“Post-Peridot support group,” said Dave when he answered the phone. “I’m not surrounded by 360 degrees of wildflowers, and I just don’t feel right.” I didn’t feel right either.

We’d spent the day before roaming among the prolific wildflowers on Peridot Mesa, two-plus hours from Tucson on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. (You need a permit from the Apaches to go there.) It was so intoxicating, it felt like we’d been swept out of this world, and it was hard to come back down to earth.

Intoxicated by Purple

It all started in Globe the night before. Not knowing where we were going, we suddenly came upon an entire hillside of purple. I’d never seen the flowers before, and no one there could tell us their name, not even the Tucsonian who’d photographed the plants before.

When we returned the next morning, the purple looked and smelled like stock. A maintenance man called it “night scented.” I looked it up when I got home and confirmed it: the flowers are nocturnal, open late in the day and release a strong, sweet, spicy fragrance. Matthiola longipetala, member of the mustard family, native to Eurasia and introduced here.

Peridot Mesa

We found our way to Peridot Mesa, wildly beyond anything I could have imagined. Mexican gold poppies everywhere, punctuated by the occasional stunning saguaro. The poppies were dramatic enough, lavishly spilling over the hills, but I was even more inspired by thousands of lavender blue dicks, trembling in the breezes above the yellow. This perennial lily is also called desert hyacinth, found in all North American deserts. Several Arizona native peoples once dug and ate the bulbs raw or cooked, including the Tohono O’odham, Pima, and the Apache, who let us come to this exquisite mesa.

I’d only seen owl clover in Arizona Highways Magazine, so I thrilled to see them at long last in the wild, although they weren’t the dense carpets I expected. The rose-purple blooms look like little brooms, hence their Spanish name, escobita.

Besides the opulent scope of the Peridot scene, what inspired me most was the wide variety of species. I was excited to see the flowers hugging each other in different combinations: scorpion weed, lupine, and creamy white chicory among the poppies, clover, and blue dicks. Oh, and the fiddlenecks. Not a spectacular flower, but so ubiquitous and so yellow-orange, I’m always happy to find it. The spiked blossoms coil like scorpion weed, named because its own blossoms coil like the tail of a scorpion.

Fiddleneck is in the borage family, but unlike the blue borage I used to grow and eat in salads, fiddleneck contains strong alkaloids which make it poisonous to livestock. Yet the Pima used to boil and eat the leaves, and scorpion weed, too. Scorpion weed  is such a lovely color, it’s also called heliotrope. I wish I could call it that, but I always come back to its more common “insect” name.

What’s Where Why?

I’m fascinated not only by the colors, shapes, and the scale of vast carpets of flowers, but also by what grows where and why. How mysterious to find a hillside of stock in Globe and seldom anywhere else. Why were there so many globe mallow on the west side of the Dripping Springs Mountains on the way home but not on the east side on the way up? And why did we see stunning clusters of white tackstem (which Dave calls “lemon drops”) in gravelly areas beside the road only in Mammoth and not elsewhere? Did the town scatter seeds in a special wildflower planting? And what were those yellow “daisies” among the Mexican poppies on the Mesa? I can’t seem to differentiate between the vast array of yellow sunflowery blossoms in the Sonoran. Above all, what miracle makes Peridot Mesa so spectacular in all of Arizona?

After all the wild beauty, I was dismayed to drive by several mountains of tailings from the mines in Kearny, Hayden, and Winkelman. I had to ask myself what products I use that require the metals dug up there, destroying so much mountain, desert, and so many saguaros.

The Burned Saguaro

On top of both mountain ranges going and coming home, we encountered extensive fire damage. We passed a saguaro specimen that called to me so loudly, I had to make a U-turn and drive back to encounter it more intimately. I’m deeply inspired by the way saguaros die and have photographed many examples. But I’d never seen a death like this one.

Saguaros can be blown over by the wind or rot in the middle and collapse or simply die of old age like the rest of us. When struck by lightning, the moisture inside may boil and explode them. This one was burned to death. The fire completely incinerated its skin and insides. But no limbs fell off, the strong ribs stayed intact, and the cactus remained standing: tall, mammoth, and majestic. I’ll drive past those ugly mines again just to visit this new friend, south of Superior and north of the Ray mine.

When I showed Dave Denny the close-up I photographed, he said: “That looks like the burnt ‘Atomic Christ’ that used to hang in Holy Cross Chapel in Sedona.” I gasped. When I showed it to David Levin two hours later, he said (I’m not making this up): “That looks like the ‘Atomic Christ’ from Holy Cross Chapel.” It does. And that’s a story for another time.

Fallen from Heaven

I’ve seen many wonders in my blessed life: the depths of the Grand Canyon and the snow-covered peaks of the Rocky Mountains and the Swiss Alps. The red rocks of Sedona, Utah, and Wadi Rum in the Jordanian Desert. The tropical flowers of Hawaii and the turquoise waterfalls of Havasu Canyon. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans crashing against rocky coastlines as well as the Mediterranean and Caribbean seas. Great art works in the Vatican and L’Ermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. But the magic of Peridot Mesa touched me more profoundly than any of these. I have never seen anything so beautiful.

This morning, a day after my up close and personal experience on the mesa, I feel disoriented, like the man or woman who “fell from heaven.” I feel as if I’ve “come down” from some lofty celestial space and a long moment of sheer perfection. Our winter rains, cool temperatures, and who knows what other mysterious factors conspired to create this magnificent superbloom which will never occur again in quite the same way. And I immersed myself in it. It transported and transformed me in ways I cannot describe. Somehow, I’ll never be the same again.

I want to weep, laugh, cry out in jubilation, and most of all, to fall silent in awe and wonder, and the deepest realm of joy that carries me beyond any words, any sound, any conceivable human expression. And so I will.