Dinosaurs, Dancers, and the Desert

Introduction

Movement is more important to me than air. It’s hard to breathe when I am standing still. I’ve moved six times in my twenty-one years but whenever anyone asks if it was hard I want to ask them if staying still was really so easy. Each place made me someone new. It’s not a question I want to know the answer to, but I can’t help but wonder what kind of woman I would be if I hadn’t had the chance to change.

Noise

When my mother tried to make me play soccer as a child, I sat down. In the middle of the field, with all the kids running around me, cleats close enough to my face that they were inarguably more dangerous than the ball, I sat. Rooted myself to the freshly-cut grass and refused to get up. The other children could run around me if they liked running so much. Let them chase a ball down a field to score a point that didn’t mean anything. In the meantime, I was content to simply sit. No matter how much they yelled at me, I refused to move. They’d have to physically rip me from the ground, and if they dared to try, I would go kicking and screaming.

When the coach suggested that perhaps I would like being a goalie better, as they didn’t have to run back and forth across a field for an hour, I stepped out of the way whenever the ball flew towards me. I didn’t want to get hit in the face with a ball. I wanted to be a cheerleader.

My parents didn’t want me to. There was too much stigma behind it: cheerleaders were sluts, cheerleaders were dumb, cheerleading wasn’t even a real sport. But I wanted to, and when I wanted something I tended to get it. I wasn’t particularly spoiled (albeit slightly—okay, majorly), but I begged my parents for long enough that they decided letting me cheer would be less annoying than listening to me constantly beg to.

So a cheerleader I became.

I wasn't a football cheerleader, I was a competitive cheerleader—I never wanted to cheer for anyone but myself, and definitely not for boys who already had rows and rows of bleachers screaming for them to win a game I saw as even more pointless than soccer—and I soon found out that competitive cheerleading was undeniably a sport. And a hard one.

I got a hernia at age twelve from working out too much at such a young age. I found the little, hard bump right above my belly button, poking out like a pimple begging to be popped. But it wouldn’t pop and when I moved it hurt. When I laughed or coughed or cheered it hurt. They cut me open and stitched me back together and after a couple of weeks I was back to normal, but the surgeon that saved me wasn’t. He drowned on vacation trying to save two little boys from a rip current. The little boys made it. He didn’t.

When my mother told me that he’d died, only a month after giving me surgery, I remember thinking how fast things happened. How you can go from having a wife and kids and an amazing job to having nothing but saltwater in your lungs and a bloated, floating, useless body you couldn’t live in anymore. But he died doing what he loved: helping children. In most drowning cases, a child that is under the water for more than two minutes doesn’t survive.

It takes two minutes and thirty seconds to finish a cheerleading routine. The thing I loved about cheerleading was how fast those two minutes and thirty seconds went by. It was nothing but flying, my body twisting and turning through the air, somehow always finding its way to its feet. It was lights and noise and adrenaline, my teammates screaming at each other that we could get through it, and get through it cleanly. Unscathed, untouched, unstoppable, our makeup not even dripping, our skirts not out of place, our pretty pink lips still smiling even while our lungs were begging us to open our mouths wide and greedily gasp down all the thick, hairspray-stained air.

At the end of those two minutes and thirty seconds, after all that noise and movement, we were allowed to breathe again, allowed to hug one another, sweaty bodies shaking. To go back to the slow, steady quiet of everyday life.

My surgeon wasn’t.

Or maybe he was. Maybe after all that noise in the two minutes it took him to save those little boys’ lives, he found steady peace in the cool quiet of the ocean. I know how relieving it feels to go back to the quiet after the noise.

But I also know how relieving it feels to hear the noise after so much quiet.

Magic Bugs

Seventeen years ago, I met the cicadas.

There’s cicadas every summer in the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest states of North America. But every seventeen years, there are special cicadas, and they emerge from the ground in the billions. They are large, roach-like looking bugs, except with wings, eyes redder than stoplights, and four long, scrambling legs. They reminded me of dinosaurs the first time I saw them. They looked ancient, like they’d just flown out of a storybook and landed on my Chicago’s suburb’s’ sidewalk. Or maybe they’d flown out of a nightmare. Or both; storybooks need nightmares to make them interesting, after all.

But the first time I heard them—that’s when I knew how otherworldly they really are.

They don’t sing. They scream. They wail. They rave and rage and ravage the summer night air, cutting through doors and walls and the thickest buildings, to get into your ear. Predictably, it is only the males that scream. The females are content to keep their reemergence to themselves.

The ones that come out every seventeen years, that take over the streets and flood the sidewalks and scream, are officially known as Magicicada Cassini. I love that they have magic in their name: Magicicada Cassini. They deserve to; it belongs there. They live the longest out of any other insect and scientists are still unsure why they only emerge every seventeen years. They keep their survival a secret, and it most be a good one, as they’ve survived for 1.8 million years. That’s since the Pleistocene Epoch. So, I guess they weren’t really alive when the dinosaurs were. But in my child’s mind, they were still something that shouldn’t be alive but had somehow made it this far anyway.

The males scream to attract females. Together, with all of the men crying out for mates at once, the sound can reach up to 100 decibels. They make the noise by vibrating their cymbals, which are two long, drum-like membranes they have on either side of their stomachs. The females don’t have any, which is why they can’t produce the same sounds.

Instead, after mating, the women quietly burrow into the bark of living trees where they lay anywhere between twenty-four to forty-eight eggs at a time. The image of little eggs waiting to be born being nurtured inside of a living tree brings comfort to me. They may not be raised inside of their mother’s stomach, but they are raised inside of something just as alive. Maybe the trees tell the cicadas the ancient secrets of how to survive so long. Maybe the trick to living is to make friends with trees.

