From a New York Times column by Terry Tempest Williams headlined “47 Days in Extreme Heat, and You Began to Notice Things”:

Aridity is baked into the people and places of the American Southwest. We possess a dry demeanor influenced by a landscape that is often cracked and weathered by wind, water and time. You see it in our faces and you feel it on the ground, but we hardly have a vocabulary for the extreme version of heat and drought we are now living through.