Three Kings

An inch and a half. That’s as far as a saguaro gets in its first eight years — down in the shade of a palo verde or an ironwood, borrowing shelter, growing slower than seems reasonable for a living thing. It won’t put out its first arm until somewhere between fifty and seventy years old. It isn’t considered an adult until about a hundred and twenty-five.

So you come around an easy loop trail one evening, and three of them are standing head and shoulders over everything else on that piece of ground, and you stop walking.

The one in the center is the saguaro you’d draw if someone asked you to draw one — straight-trunked, symmetrical, arms lifted at the exact angles a cactus is supposed to lift them. The one on the right stands deeper in the scrub and runs at least as tall, though it narrows toward the top into something closer to a spire, its lower arms swallowed by creosote. The one on the left surrenders a little height and every bit of symmetry; its arms leave the trunk at whatever angle and length they pleased.

Arms that size mean none of the three is younger than seventy, and their height says a good deal older than that. They’re the oldest things in that patch of desert, and they stand over it accordingly — which is where the title came from.

The trip was Joshua Tree and Phoenix — my wife’s birthday — and Saguaro was a day’s drive down to Tucson. It was the quieter park, and it was the one that got me, largely because of stands like this one — that many full-size specimens, some standing 30 or more feet high, holding a single small footprint is pretty awe-inspiring to behold.

The frame is a multi-shot panorama, which is why it doesn’t fit the standard sizes. The three tall ones needed the vertical room, and I hadn’t shot enough width past them to crop to 2:1 without cutting off tops or bases.