FROM THIS VALLEY, THEY SAY, YOU ARE LEAVING

LYDIA MILLET

I’m devoted to where I live—some might say too devoted, since I’ve left people and jobs elsewhere to stay out here. Once, after a local utility sent me a letter announcing it planned to blade a swath across my patch of desert to lay some cable, I dissolved into a fit of sobbing. That was fifteen years ago, and so far the bulldozers haven’t come: from what I can tell, they chose to blaze a shorter trail through the property next door instead.

Which happens to belong to my mother. She replanted a few bushes and cacti along the path they plowed, but you can still see, in the bare ground around those sparse plantings, the footprint of the machines.

It’s not that I experience the “pride of ownership” that real estate agents like to tout in ad copy. The phrase doesn’t resonate with me, no matter how hard I reach for a feeling that might approximate it. I’d like to think ownership meant something beyond resale value—say, permission to protect a place from harm—but mostly, as far as I can tell, unless you’re willing to lie down in their path, the bulldozers will come whether you own a place or rent it. It’s far truer to say the land owns me: it has all the power in our relationship.

Somehow it became my only right home as soon as I set foot here. I can’t say exactly why, because my long, straight street, as you drive down it toward the turnoff for my house, looks almost ugly. I see prettier streets all the time. But as soon as I head up my winding dirt driveway, I find myself in a lush tumult of trees and cactus and shrubs—lush to the eye, though piercing to the touch. With the angle of the sloping land against the sky, and without the light pollution of Tucson on the other side of the mountains, I can sometimes stand out in my yard in the darkness, look up, and see not only the constellations but the wide, hazy path of the Milky Way.

The expanse of stars, the multiple mountain ranges visible from my balcony, the cactus and other otherworldly, curious forms of plant life all come together with a singular beauty. Wild animals wander through my yard: mule deer, bobcats, and collared peccaries that look like boars, which we call javelinas. Foxes, coyotes, roadrunners, quail. Others alight on trees: owls, hawks, flickers, songbirds. Still others live down in the coolness of the earth, like the round-tailed ground squirrels that remind me of miniature prairie dogs, Harris’s antelope squirrels that resemble chipmunks, many lizards, tortoises, and toads.

My home lies adjacent to Saguaro National Park, whose low but dramatically pointed volcanic mountains are spiked with tall saguaro cacti, the iconic plants of the American Southwest you used to see in cartoons about the desert and cowboy movies. They’re often thirty or forty feet tall, with arms that make them look creaturely. Spread out and upraised, as though they’re constantly hailing you in greeting.

There are other wondrous cacti as well, some in the shapes of paddles, others like barrels, still others like clumps of breasts growing out of the ground or trees with thousands of spiny segments that get lit up gold by the setting sun. Woody plants called ocotillos with red flames for flowers, thorny trees with green bark.

Still, it’s the saguaros that most define the Sonoran Desert. These giants can weigh more than five thousand pounds and, in good conditions, outlive people by dozens of years and sometimes centuries—one saguaro on the east side of the city, called Granddaddy, was three hundred by the time it died in 1992. They’re a keystone species that many birds depend on for nesting, from woodpeckers to tiny elf and screech owls. Bats, bees, and birds pollinate them. Javelinas, coyotes, and tortoises eat their large, fuchsia fruits. As do the Tohono O’odham, who’ve lived here for thousands of years. They make jelly from the fruit, along with wine that’s consumed during rain ceremonies.

But the so-called megadrought that has descended on the West since 2000 ranks among the greatest droughts of the past millennium. The animals that live here are hardy, but their water-saving adaptations depend on a fragile balance—the desert’s green things grow and reproduce with painful slowness. My mother, who moved here a few years after I did, has rain gauges stuck into the ground across her land, tiny beakers with wire frames. She’ll shake her head after a particularly dry summer monsoon season, telling me sadly how many inches we got, as though each fraction of an inch is gold.

And it is—better than gold.

Eventually, they say, the changing climate may plunge our region into conditions reminiscent of the Dust Bowl.

Before I moved here I didn’t tend to stay in the same place for too long—three years maximum, as an adult, before I found this desert when I was thirty. Admittedly, I’ve traveled a lot: my contentment and career both depend on the connections offered by cars and airplanes, which break up my isolation and let me see friends and visit family. So I’m a conservationist who worries about carbon all the time but can’t live in her private haven without leaving a heavy footprint.

