Phoenix Rising
Trigger Warning: If you or someone you love likes or is from Phoenix, Arizona, you should skip this piece.
This post is a series.
If you haven’t read the night before Sam left and part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5, I suggest you start there. 🫶
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We pull into a Target. The palm trees are taller than all the buildings. Not that the buildings are very tall here. So far, they are low, no more than two stories high. The memories of my NYC skyscrapers morph into a mirage, the warbled haze of the desert.
Personally, I’m a four-story city girl or higher. Over the years, I realized places that had buildings roughly at four-stories high are where I feel most comfortable. They need to be roughly the same height as the trees as my childhood backyard. I need height. I need closure. I don’t like the feeling of being too exposed and out in the open. Look, we all have our particulars.
The entrance to Target is lined with trimmed red bougainvillea bushes.
The sun is so bright, and I feel numb.
A dream state.
I can’t believe we are here.
I can’t believe I am here.
This isn’t real this isn’t real this isn’t real this isn’t real this isn’t real this isn’t real
I take one step in front of the other. Sam and I enter.
Target wipes away any sense of location. For once, I am grateful for the copy/paste architecture of big box consumerism. I can focus.
I’m not in Phoenix, Arizona. I’m in anywhere/everywhere America.
I’m in Albany. I’m in Atlanta. I’m definitely not in the desert city where I am going to leave my husband.
I start to play pretend. My talent for disassociation is at an all time high.
It’s a short lived delusion.
Because what brings me back down is when Sam starts collecting items that we already have back in Brooklyn.
Why is he getting more stuff?
Why does he need it?
Why does he have to be here?
I feel dizzy.
How am I supposed to just put on a brave face?
How am I supposed to be excited for him?
My thoughts start looping around in a circle, etching in a mental road that I will travel down over and over again, grooving them, making them deeper and smoother to race down faster.
Like a record player, my thoughts keep circling circling circling
How did this happen?
Why did this happen?
Why are we doing this?
Does he have to leave?
Do I have to go home without him?
Should I stay?
Am I bad for leaving?
How how how how?
Why why why why why?
I can’t totally remember how, but we somehow end up in conversation with the Target cashier. What starts as the usual pleasantries turns into a rambling, half-assed therapy session.
By the time he starts putting our items into bags, Sam and I have fully gushed about our situation in a record four minutes.
...Long distance...
.....I’m in Brooklyn....
......Starting new jobs....
....getting married.....??????
Maybe the attendant could see we were both dazed and confused and caught in the headlights of our decision as the words mindlessly tumbled out of our mouths.
The attendant makes the surprised face with the half step back that I would get accustomed to.
He looks down as he places kitchen utensils into a bag and just says,
“I believe in you guys,”
as he hands us our final bag.
I sigh. That ISN’T what I want to hear. I want him to give me an answer to this problem. I want him to offer Sam a job back in New York. I want a SOLUTION---not fucking hope.
Look, I was three words away from becoming hysterical. I shouldn’t have been talking to anyone without a mediator. I was resisting the strong urge to sit down in the shoe aisle, grab my knees, and rock back and forth.
I should not have trauma dumped on this poor Target employee, who was just trying to get through his shift, but I did. Sam and I were both out of our depths. I didn’t have a therapist or a breath or a coping mechanism or a sedative strong enough to handle and process what we were about to do.
Every cell in my body was rattling with fear.
He should have handed us a receipt for the items and an invoice for a therapy session.
I make a face that lands somewhere between a sneer and sadness.
“Thank you and have a nice day,” I say, as I grab the bags, and we exit.
We step back outside, and the heat is actually really nice.
Wow 86 degrees on a March afternoon. Wild.
But the heat here is a false friend.
Because in Phoenix, Arizona, it will try to kill you.
Here is a small list of synonyms for the desert:
barren,
uncultivated,
desolate,
lonely,
arid,
solitary.
Who looks at this list and thinks, “Sounds like a great place to start a family,”???
The desert is deceptive. It plays tricks on you. It lulls you into a heat stupor, dehydrates you, and makes you hallucinate. Anything that has tried to survive here has evolved to have a hard, prickly exterior.
Let me start with the low-level threats. Arizona is home to the most venomous animals in the continental US. There are 14 different kinds of poisonous snakes alone. Bobcats and coyotes have been seen prowling suburban rooftops and the streets of Scottsdale. There is a spider called the tarantula hawk. Imo, combining two predator names into one is enough to get the point across. Also, did I mention the killer bees?
The animals that live in the desert have adapted to the extreme heat over centuries. They don’t go out during the day. Instead, they burrow and come out at night. They have learned how to survive with minimal water and can endure longer times of drought.
That’s before I even get to the heat.
The region has always been hot. It is a valley surrounded by low level mountains, which traps the heat. The air here is dry, which heats faster than moist air and makes it hard for rain clouds to form. So the dry air keeps the soil dry and the scorched cycle continues. I’m getting parched just thinking about this.
There are accounts that 1900s Arizonians did not mind the heat until it got humid. Apparently, locals claim that they enjoyed the 100 degree fourth of July celebration.
I can’t help but wonder if the part of their brains that senses heat had long been fried off???
June 26th, 1990 was the hottest recorded day in Phoenix. Only five days into summer, it reached 122 degrees. That’s hot enough to fry an egg, cook a steak sous vide, or decompose a body in a matter of days.
And THAT’S before we even get to the CLIMATE CHANGE of it all.
Today, the population boom and endless suburban sprawl has lined the desert ground with concrete, steel, and asphalt. Our modern structures trap the heat, and as one publication put it, “results in a thermal dome extending vertically above the city.”
