Even in the mostly cement courtyard between two cement buildings, I can smell the
the unmistakeable scent of desert after rain. It got me thinking of how Nature
occasionally likes to show she's bigger than us.
I could not live in this desert without air conditioning in summer; I think I'd be
a miserable invalid four months of the year, or maybe just nocturnal. A lot of
others couldn't live in colder climates without at least the primitive heat
technology of a fireplace. Yet every so often the power goes out and we're shown
graphically that our technology hammock is not indestructible.
Nature intervenes in kinder ways too. With all the regimented timing of modern
life a lot of us still wake up earlier in summer when it's light earlier. People
in the far north and south get depressed or go into nesting mode in the winter
months. Even the routine drive to work gets changed by things I can't control:
light, wind, rain.
Last Saturday Rudder had the brilliant idea of taking the tour of apprentice
shelters at
href="http://www.franklloydwright.org/index.cfm?section=tour&action=taliesinwest">
Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's home and school. These are where Taliesin
students live while working on Masters degrees in architecture. First year
students are required to live in big individual canvas tents that they put up each
year on permanent bases. Each tent has a mattress with blankets and pillows and
not a lot else. (Clothes and possession are kept in closets in the apprentices'
locker rooms.) More advanced students live in shelters which they build or rebuild
themselves. A few of these are entirely enclosed, though even those aren't
terribly well sealed. Others consist of walls and roofs, not necessarily coming
together on all sides. One s a hanging tent, supported on suspension cables at the
end of a cantilevered bridge. They're out in the desert, separated enough that the
openness isn't a privacy problem. The idea is that the students live on and with
the land and come to know it so that their plans will growing from the land
itself. (It's worth noting that they pack up and go to Wisconsin when it gets hot
here, as Frank Lloyd Wright himself did every year.)
The thing that struck me most was the smell of the desert. The clean-washed-dust
smell is noticeable everywhere in the valley after rain, but out at Taliesin I
smelled sagebrush and palo verde and a whole range of scents. I don't know how I'd
like living in an open shelter for a season, but it would be fun to try. It seems
so far removed from life in my tiled house and fluorescent-lit office, shuttling
between them on a paved highway. Meanwhile, I'm just glad that Nature is too big
to let us shut out the smell of desert after rain.