Graduation and the Sonoran Desert

“Why do you live here?” I blurted, my legs feeling like noodles from the intense heat.
“I ask myself that question every day,” Shannon, Ted’s niece, admitted as we walked toward the huge horse arena where her son’s graduation would take place at seven p.m.
“It took me three years to adjust to the heat, but we still stay inside when it’s the worst.”
“We live here for work,” her husband answered, “but honestly I don’t mind the dry heat after growing up in Canada.”
I’d grown up in humid climate, too, so I nodded and took Ted’s hand as we moved in the stream of people headed for the arena.
Earlier that day, we’d traveled to Queens Creek, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, where the sun had nuked my brain and body, making it hard to think or walk. It was 108, and cool, our hosts assured us, compared to the scorching temps later in the summer.
Finally, we reached the arena. Although open on all sides, it had a roof with huge fans rotating and cooling the air.
Emerson, our redheaded grand-nephew, would soon walk up on stage and receive his diploma after years of hard work at the Queens Creek American Leadership Academy (ALA), a charter school with high standards and a mission to develop leaders.
Reaching this point in his life hadn’t been easy because Emerson and his little sister were born profoundly deaf. Emerson had cochlear implant surgery when he was three, his sister when she was one.
“Most people don’t know what we’ve gone through,” Shannon told us as we settled on the benches, “not just from the surgeries, but from upgrading and maintaining the implants over the years. It’s been expensive.”
Later I learned that cochlear implants transmit sounds past the damaged part of the ear to the cochlear nerve which sends the signals to the brain to interpret as sounds.
According to the Mayo Clinic, “These sounds are like natural hearing, but not quite the same. It takes time and training to learn to hear the signals from a cochlear implant as words.”
Although it might be just a personality difference, Emerson’s 15-year-old sister is vivacious and talkative, her long red hair hiding the external devices while Emerson has little to say.
His short hair, part of the ALA’s dress code, doesn’t cover the transmitter held by a magnet above his ear, the speech processor curved around his ear like a hearing aid, or the microphone.
As a three-year-old, he’d been learning sign language when he had surgery, so his emergence into the world of sound must have been disorienting.
With an hour to go before graduation, we watched as a dark brown horse, ridden by a beautiful girl, pranced around the back of the arena. The aroma of horses wafted around us as the stands filled with the graduates’ families and friends.
At seven p.m., mostly out of rhythm with “Pomp and Circumstance,” the graduates filed in two by two, often with the boys outpacing their female partners in high heels. Once they sat down, the ceremonies began.
After the last diploma had been awarded and the last photo snapped, the graduates marched out and waited for their families in what seemed to be a large, clean paddock.
Emerson wore a lei made out of one dollar bills and had already counted all that had come in his cards, around $500, nicely supplementing his McDonald wages.
He planned to buy a used car and go on a mission, his parents and grandma hoping it would be one that used his sign language skills.
The next morning, after we breakfasted with the family, Shannon said, “You need to visit us when it’s beautiful here, in the fall and spring.”
We agreed, hugged everyone, and wished the graduate the best of luck. Then, with our Jeep’s air condition working only in temperatures 80 degrees or less, we headed for higher, cooler ground.
On the way, we drove through forests of saguaro cacti with delicate white flowers blossoming on the tops of their crowns and arms and even on their torsos. Those resilient cacti survive and even thrive in one of the harshest environments on earth, many living 150 years or more.
Their beautiful blossoms open at dusk and close midafternoon. The flowers and resulting crimson fruit provide food for birds, bats, insects, animals, and humans.
We drove off the highway onto a rough dirt road to photograph the magnificent plants. I stayed in the Jeep, but Ted traipsed across the spine-filled landscape for close-ups of the flowers.
While I waited, I listened to the desert sounds: The faint calls of unknown birds, some of which had probably pecked holes in the saguaro for nests, pollen-drunken bees, and a blessed breeze that cooled my sweaty head.
Each sound entered my ear canals and traveled through the intricate, internal labyrinths to the cochlea which transmitted the signals to my brain for interpretation, a miracle, one I hadn’t appreciated before this weekend.
Ted strode back to the Jeep, pausing to pick small cacti off his jeans, and then we drove back to the highway.
Once we climbed to about 5,000 feet, the saguaro disappeared, and the air grew more tolerable, but I couldn’t help thinking about Emerson and his sister with their cochlear implants, blossoming in a desert climate, learning resilience and strength from the challenges they faced.