My Facebook page is full of fake news. Seems like many of my friends have been sucked in and accepted some false truths.
No, the fake news I’m thinking of is not about the tin-foil-hat wearing wackos and their search for the child sex-slave camps that supposedly ring the city.
Rather, my FB feed is full of hopeful and even poetic comments welcoming the rain. Yeah, right. It’s not even June 24th — el día de San Juan — which around these parched parts is the traditional start of the summer rainy season. Then again, when was the last time, if ever, that it rained on the feast day of St. John the Baptist?
Bah, humbug. Neither is it Christmas in July.
Sorry to rain on everyone’s parade but it’s too early for the chubascos. I don’t know who coined this term, maybe it could have been Michael Goodrich, the former longtime weather forecaster on Channel 9 who said: “rain in June, no monsoon.”
I say, best the rains commence on the Fourth of July, at least. This would dampen Sentinel Peak and soften the fiery blow delivered by the pyrotechnic show in the annual, sorry spectacle of the burning of the saguaros. Sad.
I’m all right if we endure a hot June. Hey, this is Tucson. The streets are not crowded with vehicles driven by out-of-town university students and winter seasonal residents whom we affectionately call snow birds. Even some Tucsonans flee town for as long as they can to escape the heat. When I lived in San Diego, Zonies from Tucson flocked there, much to the dismay of the locals.
Let’s face it, Tucson in June is not for human snow flakes.
My fear is that if the rains were to come now, the clouds would be wrung dry by late July or early August. Then what? Humid dog days is what we would be left with and no rain.
Or as Ignacio Ibarra, my former Arizona Daily Star colleague who lives in the Bisbee area, wrote on his Facebook page: “Always torn this time of year between calling down the rain and worrying that an early monsoon could mean a crappy monsoon. Desert dilemmas.”
I know non-desert folks don’t understand our fascination, our connection, our deep focus on the summer rains, but if they were to spend just one summer here, they’d come to appreciate our obsession faster than a roadrunner crossing a lonely road. They would come to enjoy and even fall in love with the smell of the wet creosote and damp earth and the symphony of the cicadas filling our nostrils and hearts with the delicious joy of living in this special place, the Sonoran desert.
Growing up I had a different kind of appreciation for this special time of the year. Summer meant staying out on North San Rafael Avenue, near St. Mary’s Hospital, long into the evening with Oscar, Gordo and Michael. Summer meant watching the arroyo behind our house fill with water. Summer meant listening and looking for the sapos, desert toads which magically emerged from their dry subterranean retreats and hollows. Such a racket they made, sounds that I rarely hear nowadays.
The weather patterns are changing. Old-timers insist that the Tucson valley received more rain when they were running around the arroyos than today. Could be true. I haven’t checked the historical rain records. Then again, last July was a gully washer of a month as nearly 7 inches of rain fell that month. The summer monsoon, however, petered out in August, leaving us miserable.
The signs of impending monsoons are growing. The National Weather Service in Tucson posted on its FB page Friday that storms are forming in Santa Cruz and Cochise counties.
And as I write these words, I can see through the newsroom’s narrow windows clouds stacking up toward the south. The air feels a bit humid. The rains are coming.
And with the rains come the cracking of thunder, the brilliant flash of light, the thickness of the desert air. That’s the kind of summer that Tucsonans and Southern Arizonans live for.
Sure my FB friends believe it would be nice, heck more than nice, if the rains were to drench us now. But I can wait.
Because waiting for the rains, anticipating their arrival, guessing when they will come and talking about our favorite memories and expectations of the monsoons, is half of our summer fun.
