Soon, the Monsoon

Today is a harbinger.

Every year Arizona gets a summer monsoon. It's not a figure of speech--it's the real thing, the Mexican Monsoon to be exact. It usually arrives around the Fourth of July (fireworks by Mother Nature to go with man-made rockets) and stays until about Labor Day, sometimes earlier, sometimes later. Have you seen the Kitt Peak lightning photo? That's a one-minute time exposure.

We're still in the dry season now. It hasn't rained in weeks. There's been barely a cloud in the sky. Everything is so dry it crackles, and the palo verde and ocotillo have dropped their leaves. It hasn't been a hot year--after a blazing first week of June, temps in Tucson have hovered around 100 degrees F, which is fairly normal for the season. (It's A Dry Heat!)

Today, there's a change. It's not real yet--it's just a tease--but a little before noon, flotillas of cumulus started forming overhead, starting in the southeast (where the moisture streams in from Mexico). There's a dry westerly fighting it, and the clouds are ragged along the edges from it, but they keep in piling up. The air has a weird smell: instead of sharp dryness catching at the linings of the nose, there's a thickness that says moisture. My evaporative coolers suddenly aren't working so well. If I had a stillsuit, I'd be starting to get clammy in it.

It's just a tease. Official monsoon is three consecutive days of dewpoints of 55F or above, which means a steady stream of moisture from the southeast, ongoing storms in Sonora sending outflows northward, and day after day of boomers starting earlier and earlier and going later and later until they dissipate, then reappear a day or two later in a season-long cycle. The air at ground level is still dry enough to make the horses' tails stand on end, but they're not the full-blown static-charge fiber optics of a day or two ago. There's an odd wind blowing--not sure which direction it wants to come from.

Supposedly this is a three-day surge and then the westerlies will be back--but it's a promise. In a week or two or three (or possibly even this week if everything cooperates--nobody really understands the phenomenon), the real thing will be here, with wild boomers and torrents of rain and a new growing season. The Colorado River toads will come out from under the house (huge things, the mother toad is a foot long) and park under the barn floods at night and chow down on bugs, the little frogs and toads will hatch in the sometime ponds, and every day will start off like a sauna, rise to a sweaty crescendo, then sometime after noon, blow apart in waves of storms.

I love the monsoon. It kills the joints and is scary when the lightning walks, with power failures and wind damage and wildfires and all the rest of it, and evening rides get washed out as often as not, but it's still one of my favorite seasons in the Southwest. Veils of rain sweep across the valleys, lightning does a wardance on the mountains, and the green things come back--even start to bloom.

It's coming. I can smell it. Soon.

Coda, with Thunder

I thought the clouds and moisture would blow off eastward toward evening, but they did no such thing. The south and east got blacker and blacker. When I came out in the evening, the air had that sauna sensation, and the southeast was black with rain--and there was a piece of rainbow. The storm moved in toward the Rincons, and settled a mile or two away, with the winds and thunder blustering at us. The west was almost clear, with a few clouds; the sunset was gorgeous.

We're still just outside the edge of the storm, and the wind is still blowing. I took Camilla out for walkies and she was really feeling the thunder--she was as edgy as the air. I had to bring her back before she blew. Then I took Pook out to literally head for the hills. He's had two years more of groundwork and it showed. He was edgy but attentive, and we did some nice hill work--going up them at a consistent pace, and down them in pieces, with pauses to balance, even to back up (backing up a hill is an interesting exercise for a horse). He thought that was fun.

There's a new plant nursery two houses down toward the north--I keep meaning to ask if they have a storefront. They have a little sort of greenhouse, and a lot of tagged ocotillo out in back of it, and assorted cacti. It looks as if they're taking plants off land that's being cleared for development, which is a legal and I presume lucrative occupation. In fact I think developers are required to have nurseries or accredited nonprofit groups remove the rare or endangered cacti. Ocotillo aren't in that category, I don't think, but they're a popular plant for xeriscaping. I love 'em myself.

Anyway I think it's neat that there's a desert-plant nursery in the neighborhood.

After the dinner circus, I decided on the better part of valor, and put the side tarps up on the hay--there's a roof but it's open on the sides, and rain can blow right through. I don't think the rain will come this far off the mountain, but it never hurts to be paranoid--and the forecast is for two more days (at least) of this "pre-monsoon."

It's lovely tonight, with the cool air and the smell of rain. Rain smells different in the desert--sharp and rather dry, like dust and creosote. Yes, It's A Dry Rain.