Dr. Larry Stevens, a Grand Canyon ecologist who once was within spittin’ distance of becoming a physician, admits that during his initial 3 years in the desert, that he suffered from “hydromelancholia,” [a medical term I’m sure he coined], for he was “missing the water of his childhood.”
But I claim that on his 4th year in the desert, Dr. Stevens came up with a “vaccine” for hydromelancholia” because I saw the needle marks in his arms when we used to crash through the wait-a-minute bushes in the thorny scrublands of the Verde Valley when we were in our Twenties!
The cure for hydro-melancholia, me thinks, is hunkering down to imagine all the water safely sequestered away all around you, in barrel cactus, mesquite roots, pack rat bodies, mockingbird song, dragonfly abdomens, Gila Monster tails, buffalo gourds and white-winged dove droppings!
A cure is at hand for all of those who have been homesick from Somewhere Else, and are having trouble “getting over the color of green” as Wallace Stegner once called this ill-temperate disease.