D  e  s  e  r  t     E  x  p  o  s  u  r  e     July 2005

Land of Light

We are situated, small and not very important, at the bottom of a bowl, watching a carnival in the sky.

There is a lot of sky in Deming, and a lot of light.

We also have plenty of nothing. There's not a lot of money, and there's not a lot of entertainment. But what we do have is wide-open spaces, and that at least partly compensates for the nothingness.

The morning light in summer is one of the things I like about Deming. When I'm home, I leave both front and back doors open while I eat breakfast, write, make phone calls, dig around my trees, or do other things that can be done only before the metallic afternoon heat bears down.

With the front and back doors open only about 12 feet apart from each other in my singlewide trailer, there's a kind of transparency to my house. It's sort of like a dollhouse or a diorama, in which the charm of what is seen through a tiny window or door is magnified though a process I doubt anyone has ever explained.

A slight breeze sways and light pours in, the color of champagne. It's a delicate shade captured exactly by prizewinning Las Cruces watercolorist Robert Highsmith, a color that may be especially meant for a watercolorist. In northern New Mexico the morning sun is a buttery, buff shade, but in the south it is champagne.

Oh, the elegance of singlewides—at least mine. There is an efficiency of space and line to them and a light feel that comes from them being made of material like that of a tin can.

But they are inefficient in terms of heat, and by about noon I am roasting and sweltering. The box fan works pretty well, or the swamp cooler when it gets into the high 90s or 100s. But I don't like the noise and want to get out of the house.

Not many people really think about how the sun looks in the hot afternoons, because the sheer heat tends to overwhelm the light. It beats down like bronze or brass.

Fieldworkers and construction crews probably have the least protection from the sun. Most people are likely holed up in their air-conditioned offices or homes, or in un-air-conditioned homes with shades drawn, and don't even look outside. The brain fries, the nerve ends frazzle, and perceptions are deadened.

My dog hunkers down in her little dug-out space under one of the spreading juniper shrubs, the coolest spot she knows.

The mourning doves in the cholla cactus, models of motherly self-abnegation, cover their eggs or their feathery babies with their gray spread-out wings all day long, no matter how hot it is.

The epitome of tenderness, house finches in their nests in my bathroom window cover their babies from the intense afternoon heat by sitting on them or even standing above them and holding out their wings like an parasol.

In July through mid-September, the monsoon season, the late-afternoon sky is often shadowed over by serious-looking clouds. Rain, like long gray strands of hair, forms walking pillars to the west or south—consciously avoiding my street and my yard, it seems.

As a northerner for most of my life, I sometimes hunger for green and wetness, things they have in excess up north. I revel in the matte tones and drama of threatening storms. I sit swept by the wind on the screened-in porch, playing the Brandenburg Concertos on my tinny tape player and imagining the Florida Mountains are the Alps.

When the late afternoon is clear, the rays of light get long and rangy. As it cools off, the mountains turn a tawny gold and purple, with a liquid clarity like the background of countless cowboy movies. You can almost hear the stagecoach wheels creaking or the squeak of cowpokes' saddles in the leftover late-afternoon warmth.

I think this is what brings some people to the area, so they can play cowboy and take in the Old West atmosphere. I don't. I look for signs of Old Mexico, if anything. Both these pastimes are a little hard to carry out where I live because of the way the streets are laid out in nerdy, rectangular blocks as if it were New Jersey or Illinois.

But in the evening the sky starts to get more interesting than anything else going on down on the ground.

When the sky is relatively clear, it can be full of fantastic cloud formations. Thunderheads sometimes pile up and form cloud-towns or elaborate walled cities from the Middle Ages flushed with peach, rose, red, lavender and gold tones. You can see enormous domes, towers and great fans spreading out in wisps through the sky.

There are also the usual cloud swans you can just make out, elephants with stunted trunks, hands with stubby fingers, and rabbits whose ears turn to paddles, drift away, and dissolve. As the last light dims to gray, the cumulous clouds form little trains sailing into the distance, holding close the last rose tones of sunset.

I once saw elaborate quilted clouds spread out formally through a quarter of the sky. It was made of palest peach and fragile, insubstantial gold, a robe for the Emperor of China. Sometimes during the last five minutes of sundown, the western horizon turns a fervent rose tint never seen before, washing everything in its color. Other times it turns a flaming incandescent orange in a last-minute secret disclosed before dark.

We people are situated, small and not very important, at the bottom of a big, wide, flat bowl, watching the carnival above.

The last show of the day is the full moon. Most of this show goes on when few are watching. A moonlit night in the desert is so bright it competes with the day.

The moon slips in with its mild light almost unnoticed at first, its whiteness like milk mixed with the honey of the late-afternoon light. But then it turns to silver and subsumes everything. It keeps my dog awake all night in the bliss of its pale froth. The light chalks up my car, the fence posts, the garage.

Then later, about bedtime, something else happens. The Florida Mountain range turns into a gray veil hanging in the east, as transparent as the night sky. By midnight, the mountains are ready to levitate for several hours. I've seen them. Gravity is temporarily suspended.

My front door is open, the screened porch is open, and the flat land is open in the uncontaminated peace.

The earth sleeps and the sky is awake. Day is turned upside-down. I turn over and go to sleep.

Borderlines columnist Marjorie Lilly lives in Deming.

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