Harvest Green

From the journals of Hans Von Biermann

The late rains have awakened the Territory. The washes stir, the ocotillo have leafed, and green covers slopes I remember only as dust and stone.

It will not last.

I have learned not to squander such moments. When the season offers something at its peak, one should not wait.

I have crossed this country often enough to know how quickly it changes its disposition. For months these mountains seemed determined to bake every living thing from their slopes. The washes were little more than pale scars through the stone, and the ocotillo stood bare as switches against the sky.

Then came the storms.

For several nights I watched them gather over the Superstitions, great black clouds piling upon one another until the mountains disappeared behind them. The rain came hard enough to send water rushing through places where I had grown accustomed to walking dry-footed.

What followed seemed the greater wonder.

Within days, the country changed color.

Grasses pushed through ground I would have sworn held nothing but rock. The ocotillo dressed themselves in leaves. The palo verde seemed greener still, and even the mountains carried patches of color where before I remembered only brown earth and burnt stone.

There is an abundance to the Territory that a man might never suspect if he judges it by a single season.

But abundance here is rarely patient.

A prospector learns this lesson quickly enough. A promising vein may disappear into worthless stone. Water found one week may be gone the next. A trail easily followed today can vanish beneath a flood tomorrow. The desert does not concern itself with whether a man has chosen a convenient time to receive what it offers.

Perhaps that is why I have come to admire it.

Elsewhere, men arrange their lives around calendars and clocks. Out here, such instruments are useful only until the Territory decides otherwise. Rain falls when it will. Flowers open when conditions permit. The mountains reveal what they choose, and for precisely as long as they choose to reveal it.

This morning I climbed above the wash and looked back toward the Superstitions.

I scarcely recognized them.

The country before me was green.

Not the endless green I remember from other places, but something more remarkable for its rarity. A green purchased with months of heat and dust, destined from its first appearance to disappear.

I stood there longer than I intended.

There will be time enough for the brown country to return. The washes will empty. The grasses will surrender. The ocotillo will cast off their leaves, and anyone arriving afterward might reasonably doubt what I have written here.

Let them.

I was here when the desert turned green.

And I have learned not to wait until tomorrow to appreciate what the Territory has offered me today.

— Hans Von Biermann

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