Aflight en route to Tucson, a couple seated next to me explains they are headed to the desert to celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary. “Forty years,” I say, “that’s remarkable. What’s your secret?” Both husband and wife cock their heads, then exchange looks; it appears they have never considered this subject. They study the other to determine who should speak first, when finally the husband turns to me.
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“I think,” he says, “that whenever one of us wanted to give up, the other one wanted to keep going.” Celebrating an anniversary amid the spiky aridity of the desert seems a contrast to the lush abundance four decades of marriage suggest. Then again, maybe it is the perfect setting: Consider the saguaro impossibly flowering against a hallucinatory plane of nothing but quicksilver mirages or the vermilion flycatcher submitting to a sere, sedimentary wind to carry it home. This is a scape of nature where any frame presents perseverance and surrender in perfect balance. But, for human nature, when to do which can be as elusive as desert water. After all, as much as we may exhort the resolve of the athlete who will never succumb, perseverance becomes masochism when we speak of an abused spouse.