My life isn’t what you’d call sustainable. It’s a rural life, of a sort, since the only businesses out here are gas stations, a couple of dollar stores, and a dive bar called the Wagon Wheel Saloon. But it’s not a farming life. Unless you give yourself over to cultivation pretty much full-time, and don’t mind sucking plenty of water out of the river system and overdrawn local aquifers, the desert’s not a great spot for food growing. I don’t grow anything I eat save rosemary from a single bush in my garden, one that’s apparently impossible to kill.

Not everyone has found this desert so difficult to cultivate. In fact, southern Arizona has been continuously inhabited for longer than most places in the country—more than ten thousand years. People are thought to have lived here in Avra Valley in the Middle Archaic period, between 5000 and 1500 B.C., and the Hohokam were here by 200 B.C. The Pascua Yaqui were in the area by around 550 B.C. and thrived for many centuries before white people like me arrived—with no access, that we know of, to either grocery stores or restaurants.

These days my town is a satellite of a city that is itself a satellite—of the Colorado River, which now provides, through a multistate water-sharing compact, much of its water. My routine and job depend on internet technology without which, on top of my car and its gas, and that water that’s piped in from far away, I couldn’t feed myself or my children.

Our living here looks more like suburban luxury than rural self-sufficiency—a gift of fossil fuels.

When I bought my house, it was a decrepit structure thrown together without permits, probably first in the 1950s, though the earliest county records are from twenty years later. Made mostly of army-surplus plywood, it featured studs that were often placed at an angle no self-respecting builder would tolerate—not perpendicular to the sheetrock but parallel to it. The floors were peeling burgundy linoleum, and the walls lined with that 1970s fake-wood paneling that doesn’t fool anyone, also made of vinyl. The house was so porous, when I first moved in, that black widows and bark scorpions—Centruroides sculpturatus, the only lethal scorpions in North America—had colonized the interior. One of these crawled into my bed while I was sleeping and stung my hand twice, where it lay under my pillow.

Termites and pack rats had taken up residence inside—the latter, at one point, accumulating hundreds of pounds of cholla cactus, ripped-up insulation, random-seeming trash, and of course their feces in the massive nests they built in the walls and crawl space. Western diamondback rattlesnakes lived in holes all along the perimeter, where the dirt met the concrete slab. Still do.

I replaced the roof and raised the ceilings, replaced the linoleum with the Saltillo tile that’s typical of Mexican Sonoran homes. I built an addition onto the house, installed a solar array and solar water heater, gutted the main living space, and cut arched doorways between rooms. Planted native vegetation where the previous owners had left a barren field of dirt surrounding the dwelling and installed a drip system that doesn’t waste too much water for irrigation. I had a pond built, where fish live and lily pads grow and wildlife come to drink. The fish and the lilies are non-native, but since the nearest other water is likely a dog bowl or stock tank a half-mile away, there’s not much chance that they’ll spread.

I’ve never been drawn to the cowboy myth, whose romance of independence belies the fact that livestock operators’ off-road-vehicle-driving lifestyle is neither romantic nor independent. Beef growers have done far-reaching harm to the West, their cattle trampling and polluting rare, precious rivers and streams and driving a range of native plants and animals extinct. And they’re heavily subsidized by taxpayers.

But I do love the solitude that myth evokes—along with many other desert myths, from the ancient holy books on—as a form of meditative communion between the small self and the limitless universe, the finite and the infinite. The music and noise of people and the silent majesty of open country.

And I love old, sad cowboy songs. One of them has been running through my head lately, possibly because my daughter had to memorize a verse of it, translated into Mandarin, to perform with a group on a school trip she made to China last year. The English lyrics, sung by Marty Robbins in the rendition I know, go like this:

From this valley, they say, you are leaving

We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile

For you take with you all of the sunshine

That has brightened our pathway a while.

