During my childhood, I had a second family. One of my sisters was much older. After nursing school, she married a young doctor, and they began their family—seven children in seven years. This was much to my happiness, because I loved kids and was lonely in my own house. When summer arrived, mom packed me off to spend time with my sister. Leaving our house in the city for their little ranch house on Melody Lane, at the end of a cul de sac surrounded by corn fields, I enjoyed the gentle chaos of a big family. I tried to keep the kids outside while my sister sewed for me — loose calico smocks and other hippie wear.
I took the kids adventuring into the wilds of small-town central Illinois where the rich black soil lay so flat that the only thing breaking the horizon was rows of corn and the locomotives heading towards Chicago, or Santa Fe. Bicycles were aplenty in the garage along with science projects and crafting supplies. Books filled the shelves in the hallways. Dinners were home-made from the garden and discussions ranged from science and medicine to sports and TV. Free flowing streams and forests were absent, but we imagined a wilderness with cliffs to climb and rivers to jump across.
My sister’s husband grew up on a dairy farm in Ohio, one of 12 kids. He gardened that black soil, raising much of their food while my sister grew flowers and berries. With seven kids, we always had enough for a game of football, kickover, wiffle ball, or badminton — and there was usually a pool in the yard. I always had my guitar along. We sang Old Dog Blue and Groundhog and Kickapoo Creek. After dinner, we piled into the back of the woody station wagon and were driven to the Dairy Queen for cones.
But eventually, we all grew up and moved away from the Midwest to other parts of the country, starting our own families, becoming different people. I lost touch with the second family that had given me so much. Just recently, though, after forty years, I headed out west to find a couple of them. Vermont is the home I love, but late winter, with the damp cold and frost-heaved dirt roads sucking you in, is a suitable time to visit someplace hot.
Waking up in a low stucco house in the Sonoran Desert, I ran outside into the heat and sunshine and looked out upon birds I had never seen before. The tiniest warbler, Lucy’s, which breeds only here, sang from the mesquite trees. Anna and Costa and Broad-bill hummingbirds buzzed me. Strange grey cardinals called Pyrrhuloxia and tufted black silky flycatchers called Phainopeplas sang from the Palo Verde trees in full yellow bloom. A thrush with a long-curved bill worked the ground for seeds, along with lesser goldfinch and white-crowned sparrows. Most amazingly, a pair of large Gila woodpeckers were screaming from the hole they had made in the side of a Saguaro cactus, feeding young.
I grabbed a water bottle, an essential, and my binoculars and went out walking in the wash. I grew up in rural Missouri, so I remember how to walk in snake country, cautious stepping, looking for patterns. Every morning, before the heat set in, I walked through the desert following meandering trails, remembering to not get lost, as water only flows downhill, watching for rattlers.
Among the flowering prickly pears and blooming Ocotillos, and the Chollas that will jump at you as you pass, leaving terrible barbs, I photographed plants and birds and the early morning sun on the Santa Catalina Mountains. Mostly, the washes are dry, but when rain comes, even miles upstream, they are dangerous. Floods carrying debris –trees, rocks, and dead cows scour the wash. No one builds there, which is a blessing in the desert, where suburban houses for retirees are spreading across the horizon, eating up the land.
I was delighted to find that my niece and nephew and their families had carried on the tradition of adventuring and scientific exploration. They were the outdoor people I am so comfortable with. We visited Biosphere, the desert experiment of putting humans in a closed, self-contained bubble. We saw the new movie about humans in space, The Hail Mary Project. We visited the Sonoran Desert Museum which explores plant and animal adaptability to extreme environments. We hiked high in the mountains and biked on miles of trails. We ate Mexican food. We swam across icy Lake Patagonia. We looked up birds and plants. We played with their grandkids, singing and playing guitar. We swam in a pool. This time, however, it was the little kids I had taken out on imagined adventures so many years ago across the flat Illinois plains who took me out into the very real wilds of the American Southwest.
It does all come back around.
Micki Colbeck is a writer and naturalist who chairs the Strafford Conservation Commission.