Well, first I guess I better set the stage a little so you know who's lying to you.  My name is Ted Hall, I'm gonna be 57 years old when the saguaros bloom, Phoenix is home for better or worse, I have never been adjudged mentally incompetent and have not yet appeared on "America's Most Wanted" as either a perpetrator or victim.

I received my fist catechism in desert life during a, shall we call it "balmy" August in 1960.  We lived in San Diego about 15 minutes from the beach.  I was nine and happily contemplating an idyllic lifetime of surfing and endless beaches of soft, warm sand when Dad comes home one day and announces the fantastic news:  We're moving to Phoenix!  Next week!

My immediate reaction exhibited all the joy of a condemned man being dragged to the dentist for an unanesthesized root canal on the way to the electric chair.  Much foot stomping, throwing of various unattached household items and repeated screams of "No! No! Nooooo!" must have convinced my folks that they had raised quite the mature little man.  But my impassioned pleas, reasoned arguments and threatened legal actions were all in vain.

And so it was one horribly bright day in August, me, my brother, Mom, Dad, a black, carsick-prone  mongrel named Snowball and several hundred pounds of Stuff were compressed inside an UN-air conditioned late-50s Chevy sedan crawling along old U.S. 80 eastbound through what looked to me like a whole lot of dead nothing. 

We'd started well before dawn, "So we can get through some of the worst of it before it gets too damn hot," as Dad had so comfortingly explained it.  I'd tryed to stay awake, perched on my knees watching paradise fall behind through the rear window, but I fell asleep somewhere outside of El Cahon and hadn't awakened until someone turned the cars heater up WAY too high just west of El Centro. 

Of course, no one had touched the heater and now I couldn't touch the metal around the window.  This was a whole new kind of hot.  This was the kind of hot that happened when Mom opened the oven to check the Thanksgiving turkey.  But this hot wasn't coming from an oven, it was coming from EVERYWHERE, and it kept getting hotter.  As best as I could figure, the Earth in this particular area existed in a physical state beyond man's understanding and  endurance. 

Apparently, Snowball the dog agreed with me and promptly began to vomit explosively throughout the backseat area.

Fortunately, this untoward event occured near a scenic, "historical" landmark-style widespot in the middle of the Yuma sand dunes.

As the car slowed to a stop I remember two things (I mean, besides the general horror of dog barf).  First, the previously thought to be most inconceivably hot temperature in the universe became instantly HOTTER when we stopped.  And second, as I opened the car door, I heard the first utterance of what would come to be my Mother's most famous, infinitely repeated chant, "Teddy!  Watch where you put your feet, for God's sake!  There are snakes!"

Well, Mom was right and here I am, nearly fifty years later, still in the desert and still watching where I put my feet.