Rain Dance
Okay, now I
know
I shouldn't have done this.
Let me set the stage for you: it's 95 degrees (a mere 89 in the shade!), and I'm 4800 feet above sea level. Not that there's an actual sea for hundreds of miles. Or any water at all, damn near. I'm sure a nineteenth century explorer or a Native American shaman or botany professor could scare up some agua by slicing open one of these plants or digging a hole or sucking the blood from a gila monster, but I'm none of these things. I'm an amateur hiker-- and a stupid one, at that, judging from my predicament.
Spring break in Arizona had sounded like such a great idea. Chicago was still getting flurries, and going home to Michigan didn't seem much better, judging from the plaintive noises my mother was making over the phone. No, getting the fuck out of this weather entailed more drastic measures-- and you couldn't do much better than the desert, I'd thought. My buddy Joel, who graduated a couple of years ago, has a house in Phoenix, and he had said I could crash there while he was in the Caribbean with his immensely hot girlfriend. I'd bought tickets for the earliest date possible, and after my last final had grabbed my suitcase and raced to the airport.
It had been evident I'd not been the only one with this idea, though; this town is packed with transients soaking up the sun before returning to whatever frigid environs they hail from. The end result is that everything is incredibly crowded and it's difficult to get the bartenders to even serve you unless you have something with tits attached to your arm. And who really needs beer when you've got something with tits attached to your arm? That's the way I see it, anyway.
The point is that I had gotten bored with the whole downtown scene in both Phoenix and Tempe, and I'd looked for something else to do. The city is surrounded by mountains, so I had decided to give hiking a try. I'm from a flat state, so it was all new to me. For which I hope some deity will grant me a plea of "guilty by ignorance", since what sane region of the planet has near-hundred degree temperatures in April?
So here I am, empty Arrowhead bottle in my hand, three quarters of the way up some feature dubbed "the Flatiron" by the local yokels, thirsty as hell, and there's a naked chick furiously masturbating in a pool of water.
A pool. A naked chick.
I've seen those old cartoons where Daffy Duck treads the desert, sees a beautiful pondful of refreshing water, and leaps into it, getting a mouthful of sand in the bargain. I've seen those cartoons, and I ain't playing. I may be ignorant of the desert ways, and stupid for not checking the temperature, but one thing I am not is gullible. And there is no pool at the top of this mountain, and no cutie getting her jollies in it, and she is not looking at me right now with a startled look on her face.