Saguaro Mi Amor
Contributor
“How Was It?”
“Look outside the car window,” Tony said as he whipped down what used to be Route 66. He sped in a distinctly German way, the landscape dissolving into a cinematic motion blur. The sky had already purpled. Our flora protagonist—the saguaros—stood across the vast, arid Sonoran Desert, their columnar silhouettes etched against the bleeding sunset. In the distance, massive red-rock ranges rendered them solitary yet elegant sentinels.
Saguaros’s beauty is unique and functional. Their pleated skin expands to store water during the rare desert ritual of rainfall. Their lateral arms create structural variety and height, making the saguaro the architecture of this ecosystem. Woodpeckers carve homes, owls visit their nocturnal flowers, and doves nest in their ribs. Their verticality stands as a monument to desert time.
We often imagine the desert as empty space. In truth, it is humans who fail to perceive its concealed abundance.
We had just departed our advanced studio site—Biosphere 2, the astonishingly absurd relic of 1980s science: Seven miniature biomes coexist in an air-tight vessel: rainforest, coral reef, mangrove wetland, savannah grassland, desert, and two anthropogenic habitats. Eight “biospherians” once lived quarantined for two years, performing a trial run for sustaining human life beyond Earth.
But how egoistic, I thought, for our species to believe that we could reproduce our planetary conditions within this confinement? Our relationship with the land, I realized, has always been delicate: an oscillation between control and reverence.
Tony stepped harder on the pedal. Outside the window, the saguaros returned—they are ubiquitous in this “fertile,” sandy soil. They no longer felt like flora but instead oracles of authenticity—It felt ironic when Biosphere 2 sits in a town called Oracle, Arizona. Do you know a mature saguaro may live 200 years? It will outlast city limits, land treaties, generations of travelers, and scientific frameworks that try to measure its patience. It is rooted and reflective; it grows slowly.