“But it’s a dry heat…” Or so they say around here. (It is also the caption on those tourist T-shirts depicting a dried-up skeleton propped up under a giant saguaro cactus.)
True, but once you get much above 105 degrees this very unnatural oven effect would make even the Pillsbury Dough Boy pop a stroke. “Dry heat”…yeah, right.
June in southern Arizona is a rough time of year, sort of a torturous bridge month between the pleasant days of spring and the arrival of the cooling monsoons. The June air doesn’t seem to move…not a cloud in a sky of faded denim blue–faded from its normal bright blue due to the effects of extreme heat, I suppose. (Maybe you could argue that those effects of extreme heat actually fall upon your own squinty, sweaty eyeballs as opposed to directly changing the atmospheric conditions, but I am no scientist.)
Sometime in July, the monsoons will (hopefully) arrive and towering cumulus will build over the desert and–if you win the meteorological lottery, that is–heavy, cold raindrops will splatter down from above and bring the dusty-dry washes alive…alive, at least temporarily, with the miraculous sound and sight of flowing, gurgling water, pushing a heavy wave of creosote perfume ahead of its brown wake. The wind will stir…there will be wisps and currents of cool air swirling about…and sometimes even raging, cold gusts that will knock you off your horse at the Old Tucson studio gunfight.
But that’s July. June is the hot, dry, still, cicada-buzzing, hover fly month of 105-plus degree temps that will make you pine for the fjords even if you can’t find Norway with Google Maps or the parrot sketch on YouTube.
And June it still is…
Desert Heat. Southern Arizona, 2014
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