That’s like wearing a wool beanie at noon in August. If a heat dome isn’t a freaky enough term, you can also choose to call it a heat island. Pick your poison.
The heat trapped in a vertical dome prevents the city from cooling at night. That’s why during peak summer, you can walk out at 10pm, and it’s still 105 degrees. High temperatures at night mess with our circadian rhythms. It’s important for the body to cool as we try to sleep. From the end of April to early September, it’s physically impossible to walk around for any more than three minutes.
“Oh but it’s a dry heat,” people say, “It’s not like the humidity back on the East Coast. It can’t be that bad?”
It’s called dry heat because the SWEAT OFF YOUR BODY EVAPORATES TOO FAST TO STICK TO YOU. That makes it harder for you to gauge how dehydrated you are and increases your chances of a sun-related illness.
And sure, summers in New England can be sticky and hot, but we have those 4pm thunderstorms that boil up and break the humidity. I live for those summer thunderstorms.
Despite the brutal heat dome and killer bees, five million people have rocked up, spread out, and spawned– burrowing deeper into the desert sand like a scorpion.
People and cooperations have been lured to Phoenix with the promise of affordable housing, winters without snow, and tax breaks. This population boom could have only happened because of one singular technology: air conditioning.
PHX owes its entire modern existence to AC.
Do not get me wrong. I love AC like every other red-blooded human.
I have dipped into many an H&M on a hot summer day just to cool off.
However, global warming is exacerbating this naturally hot locale and is reinforcing its crippling dependence on air conditioning.
The AC unit became accessible to the average American family in the 1950s and 60s. That correlates with a major population boom as thousands of Americans began to find respite in the desert. This turned sleepy little Phoenix into one of the most populated cities in America in just a quick 50 years.
In 2024, there were 100 consecutive days of over 100 degrees. Air conditioning is not a luxury here. Here, it is part of the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and Phoenicians cannot survive without it.
Phoenix spends more money on AC than the average American, nearly three times as much, accounting for 60-70% of their electricity bill.
(I understand that the heat costs in winter climates is just as bad as AC, but PLEASE let me rag on it for a moment. I am very aware I have rage colored glasses on).
We expanded into a climate that was once unlivable but is making the rest of the world also continuously unlivable... as the AC burns fossil fuels and adds more CO2 into the atmosphere, making the world...hotter….which makes everyone want to blast the AC even more.
Sure, the winters are nice, but it’s not like you have escaped the seasonal depression. It is so hot outside from April to September that people STILL get vitamin D deficiency BECAUSE they can’t go outside.
Before AC, people would sleep outside during the hottest days, under wet sheets, exposed to the wilds of the desert: scorpions, snakes, call in any of the deadly animals mentioned above. I am bewildered by the arrogant impulse to tame the desert.
Today, people scuttle from their air conditioned houses to their air conditioned cars to an air conditioned office/mall/gym/friend’s house back and forth back and forth for months. It could be 112 outside, but you never feel anything more than the cool manufactured breeze of 73 degrees all summer long.
If the AC of every home, establishment, and car quit in the middle of July, five million people would become more burnt than toast.
WAIT I HAVEN’T EVEN MENTIONED THE WATER PROBLEM. Apparently, back in the 1920s, there was a gathering of all of the states that pulled water from the Colorado River (who is best known for her work on the Grand Canyon). I’m talking about Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and California representatives. They decided how much water each state should be pulling from the river.
What they decided on wasn’t too bad, given the small populations of the wild west. Unbeknownst to them, it is now believed that the year they happened to make this decision was a rainier year than normal. So the water levels were uncharacteristically high. Local officials continued to draw water from the Colorado River at the agreed upon rate despite the population boom of the west over the last 100 years. And they STILL haven’t fully fixed the problem. ( I have heard that Phoenix is very good at recycling its water, but the Colorado River is still in crisis).
The rattle-snake is eating its own tail and will soon choke.
Did I mention Phoenix is now the fifth largest city in America. This whole population, built on poor data and hubris, is sitting quietly in the center of hell, hands folded, thinking it’s fine.
In the desert, death is always leaning against an organ cactus, filing his nails, just WAITING for someone to come through and step on a scorpion.
Everything about the desert is designed to make you insane. Or at least it was starting to make me go crazy because...this is where I’m leaving my husband?
I didn’t know any of this when we drove on that unlucky March day, but I knew in my gut this was not it for me.
I knew I didn’t want to leave Sam.
I knew this was not what I wanted our life to look like.
Good god we are here...this is really happening
THIS is where he was to survive without me...with his Polish/Russian/Scottish genes?!? No way, man.
My husband loves sports coats. His favorite item of clothing is either his leather jacket or his big, comfy robe and slippers.
He is 6’1’’ and runs hot. He sleeps with only a sheet on, even in the arctic cold New York winters. He proudly falls under the category of “fall girlie”.
He is someone who already needs frequent reminders to put on sunscreen AND drink water. AND I WAS SUPPOSED TO LEAVE HIM HERE??? Summer is just around the corner!
Look, I know that there are people who love it here– who manifested their destiny and settled down and stretched out amongst the saguaros and juniper bushes.
I love that for them. I’m glad they have made a home out of such extreme conditions.
I AM NOT ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE.
I REFUSED to be someone who just accepts this random roll of the dice.
I belong in the shade of forests or tall skyscrapers...a world I would be returning to in 48 hours. Because the final minutes of our road trip adventure were starting to come to a close.
Love it- excited for the next instalment!