I recently caught up with a young friend who had just returned from an extended stay on the Oahu Island of Hawaii.  When I asked how he found our Sanpete Valley after three months in such a lush, tropical setting, he answered me with a single word… “Brown.”

I understood.  Having lived in the verdant city of Seattle for 30 years, coming back to my native state of Utah was a decided trading of vibrant greens for muted earth-tones.

We live in a desert after all.  Ours is not one of those places where rain falls on more days of the year than it doesn’t.

A Hopi friend tells me that the Water God leaves this place dry on purpose. I would say that this arid land is all part of Mother Nature’s grand and splendidly varied design.

Because, if “Variety is the spice of life,” then it is also an integral part of the glory and wonder of our physical world.

My wife and I used to love to go romping through those luxuriantly overgrown rainforests of the Pacific Northwest; but nowadays we are equally taken with our warmer saunters through the stark and barren beauty of this area’s seemingly endless red-rock landscapes.

We live in a desert, which is perhaps not everybody’s desired place, but it is singularly and severely unique.

In Seattle, rain could sometimes become tedious, simply because it fell so frequently.

Not so in this high desert place we call home.  Here, every storm is a blessing.

There were days, during the extreme heat and drought of the past summer, when rain seemed so improbable that a single drop of water from a stingy sky would’ve been a miracle.

Seeking a respite from the heat of a sweltering afternoon, I pedaled my bike up a canyon road to a favorite swimming-hole last July, only to find it had become a muddy bog.  I coasted forlornly back home, turning the garden-hose over my head, while cynically pronouncing to my wife that it would never rain again, and thus we all were inevitably doomed to dying a slow death of dehydrating agony. (After that gloomy prophecy, I was left to wonder why she and our car were both conspicuously absent for the rest of that day.)

My moody mid-summer prediction has been contradicted multiple times since I uttered it, by a number of recent cloudbursts, all so refreshingly welcome that one is inclined to stand outside with arms outstretched and mouth wide open, hoping to literally drink from the sky!

I stood in the doorframe of our old barn during one of these recent downpours, laughing giddily, as fat raindrops pelted like sweet music upon the barn’s metal roof. And I sent up silent prayers of thanks to my Hopi friend’s Water God, and to my own God, for such a precious and precipitous gift—a thing I never once did during any of those ubiquitous Seattle rainstorms.

(And I’m happy to report that these recent thunderstorms have replenished my local swimming-hole, into which I gleefully flung myself only yesterday.)

Craig Childs, in his “Essays from Dry Places,” writes of our Utah desert: “Rain I welcome, but I like the dry, too. It is a desert after all.”

I get that.  If the Hopi Water God has deliberately left this area dry, I can understand why.

If it rained two out of three days here, as it does in greener places like Hawaii or Seattle, it would not be the singular geographic wonderland that it is, and quite unlike any other place on earth.

I’ve learned to embrace the heat and the dry of our high mountain desert, but I definitely welcome the rain when it finally comes; because it is an event, a thing to be celebrated and reveled in, and a cause for rejoicing and thanksgiving; a time for standing outside, open-mouthed, trying to drink from the sky.

Edward Abbey, in his book, “Desert Solitaire,” muses upon “…the perfume of sagebrush after rain,” which is a perfume we all recognize, and have smelled very recently.

I regret my rash and angry prophecy on a blazingly hot day in July. We desert dwellers are not forsaken.  The rains will come again, perfuming our valley, and refreshing our soil and our spirits.

And, when they come, perhaps you will stand outside with me, with outstretched arms and mouth wide open!

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