Some of the West’s most colorful characters ended up in Arizona sooner or later. For some, it was the lure of the boom town bonanzas. Others found it a refuge from the restrictions of more established societies in the East. For DeForest Hall, it was the wide open spaces and the weather. He liked the high desert around Wickenburg so well that he changed his middle name to Wick.
Q: On a cross-country trip, my husband and I started wondering about those “pool of water” reflections on the road ahead. What causes that?
A: These travelers have seen, as we all have, a very common mirage. There are two kinds of mirages: inferior and superior. Inferior means the object is displaced downward. Superior is the other way around. The road thing is an inferior mirage.
On a sunny day the surface of the road and the air just above it get very hot. The air just above that is fairly cool in comparison. Now, light travels faster through warm air than it does through cold air because warm air is less dense. Hence, when light hits that hot air just above the road surface at a certain angle, it changes speed and is bent upward. As a result
Q: If Tucson and Phoenix are both in the desert, why is it always just a little bit cooler in Tucson than it is in the Valley?
A: Tucson is usually a little bit cooler than Phoenix because it is a little bit higher up. You may not actually have a sense of ascending when you drive there because you are lulled into a state of semiconsciousness because it is the most boring drive in the world.
Q: Why do people paint the trunks of their citrus trees white?
A: HA! At last, a question we actually knew the answer to without having to look it up or ask somebody. It’s to protect them from the sun.
We are soooooo smart.
To celebrate, we asked an actual newcomer in the office if she knew why citrus trunks are painted white, and she said it was to repel insects. These comical newcomers.We were going to laugh at her until we remembered she is much higher up the food chain than us and holds what passes for our career in her elegant and well-manicured hands. So we didn’t laugh.
Just to double-check, and to look busy, we called Ralph Backhaus, a professor of plant biology at Arizona State University.
Here at Valley 101 headquarters, white-coated lab technicians have been working round-the-clock to answer one of the greatest questions ever to cross the Valley 101 transom:
Do your feet get bigger when you move to the desert?
You know, we spent hours flipping pancakes, doing day labor, weeding soybeans to get through college, followed by years of crawling over the broken reputations of colleagues and competitors to arrive at a place of relative safety in journalism, and it comes to this: Do your feet get bigger when you move to the desert?
