After living in a desert for nearly twenty years, I've learned a few survival tips, but this one is the most useful and effective in keeping me alive: follow smart critters north. Long before air conditioning, cheapish hydroelectric power, and couch potatoism, people who inhabited the desert regions of the world were migratory. They followed the smart critters north to cooler climes. When I first moved to the desert, I was told by the man who convinced me to leave the coast (yes love makes you do crazy things) that I would eventually get used to the summer heat. For the sake of love, he lied and, for the sake of love, I believed him. But after a few seasons of triple digit heat, love wasn't enough to maintain this delusion. I started to pay attention to what people who had lived in the desert for generations did in the summer and discovered they were all semi-migratory. Since then I have also become semi-migratory.
In a perfect world, my family and I would close down our desert home in early June and travel north to our cabin in the woods and stay there until August. But we don't have a cabin in the woods. So we rent one for as long as we can afford: four days. The rest of the summer we either look forward to our four-day jaunt or try to hang onto the memory of it. We just returned from our escape from the heat. It's 109 degrees and this is the last time, I hope, that I will ever have to endure the mind-numbing buzz of vuvuzelas as the World Cup final game plays on the television. I'm sweating and trying to hold onto the cool feeling of creek water on my feet, the gurgling sounds of the stream, the calming effect of having green all around me, the presence of butterflies. . .
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