In college, I had a summer job digging holes in the middle of the desert. Technically, some of the holes were in the Colorado Shrub Steppe and the Great Plains Short-Grass Prairie, but it all felt like desert to me. Ostensibly the job was for scientific purposes, studying the effects of changing rainfall patterns on the flora of different terrains, although my involvement was largely menial. In addition to digging I sometimes measured things, carried things, counted plants, and helped construct large metal structures. We started at sunup so we could leave by early afternoon when the heat became intolerable. Before crawling down into the holes we did our best to clean out the black widow spider webs that had accumulated the night before.
I stayed at a nearby research station consisting of 10 adobe houses laid out in a circle with a small pond in the middle. At dusk the pond would be visited by throngs of bats, drawn by the insect swarms that thrived in the artificial oasis. The houses had a back door that led to a small patio and infinite desert. Nearby was a longer building that had a wing of research labs and a meeting space/social area. The buildings were connected by a small sidewalk, on which in the early evening hours you could often find rattlesnakes warming their cold blood, as it held the sun's heat longer than the desert sand.
Sometimes I would share housing, sometimes it would just be me and the caretaker, who was nice enough but kept to himself unless necessary. The station was owned by a university and there were often groups of students staying there while they worked on various projects. They were largely agreeable people and I got to know some of them quite well. We got into some classic college shenanigans such as going out into the desert under a full moon on mushrooms, or using a large jug of embalming alcohol from the laboratory to make big bowls of jungle juice (being very careful to use ethyl, not isopropyl, so we didn’t go blind or die). Sometimes I would go back with them to Albuquerque on the weekends to get into city shenanigans but I also enjoyed my time alone in the desert. There was all sorts of new nature for me to explore. Badgers, tortoises, strange new varieties of deer, snakes, black widows and wolf spiders galore, kangaroo mice, horny toads and other scampering lizards. No cacti, but plenty of spiky and pokey things. At night, a porch light would slowly attract bigger and bigger beetles and moths until around 2 AM when they would start surpassing the size of my hand. I watched the monsoons roll in and drop torrents of rain and lightning, melting the crusty sand into beachy mud.
The fact that I returned for a second summer of labor is a testament to my appreciation of the desert’s majestic beauty and quirky characters. Although the temperate forest will always feel like home to me, I returned to the desert several more times in the years to come, having had a very kind introduction to it.