At 4 a.m. the desert wind beguiles me. The stars above scream silent and the coyotes cool their yips, but the wind blows through like a steam engine who’s lost its track. The snake-proof gate squeals open as we pack the midsize rental for Phoenix and a Southwest flight back to our by-the-bay airport. But the wind grinds the desert down, lets loose dust from rock, shakes leaflets from mesquite, flutters plumage on the spotted owl. It whips past the saguaro that’ve stood since the Civil War, the younger ones who’ve stood since Desert Storm.

The battle of Antietam yielded twenty-three thousand Navy blue and English gray souls on September 17th, 1862. On that late summer day, the reddest in U.S. history, the oldest saguaro cactus in the southwest was already a hundred and fifty years old, and would live another hundred and fifty. It plainly ignored the bloodstained zeitgeist and germinated in Mexico, grew tall in the New Mexico Territory, and sprouted fifty-two arms in Arizona.

The sheer volume of cacti in the Sonoran Desert is astounding. The outright tonnage of green flesh that peppers the landscape, staggering. They, like Roman columns in the cracked earth, exist in decades and centennials rather than our days and minutes. The young adults with knobby arms look like mothers cooing their babes while the pubescents take cover under mesquite and brittlebush where they germinated. And the diminutive round ones giving it a go in these badlands, the one or two inchers, they’re already ten years old. A paltry ten years. The commonplace centurions, fifty to a hundred years, easy. They stand sentry while the wool hiking socks bake our feet and sweat dampens our shirts. The desert is where we go to bathe in sweat, cleanse ourselves of the turgid world, like a Navajo sweat lodge or Russian steam bath. Release the toil and toxin that accumulates from our septic institutions.

Saguaro skeletons blink the landscape with their ribs exposed next to cacti pups budding their inaugural arms. Their spines and meaty green stems are given structure by a vertical skeleton. You couldn’t make a coffee table or T.V. stand from their fibrous ribs, but you could certainly kindle a flame, maybe sand one to smoothness for a bookmark.

Late in the day, the desert sunset spreads its sheen and yawns as it goldens the landscape and wrestles awake the crepuscular critters. The songbirds whoop and whir and an antelope jackrabbit slings ahead through the brush, so large you’ll think a fox sprung from the tamarisk. A final roadrunner snips by and the coyotes howl in the early night while the mindless house dogs bark a return into the blackness. And the desert breeze funnels upward a faint balmy aroma, Eau de Prickly Pear.

The Sonoran surely doesn’t care about any living thing, least of all its mammals. It cares only about dust. Reducing all to dust. Rock, cacti, javelina, song bird, all of it. How many saguaros have lived and died out here and leached into the scabrous caliche? It wants to grind us all away, dust unto dust. Though for some reason inexplicable, humans persist undeterred.

The shoulder season, a hotelier turn of phrase, is the only time to visit the southwest at present. Perhaps for the foreseeable future. Maybe the unforeseeable future. That is, the months just out of reach from the shotgun blast of summer. The heat is unsteadily becoming more inhumane. The local newscasts show their homeless seeking water and what little shade is to be found next to some downtown monolith. But no one seems to bother with the whys of the thermal blast. The newscasters simply frown, then move on to the Powerball winner and local Lions Club barbeque. We are garrulous about the heat, yet not its root.

No matter, I suppose the hard questions are best left to the dark crevasses of repression. Who wants to think about the cinders of the natural world when the Cardinals are playing the Falcons at home in their pigskin cathedral this Sunday.

A timber forest in Rainier may be crisp and lush, but the desert reveals the true measure of a creature. Every wayfarer who treks a day in Yellowstone or Yosemite or Glacier should require a day in Saguaro and experience the rugged difference, the thirsty heat, the deft landscape. For every talus peak, a spindle of cholla cactus, for every high mountain brook, a dry wash.

A few miles away in the arid metropolis, humans have descended into modern madness, bulldozing every horizon and overpowering every luddite. But in these wastelands, out here still the quiet takes hold in the dark, the stars flame above, the coyotes yip and stammer, drunk from the evening redness, and the desert is as calm and resplendent as the day it was formed. The humans may be on their way out so the exhausted land lies in wait for when it will again be silent and chaste and free of foolishness.

Thoughts of Ed Abbey, buried someplace out here, likely a bit south, dance in my head as do a deluge of rattlesnake fever dreams. The decaying cacti look like coyote blew them to smithereens with an Acme rocket just as roadrunner made a quick escape.

In fact, Abbey is in every saguaro, a thorn in the eye of whomever may look past the silent splendor of the parched wilderness, to anyone who may think a coiled rattler is somehow less than a bugling elk. Abbey was, probably still is, the Lincoln of the west, the William Tecumseh Sherman of the wilderness, administering scorched earth on the rubes in Washington making decisions about land they’d never seen and earth they’d never touch.

When Lincoln was addressing Gettysburg, many of these barrel-chested saguaros were in their cacti cradle on the way to becoming behemoths. Long before humans took breath, the flora began sprouting thorns and spines to keep critters from eating away at their flesh. Brush up against one and this season’s trendiest REI joggers will be woefully thorn-punctured. Whisk the spurred shoots away carefully, or transport them a few dozen feet down the trail where they’ll release, germinate, and grow for the next hundred years—the assured intention of the non-sentient saguaro.

Just as the bodies that fell at Antietam have long turned to ash, the ancient cacti have duly turned to dust. The soil digests the ribs of each saguaro and the hardpan lets loose the next generation of ribbed Cactaceae. Each its own character, some many decades and centuries old, reaching back to when we took up arms against our brothers and they reached up arms to the blue desert sky.

Likely the saguaros have the same ennui as humans at present, at least myself at present. They peer down and echo T.S. Eliot’s “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” They see the waste land that we cannot, the one waiting for our return, the star dust of which we began and the earth dust where we end.

For now though, the sun is taking its set and animates the cooling desert. Each creature chases the light as it abides and surrenders to eventide. Will the southwest still be here the next time it beckons me, or will Arizona Bay be the launch point for a kayak or fleet of cruise ships to the swelling Pacific Ocean? Perhaps a trilobite or tortoiseshell fossil will turn up in the Sonoran Desert ten million years after the seas have risen then subsided and revealed an ancient desert of spindly verdure in the caliche earth.