits or fireplaces to add a little warmth on chilly winter nights. A patch of artificial lawn was part of the patio in one student's cynical commentary on landscaping choices of the "commoners" in the somewhat architecturally parched residential areas around Phoenix. All of them demonstrated heroic efforts to transcend the standard box and peak roof forms of American architecture in general or humdrum stucco and tile of southwest architecture in particular.

But what struck me most was the quixotic inattention to basic elements of the environment that ended up making many of the structures unlivable. Like wind. Or rain. And sun. Our guides let us in on which structures were avoided because of winds that howled through the bed chamber every night, needed a tarp to shield from the rain, became too blazing hot on a sunny day, or happened to be built in the favorite pathway of resident wildlife. Only a few met the criteria of being reliable shelter from the weather. I'm no architect, but I guess I thought that if I were being trained to be one who is especially sensitive to the environment that I build in, these would be some of my primary concerns as a designer. Call me practical.

However, they were all very cool spaces, in the stylistic sense, to hang out in. Some of the features I liked the best were the spiral arrangement of stones for a fire circle; a window that featured an especially handsome saguaro for a view; a dash of the Great Master himself represented by a hanging screen designed by Wright; and that lawn with its symbolic watering can. But next time I want to spend the night in the desert, I'll happily rely on my sturdy dome-shaped tent to help keep me warm, dry and protected from the wind.

For more information on Taliesin West and tours they offer there, you can find everything you need on their website: www.franklloydwright.org

All of the photos in this entry were taken by my daughter Brooke Warren, who has her own fun blog at:

brooklynwarren.blogspot.com

Desert Snow

Hot and dry versus cold and wet. The two came together yesterday in the hills up by Cave Creek where I ventured to help out with one of the annual Audubon Christmas bird counts. What few birds we saw were hunkered down in the scrub with feathers fully fluffed to insulate them from the blustery weather. I too had my down coat on! Here is my birding partner, Paul, braving the winter storm, and a small pile of snow-(graupel actually)-caught in the club moss.



There is also a wildflower called desert snow, a phlox aka Linanthus demissus, which will bloom in the spring if all this moisture is enough to keep it going past germination this spring! Here are some that I found in Deem Hills in March of 2008. Looks a lot like the real thing, but smells sweeter!

Bougainvillea's

Arguably the most dramatic flowering plant to grace the corridors of the Phoenix metro area is Bougainvillea, a tropical shrub introduced from rain forests of South America. I decided to learn a little more about them, and found some fun historical references associated with their name, which was given in honor of this fancy dressing French admiral.


Admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville is well regarded in his homeland as the first Frenchman to lead a sailing expedition around the world between 1766 and 1769. In addition to having a spectacular tropical plant named in his honor, the admiral’s legacy includes several south Pacific islands, ports and straights, plus 13 ships in the French navy that have celebrated his prestige on their transom. The circumnavigation was also historic for being the first to include professional naturalists and the first woman known to sail around the world as members of the ships’ crew. Historians still question the strange liaison between the expedition’s botanist, Philibert Commercon, and his valet, Jeanne Bare, whose true identity as a woman was supposedly not known until the ships landed in Tahiti, where perceptive natives instantly recognized him as a her. Bougainville’s travelogue, Voyage Autour du Monde (Journey Around the World), was influential to philosophers and artists of the time who transformed his descriptions of Tahitian society into ideals and iconic images of the Noble Savage.


Sources:
Kobayashi, K.D., et al. 2007. Bougainvilleas. OF-38, Cooperative Extension Service, College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, Univ. of HI, Manos.

Forster, H. Jan. 2000. Voyaging Through Strange Seas: Four Women Travellers in the Pacific. National Library of Australia News.

Buffle Grass

Buffle grass has gotten a bad rap in these parts. Maligned as an "alien" and an "invader" that exacerbates wildfire, this opportunistic immigrant from the African savannah has sunk its roots deep in the Sonoran Desert. Not happy to be outdone, descendants of European immigrants organize work parties obsessed with eradicating this lovely grass.


I joined a band of Weed Wackers one weekend last spring. Armed with pick axes, we hacked at the grass's roots and trampled dozens of other species in the process. The group bagged a giant trailer load of buffle grass after several hours of back-breaking, ankle-twisting labor. But I often wonder what gain this could possibly have, when several acres of thriving buffle grass remain, since it only takes a few seeds to repopulate the area that was uprooted. Wouldn't it be easier to welcome this lovely new addition to our landscape, just as we have invited and spread our own seed? Or is there some kind of human need to fear and loathe an "other," even if it is a non-sentient and bloodless plant? Or is compulsive weeding just an human character bred into us from our agricultural heritage?


I've decided to accept buffle grass as part of the new suburban landscape. They've got just as much right to be here as I do!

Sunrise

I'm a morning person. Early morning light is always magical, with or without clouds like these, but this Sunday morning show was spectacular.