The Rain After Seven Years

For five or seven years at a stretch, the coastal basins of the Atacama look like the surface of an iron skillet left in the sun. The clay shrinks into hard polygonal plates, the salt crusts over the basalt, and the wind polishes the gravel until nothing above ground appears to be waiting for anything at all.

Six inches beneath that crust, millions of añañuca bulbs and pata de guanaco seeds sit in the dark without spending a single calorie trying to look alive. They do not send up tentative shoots during dry winters just to prove they are still working, and they do not mistake a passing morning fog for a season. They simply hold their shape until a real Pacific rain finally runs down the alluvial fans and pools in the cracks between the clay.

When that water reaches the roots, the desert does not hesitate. Within days, scarlet six-pointed lilies and silky magenta blossoms push straight up through the flooded fissures, turning a hundred miles of cracked stone into a bright, unruly sea before the sun can drink the puddles back into the sky.