We were living that summer,
that whole year really,
out of an old Volkswagen van,
about the same age I was.
If the van had been a cactus,
a saguaro,
it would stand a mere ten feet high.
We had no air conditioning,
only a tiny solar fan to cool us
as the temperatures began to soar.
It wasn’t so bad at first.
The thermometer would rise
some five or six degrees higher
than it did the day before.
We sweated more
and sought the shade
as though it were a sacred space
where our prayers might be heard,
our body temperature regulated.

Each night, around sunset,
I would go for my daily run.
When I was young,
and ignorant, in that certain sentimental way
that you lose as you grow older,
I heard of a marathon
in Death Valley,
and I wondered why anyone
would want to do that.
Why not run somewhere more pleasant?
But now that I was here,
and had experience,
I saw that you run here
because you live here,
and that running, or any other exercise,
does something to your body:
it helps you take the heat.

It helped to look at the saguaros,
to know that something else out here
was alive and green and full of water
in a place full of rocks
and minerals
and sand,
a place so dry your skin cracks open
in deep chasms
like the desert washes.

I used to think of the saguaro
as the cartoon cactus,
the cliché of Arizona,
not something real,
like the lizards and the ocotillo,
which grew upward in elegant splendor
their delicate branches stretched and curved
like the limbs of a ballerina.
But the saguaros grew on me,
their steadiness, the one thing
that didn’t sway or move
in the high winds that swept the desert
and blew sand into our van.
I started taking detours on my runs
to circle tight around them,
the saguaros,
to get a closer look,
at which point I discovered
they die from the bottom up.
The bottom few feet of most of them,
the tall and stately ones,
but also the shorter, ugly ones,
were all dried up and brown,
riddled with holes,
encrusted with some sort of exotic desert rot.

In July, the heat intensified,
and we slept with every door and window open,
wrapped entirely in wet towels
trying not to touch each other
to disperse the body heat.
My runs grew shorter
each passing day,
but one day I made a greater effort
and I went all four miles,
all the way to a saguaro
I called the Great Forked one.
But when I got there,
to the spot where it had stood,
I didn’t see it.
It had fallen over, given up.
It couldn’t take the heat,
which had grown unnatural,
excessive.

I didn’t run any more that summer.

When the fall came,
my husband and I moved into a house,
a place with ceiling fans,
pipes and ventilation,
running water, central heat,
and air conditioning.
I reinstated the daily run,
though it’s no longer through the desert,
just a suburban neighborhood,
where the only saguaros are in gardens
where they grow tall and green and stately
from water pumped out of the earth
or diverted from the Colorado River,
water that no longer freely flows
along its ancestral channels.

When I think of the dead saguaro,
I can’t help but think I am a thief.