I have heard of a man who invariably begins his letters, whether of friendship or business, with a bulletin of the day’s weather: it rains, or it shines; it is cold or warm; and to my way of thinking it is far from certain that the custom is not commendable. It is fair to sender and receiver alike that the mental conditions under which an epistle is written should be understood; and there is no man—or no ordinary man, such as most of us have the happiness to deal with—whose thoughts and language are not more or less colored by those skyey influences the sum of which we designate by the interrogative name of weather. I say “interrogative,” because I assume, although, having no dictionary by me, I cannot verify the assumption, that the word “weather” is only a corruption or variant of the older word “whether;” the thing itself being an entity so variable and doubtful that remarks about it fall naturally, and almost of necessity, into a discussion of probabilities, in other words, of “whether.”
As to the weather here in Tucson, I could fill all my letters with it, and still leave a world of things unsaid. Its fluctuations are so constant that they tend to become monotonous; as Thoreau said of one of his Concord days, that it was so wet you might almost call it dry.
Three or four mornings ago, for example, I started early for a seven-mile tramp across the desert. I wore overcoat and woolen gloves, and needed them. It was so cool, indeed, that I left word for an extra garment to be put into the carriage that was to come out and fetch me back at noon.
That same afternoon I walked down into the valley of the Santa Cruz. The sun was blazing, and the heat intense. The few cottonwood trees scattered along the road were still leafless (I had left my umbrella at home—for the last time) and the only shelter to be found was on the northeasterly side of the telegraph poles. I believe I never before complained of such obstructions that they were not big enough; but everything comes round in its turn. My thoughts ran back to the time when a boy of my acquaintance used to trudge homeward from berry-picking excursions on burning July noons. Also I thought of that comfortable Hebrew text about the “shadow of a great rock in a weary land.” The man who wrote that might have lived in Arizona. Finally, out of sheer desperation, I stepped into the yard of a little adobe house, and being obliged to walk almost to the door, said to the motherly-looking woman who came forward to see what was wanted, “Excuse me, please, but I only wish to stand a few minutes in the shade of your house.” She looked surprised, as well she might. No doubt she took me for an invalid, as Arizona people say, a “lunger.” Probably, sitting indoors, and used to summer temperature in these parts, she had been thinking of the day as rather cool, not to say wintry. Wouldn’t I come in and sit awhile? She was sure I should be welcome. But I answered no; I only desired to stand a few minutes in the shade. And two or three hours afterward, within five minutes after the sun went down,—though it had been shining in at my west window,—I needed a fire.
Forty-eight hours later we had a snowfall,—the third within ten days,—the whole world white, with “storm rubbers” barely equal to the emergency; and the next morning, the snow having gone, ice was thick in a big tub of water outside my door.
“Cold?” said an Illinois gentleman, with whom I fell into conversation yesterday, “I’ve been here three weeks, and in that time I’ve suffered more from cold than in all my forty years.”
I suspect that he exaggerated. For my own part, I haven’t suffered from cold. It is the occasional heat that makes me fearful of homesickness. Three days like that one afternoon would set me packing. All of which may seem not very important to a chance reader; but unless he is of a hopelessly unimaginative turn he can perhaps conceive how interesting and important it must be to the parties directly concerned, especially if he remembers that this is a winter resort, where weather is the one thing needful.
But what a perfect afternoon we had yesterday!—cool, yet not too cool; and warm, yet not too warm; with a softness and yet a gently bracing, uplifting, pulse-quickening, life-reviving quality in the air; and the sky, too, clear, but not too clear, so that wisps of cloud floated here and there over the bare, steep sides of the Santa Catalinas, giving them beauty. I was out upon the desert in a mood of absolute indolence, contented to walk a mile an hour, and breathe and breathe, and look. At such times it seems hardly too much to say, strange as the words may sound, that I am falling in love with the desert, a desert bounded only by mountains. Already I can believe that men are fascinated by it (the right men), and having once been here cannot long stay away.
Looking and dreaming, the bird-gazer within me pretty well laid asleep, suddenly I heard a strange voice in the air, thin, insect-like, unknown. By the time it had sounded twice the sleeper was wide-awake, with his opera-glass in play. The voice came from yonder thin clump of creosote bushes. Yes, the bird flits into sight—a gnatcatcher; and being a gnatcatcher, with such a note, it must be “the other one,” known as the plumbeous, which I have been looking for ever since my arrival in Tucson. And so it was—a pretty creature with a jaunty black cap. I shall know him henceforth, I hope, even without seeing him. We are fortunate, both of us, I take leave to say, to have made each other’s acquaintance on so ideal an afternoon.
The gnatcatcher disappeared, and the dreamer was just dozing off again, when two large birds were seen to be having a hot encounter, high overhead. This time the field-glass came into requisition. A raven was teasing a red-tailed hawk, with all a raven’s pertinacity and spite. Again and again and again he swooped upon him, while the hawk ducked and turned to avoid the stroke. Why the big fellow, biggest of all our hawks, larger and stronger in every way than the raven, did not face his tormentor and lay him out was a mystery. I confess, I should have been glad to see him do it. Instead, he made off toward the mountains, and after a long chase and much croaking, the raven turned away.