Statues of Horses Seen from the Sky ~ creative nonfiction by Karen Chaffee

I see a land that looks like another world. There is agave and saguaro cactus and desert marigold, all of it brown and gold and dripping silver. The silver is the sun’s light and it bathes a city, pooling like water on waterless highways and dripping from statues of horses that have roamed the world. Seen from the sky, car windows blaze, swimming pools blind, the gourds are painted to look like quail; the plane is descending, the desert ground rushes up.

The passenger from New Jersey lands wearing a winter coat.

In the airport, people wearing saris and baseball caps and business suits part to let the New Jersey traveler by. They smile from behind their sunglasses and point the way to the ladies room. The New Jersey traveler hadn’t bargained for the terminal’s air conditioning. She fled a cold predawn; she lives for heat. She finds a sweatshirt for 39 dollars that says PHOENIX. Wearing her sweatshirt, holding her coat, she pulls her suitcase to the street. Jeep Cherokees and Chevy Silverados blaze under the sun.

A century ago, the groundwater under Phoenix, part of the Salt River Valley aquifer, reached only feet below the land surface. The groundwater is considerably more feet below surface now. It is an era of innovation in a dry land. Homeowners eschew green lawn for the haunting elegance of native cactus. This practice has a lovely name, xeriscaping. Golf courses cannot be xeriscaped, so communities divert treated wastewater to greens and fairways via sprinklers and drip irrigation. Golfers continue their game.

That night, seven people who have roamed the world eat dinner together for the first time ever. They are first cousins. They have pictures of a bearded man none of them have ever seen, a man who, believing that his new bride would inherit land, jumped feet first into matrimony. He was wrong about the land. Bride in tow, he left eastern Europe for America, sired four children and eleven grandchildren, seven of the grandchildren now adults and sitting around this table, one of them explaining that the silver-dripping cactus outside his house grows for 150 years, is 40 feet tall and has bundles of fibrous wood inside. The New Jersey traveler listens; she lives for science. The cactus, she learns, cannot be removed even when the woody skeleton fails because of HOA rules stricter than Arizona law. It is the champion of cactuses. How far these first cousins have roamed, these grandchildren of the bearded man and his in-actuality impoverished bride, whom he soon deserts, obliging her to fend for herself, to manage a boarding house in Manville, NJ, to make salted cabbage, hand-cut noodles and sugary sweet wine, and raise the four children, who in turn raise families of their own. Now the children’s children have come from all over the United States to have dinner together for the first time ever.

III

A continent away, near a dipper-shaped water in New York City called the Jamaica Bay, the New Jersey traveler’s car waits in an airport parking lot. Across the bay in the Rockaways, Queens, water floods the streets on sunny days, beckoned there by the moon, or, more scientifically, its gravity. This is called Tidal Flooding and it occurs more frequently in recent years because of rising sea levels. Twice a month the moon swings in alignment with Sun and Earth, joining its gravity with the Sun’s, lifting these waters above their normal bounds. The ancients coined a word for such mischief of a capricious moon: lunaticus. Lunaticus that water stands feet deep in city streets. The times are lunaticus. Residents brave their stoops to gaze down, heads shaking. Children are delighted.

The first cousins return to their far-flung homes. In real life, they are software developers, shipping executives, writers of books about animals, owners of lakes, teachers of children, teachers of chemistry, and mothers of famous baseball players. They are the champions of first cousins. Through the decades, they shared a history they didn’t realize they shared, of Ukrainian eggs and sweet paska, of halushki and lamb-sculpted butter. Now they share memories of a house surrounded by cactus and red mountains in a brown and gold and silver-dripping land.