sound, v. To resound; to cause to make a sound;
to sink in, penetrate, pierce; to make inquiry
or investigation; to understand, to fathom.
Oxford English Dictionary
el vestigio del agua en la oquedad sonora
Neruda
It’s possible that the plant life of Tucson belongs to its tone in a way that its built life does not. Driving down from Phoenix on I-10, I stare at the unfamiliar flowers and saguaro cactuses that dot the side of the highway – unavoidable signs that I am a stranger here. But the city is full of places I already know: Target, Cracker Barrel, Dillards, Dairy Queen. These things aren’t part of Tucson, any more than they are part of Omaha, or Minneapolis, or Madison.
It is a truism about Tucson (if not exactly true) that no one here is from here; people are pouring in from all over the country, and together with Phoenix, it’s one of the fastest-growing cities in America. Cultivated palm trees rise grotesquely in front of the strip malls to identify our location as, roughly, tropical. The whole city seems to be perpetrating an ongoing, casual violence on the desert that cradles it.
*
Tucson is spread across a flat basin of land surrounded by mountains on four sides: the Catalinas, the Tucsons, the Santa Ritas, the Rincons. It sits in the northeastern part of the Sonoran Desert, which itself stretches from central Arizona in the north down through the Mexican state of Sonora in the south. The desert, like the people who have lived in it for hundreds of years, doesn’t recognize the border.
The word sonora means sonorous in Spanish. Some – probably fanciful – etymologies derive the desert’s name from this. The official tourism website of the Mexican government traces the word, instead, to the Opata word Xunuta, which it translates as “place of corn.”
I leave the grid of Tucson streets and head out toward the desert hoping to hear something real there; but to begin with the sound of the Sonoran Desert, even with the sound of its own name, is to begin with uncertainty. What resonates in that word, other than resonance itself? The echo, sonora, of another, more absent word, its language and speakers utterly unknown to me? There’s a dissonance, too, in that shift – Xunuta, Sonora.
I walk into the desert sun and don’t know what I’m hearing. I can’t recognize the calls of the birds and insects that surround me. They make a racket, hiding in the shade of the mesquite trees, sending each other messages I can’t intercept. Not: the sound of robins. Not: the sound of water.
But not, either, the silence I somehow had expected to prevail in such fierce light. After straining my ears for days trying to hear the desert, I finally realize that the problem isn’t whether its voice is audible, but whether I can attune myself to that voice. The desert is going about its business; it’s I who can’t find the frequency.
*
Staying in the mostly Anglo parts of town, I hear less Spanish on the streets of this city, just a few miles north of Mexico, than I hear in Madison. I know how little of Tucson I really know. I know that, if I see nothing but surface here, that is also because I am existing on the surface myself. The city, too, has other frequencies.
*
At the Tucson Museum of Art, the Arizona Biennial is on. The photographer Karen Strom has juxtaposed sliced-up photos of a Montrose, Colorado brick schoolhouse – built at the beginning of the twentieth century – with those of a great slab of sandstone in Arches National Park. The tone here is: gray on gray. “The Western landscape is always changing,” says her artist statement, “but its human overlay is changing faster.”
Another artist, William White, offers a photograph of an anonymous building in ruins, mountains rising steadily behind it. The landscape may yet have the final word.
*
There is a painting at the museum by Vernon Fisher, not part of the Biennial, called “Inscribing the World With Water.”
I come to realize, slowly, that even Tucson is inscribed with water – but the inscription remains invisible until the water vanishes. The city is crisscrossed by dry gullies or “washes,” riverbeds waiting for their rivers. Once or twice a year, it rains hard enough to fill the washes; briefly, Tucson is transformed. In other months, the dried-up ground fills with plants that thrive in the emptiness left by the water’s departure, holding a place for it until it returns.
The names of the plants that grow in this earth ring in my ears: ocatillo, mesquite, palo verde, saguaro. When I leave Arizona, I take with me two tiny cactuses, a book of poems, and a bottle of Sonoran desert honey, produced from the brief springtime flowering of these strange plants, so in love with the sun.
What I have still to learn: how to listen for the vestigio, the trace, the sound of what is not here.