It wouldn’t surprise me.

I thought about the cicadas after hearing about my surgeon’s death. They go from quiet to noise, quiet to nose, staying in the quiet for seventeen years before giving in to sound.

It’s no wonder they are so loud when they are finally allowed to be.

They’re coming back out this year. I won’t be walking on the Chicago sidewalks kicking them out of my way. I won’t struggle to fall asleep while their song blasts through the summer sky. I am glad for it; they are slightly terrifying and a bit disgusting, but they are also a symbol of rebirth to me.

It make sense that they would come back in 202l. We’ve all been in the quiet for too long.

The Trails

My father worked at the same job for over fifteen years. He is a very simple, kind, loyal man. The idea of leaving a job he’d had for so long seemed like giving up to him. But leaving isn’t always giving up. Sometimes staying is.

I was the only child he asked permission from. My sister would be starting college next year and my brother high school, so life would be shifting for both of them anyway. I, on the other hand, was halfway through high school, with a boyfriend and friends and a life that I could get to live for two more years if I wanted to. But I didn’t. I was over the cold and the wind and the same people I’d known for so many years. I was ready to shift. I needed to.

So when he asked me if I would be alright if he accepted a job in Scottsdale, Arizona, I said yes.

It was probably the greatest shift imaginable. We went from eight month long winters to a dry summer where the temperatures could reach over 120. We moved in the peak of summer—which I would not recommend—into a house with the mountains as its backyard. I knew I wouldn’t have any friends when I moved. I was okay with that.

I had my little brother. I got to spend an entire summer swimming with him in our new pool since he wasn’t distracted by his old friends.

I had my older sister. I got to get drunk with her for the first time since she was finally spending time at home, seeing as how she had no where else to go.

And I had the mountains.

The first time I went trail running in my backyard, I got lost. My backyard really was the mountains—miles and miles of Sonoran Desert, with enough trails to keep a girl entertained for a lifetime. I ran up and down the rocky trails under the dry desert sun. I loved the desert sun. It hit different than Chicago’s sun. It was more intense, deeper, stronger, and even when the gentle morning rays met my flesh, it felt like they sunk right into my bones.

I loved the aching of my legs when I got to the top, looked forward to the way they would shake. I loved sprinting down, my shoes slipping on the rocks. The key was to think of running downhill as controlled falling. If you get scared, you go too slow, and even then you still might fall. But if you go fast, let gravity do her work instead of trying to go against her, it’s so freeing. There’s still a chance you might slip and end up with dust and dirt on your face. I slipped a few times, but even then, I loved it. I was kissing the earth. Leaving my saliva in the dust. And, sometimes, my blood.

My skin turned the same shade as the earth and my arms were sun-kissed with freckles. I laughed when I ran, even when I was out of breath. The dawn was my favorite: it set the whole world aglow, and it was when the desert was the most alive.

People think of the desert as this dead, barren place. It isn’t. There was a whole world in my backyard, a world of sunlight and gold and slippery reptiles, of jumping cacti and dancing hummingbirds, of prowling lions and howling coyotes. Every morning I didn’t have school I ran. Every evening at sunset I ran. Every day, I ran.

Every time I ran, I learned something new about this wide, alive, warm new world of mine.

Forbidden Fruit

Phoenix is the largest city in the Sonoran Desert. The Sonoran Desert has a reputation as the wettest desert in the world, which is shocking to me, as it hardly rained, except during monsoon season, when the sky decided to have a temper tantrum and let all her tears fall at once, drenching the dry desert for a night or two. It can get up to 25 inches of rain each year. Maybe those monsoons are what bring the Saguaro cacti. Or maybe they just decided long ago that this was their home. Their only home.

The Sonoran Desert is the only place in the world where you can find Saguaro cacti. They are huge, gorgeous things, and when I ran at sunrise or sunset and the mountains turned more to shadows than sunlight I could image that they came alive in the dark, that their spiky arms turned into real ones and they wrapped around each other to dance. My father hypothesized that perhaps they were aliens, placed strategically in the desert to observe human life. In those lonely summer months those dancers and aliens were some of my best friends.

They’re protected, as most rare things are, and you need a permit to move one and can get a very large fine for shooting one. The desert loves its guns. If they are old enough they sprout flowers, but only after they’ve survived at least seventy years in the harsh desert climate. The ones with arms—most of the ones in my backyard had at least two or three—were at least a century old. In spring, after the summer monsoons, they sprout flowers. If bees are clever enough to find them and they pollinate, the flowers turn from the white cream of coffee to blood red fruit). It always felt forbidden to everyone but the birds that snack on the tiny black seeds inside. I believe the Saguaro are the mothers and fathers of the Sonoran Desert.

The Sonoran desert is anything but barren. Along with the Saguaro, it serves as the home for over 2,000 native plants, including but not limited to the cholla, beavertail, hedgehog, prickly pear, ocotillo, and organ pipe cactus, along with agave, creosote bush, mesquite, palo verde trees, and much more. My favorite cactus after the Saguaro is the one most hikers hate: the cholla.

The cholla has a bad reputation of jumping. Really, it doesn’t jump, although it’s easy to understand why people are afraid of the cute little bush leaping out and attacking them. There’s over twenty species of cholla in the Sonoran. Cholla are plants with small, spiky balls that grow out like unwanted warts that can easily detach from the pads or stems they grow on. When something alive moves past them—an animal or a human—it sinks its spines into the fur or flesh so that it can be carried with the moving thing to somewhere new, where it will eventually fall off and root to make more cholla.

Once they root, a new cholla cactus is born. Some of the cholla can grow up to fifteen feet and bloom beautiful, softly pink and lavender flowers in early summer.

It survives by detachment.

I learned a lot from cholla.

To bloom, we must move.