In my part of Arizona, we’re already seeing changes in seasonal weather patterns that seem to confuse the animals and the plants, bringing them out of hibernation at odd times or into bloom when the right pollinators aren’t around. The summer monsoon, which so many wild things depend on to survive, delivers about two-thirds of southern Arizona’s annual rainfall between July and September. But its storms are growing more frequent and intense, and heavy rainfalls result in less water soaking into the ground—more of it ends up as runoff. At the same time, average daily rainfall appears to be decreasing. So less rain is falling, while more powerful storms are reducing the availability of water to wildlife and people alike.

And the saguaros, like other native species, are suffering. Long-term surveys, conducted by volunteers who’ve been faithfully counting cacti for half a century, show that on the east side of town there aren’t enough young ones rising from the ground. In some places, there’s hardly any new growth. When the old ones die, they’re not being replaced.

Even if it turns out that the towering cacti are not yet in decline, as other observers have argued—here on the west side of town they seem to be doing better—climate change means they’ll be increasingly at risk from man-made conditions made more severe by the rising heat and drought. An African plant called buffelgrass, introduced for cattle to eat, is chief among the villains, since it promotes wildfire in an ecosystem not evolved to regularly burn.

In the future, higher daytime and nighttime temperatures are projected to reduce saguaros’ water-use efficiency, making them more likely to die during drought periods. They can tolerate occasional brief freezes, though they don’t like prolonged subzero spells: in 2011 a catastrophic freeze killed off many older saguaros. The species rarely grows at elevations above four thousand feet.

On the other hand, as freezing temperatures become rarer, saguaros may be at a disadvantage from that side, too—outcompeted by exotic vegetation that fares better when it doesn’t freeze.

I’ve seen several giants die on my land, among them one with dozens of arms that was likely a couple of centuries old. This cactus used to loom over the end of my driveway, near my house, but fell suddenly during the long, hard freeze of 2011. More often they’re killed in another way: a black ooze called bacterial necrosis spreads from one of the bird holes in the cactus, emitting what some call a foul odor. I don’t find it foul, but it’s certainly strong. As the disease spreads, the cactus rots, turns black across large portions of its trunk, and finally collapses—sometimes in segments, dropping one or two arms at a time, and sometimes all at once.

There are other looming threats to the saguaros and the wildness that remain in this valley. Some more imminent, even, than runaway climate change. Among them is a planned freeway bypass that would cut straight through the valley, between the national park on one side and a national monument on the other. A freeway would block animal migrations, kill animals directly, and bring noise pollution and dirtier air and water.

No one in the area wants it—it would be more expensive and far more destructive than simply widening the part of Interstate 10 that already runs through the western part of the city, on the urban side of the Tucson Mountains—but state and federal transportation agencies are pursuing their “preferred alternative” (the ruin of our valley) with dogged perseverance. Despite resounding public opposition.

I’ve lived in this desert long enough to have buried several animals in my yard. A dog, two cats, and one coyote. A small group of stones bears the pets’ names. I used to imagine that I, too, would be able to grow old and die in the place I love most. I don’t wish to die, needless to say, but it once comforted me to think it might happen here. And still does, when I’m feeling hopeful about the future.

I like to believe I won’t have to dwindle into frailty hobbling along a treeless sidewalk in some gray winter in New York, beside garbage cans and parked cars. That instead I may be allowed to grow old in the desert. Maybe even manage to be outside when the moment comes. Slip away under the stars, as the warm wind moves the branches of trees.

Of course, no luxury is greater than being able to choose the manner and place of your own death. And more and more it seems to me I may not be granted that luxury. Because if the desert begins to die too visibly—if I see its native life turn brown, as the drier, hotter seasons pass, and vanish around me—I know I won’t be capable of staying. I know I’ll have to retreat. It would break my heart too slowly to watch the decline of what I hold so dear: a death by a thousand cuts. I’d need to flee, abandoning my home before the worst ravages hit.

A part of me waits to see whether I’ll have to take the coward’s way out. I’d feel a terrible guilt in the act of abandonment. But guilt is more bearable than the pain of loss. So I wait to see whether too many of the giants begin to crumble and collapse onto the sand, their curving arms no longer raised to greet us.

Or whether, through the saving grace of social pressure and political will, a miracle will occur—the one we need to summon to have a chance of staving off the many catastrophic effects of a swiftly changing climate. In my home and far beyond. That will flatten the curve of extinction, slow the destruction of the natural world.

And if, through that grace, the desert will show signs of living on after I’m gone.