The Sonoran Desert is cooling down now. Latent heat stored in the cliffs and stones no longer replenished as the sun rises later and sets sooner, thermal energy escaping to deep space when one side of our planet hides from the sun in its own shadow. This eternal game of Sun ‘n Moon will continue until our parent star tires of the chase and swells to swallow our planet whole.

The gentle gusts that accompany autumn feel different, smell different. They invigorate the senses in a way that tingles my spine, invoking memories of dry maples leaves crunching under foot in Nebraska and the smell of apple cider, orange, cinnamon and cloves boiling on our wood burning stove. One of my most fond memories as a child is helping my father chop wood for the winter. He wore a gray sweatshirt jacket with a hood, blue jeans, and hiking boots which where rare in Nebraska where cowboy attire was the norm. He was strong and able then in his 40s, and remains so in his 80s, now chopping tree roots after a storm topples a mesquite in the otherwise impenetrable soil of the Valley of the Sun.

Tonight I lit a fire in my wood burning stove for the first time this season. I knew tonight was the night not by a calendar date nor a calculated change in temperature, rather it just felt like the right time. The satisfaction is much deeper than what my senses immediately convey, as though I am comforted at an ancestral level, a hundred generations responding to the pending winter in the very same way.

With bucket in hand I walk beneath a star lit sky to the wood pile, cut and chopped this spring and summer from the fallen, dead, and dying of seventeen acres of mesquite forest, inside of thousands more. This is a truly renewable resource and with a high efficiency stove, low in particulates too. I’ll chop more mid winter, sharing the task with my partner Colleen and visitors who may have chopped wood as a child but their city dwellings depriving them of the satisfaction of their own labor providing heat for an entire season.

I recognize that there are now too many people for all of us to heat our homes in this manner, but I made the choice to live in the wilderness, an hour from the nearest town in order to go to sleep with a fire for the ancestors, the comfort of a millennium, and a warmth that continues to glow ’till dawn.

The maiden voyage of Kai’s Advanced Elements Expedition inflatable kayak on the San Pedro, with the final days of the monsoon season. The paddle was on August 28, 2022, confluence of the San Pedro and Paige Canyon; Cascabel, Arizona. The video was reposted to YouTube a year later.

It’s winter in the desert. Cool days, cooler nights. I wouldn’t go so far as to say “cold nights” for there would be contention with those who do in fact endure nights in which being out of doors would be unpleasant, even difficult to endure.

While we might enjoy a dusting of snow, even a few inches each year, this year is coming up mostly dry, warmer it seems than the prior two. I have not yet seen ice crystals formed from latent dew, nor have the mesquite trees lost all of their leaves.

I am deeply concerned. This doesn’t feel right. It should be colder, and with global warming and associated climate change, I wonder if we will ever again have a proper winter, here or anywhere. I feel suffocated by the notion of a world without snow. My childhood memories recall massive snow piles formed by the snow plows clearing the church parking lot just up the street, built even higher by the blowing wind and associated drifts. Nebraska was a winter wonderland in the 70′ and 80’s, yet even there were stories of much heavier winters with drifts over rooftops, roofs collapsing under the burden of such a load.

One cold, bright morning my father attempted to exit the front door of our home in Columbus, Nebraska. The wood door open to the inside, the screen door its winter glass panes made it fully evident that a drift has completely blocked this north-facing exit. The side door, to the west was the same. As our garage was attached, my brother and I pulled on our many layers of winter gear, grabbed shovels, and climbed through the high kitchen window to the south. We sunk nearly to our chest, through the thin crust and into the light drift. I wonder now if I was at all concerned with falling all the way through, well over my head. Yet I was a kid, and such thoughts were not likely present in my brain filled with the adventure of of a house buried in snow.

We made our way along the west side of the house, around the corner to the drive way that terminated beneath the shallow overhang and garage door. We dug our way to the front door, clearing shovel after shovel until the porch was revealed. Our father greeted us from the inside, smiling for our endeavor.

I don’t recall the details, but he surely joined us in clearing the drive such that he might be able to get to work that or the next day, by foot or by car. But in that neighborhood, as with so many, the social duty of clearing snow, raking leaves, mowing the yard was more important than the need to get out of the house. Then, as now, I prefer to be snow’d in for a few days, a week or more.

In the southestern corner of Arizona, in the San Pedro River corridor and our community of Cascabel, it would take a total shift in the global climate to result in such an event (which would be welcomed by some, and completely rejected by others). We embrace the winter rain as the reason to tend a fire all day, set a kettle on the wood burning stove, and remain in doors. The clouds roll as turbulent waves overhead, this mesquite forest at the bottom of a shallow sky sea. The steel panel roof alerts me and Colleen to the rain even before we take notice of the wet patio and smell of the desert drinking it all in. That sound, the sound of rain drops that have fallen several miles only to crash into a metal surface, roll down to the gutter, and into the planters and water catchment systems–that sound is as comforting a lover’s voice at the break of dawn, as engaging as an orchestra in its first movement, as breathtaking as the opening score of a favorite film.

Once again, I am counting raindrops in Cascabel, cherishing the waves of precipitation throughout the night, and secretly hoping it will snow.

So many stories, so many things I want to say trapped in an internal monologue. Sometimes the words make it to my mouth, sometimes to my tongue only to be whispered in an inaudible tone. But my fingers, they are so simply too far away from my brain. By the time the words reach those distant implements, those tools of communication the words fall silent and lose their form, only an echo of what were moments before clear in my head.