Raining Palo Verde – Club de Golf

On our most recent lap around the San Carlos golf course under a bright blue 75˚ sky Julie encountered a Palo Verde tree that sprinkled on her. We had been playing buddy ball, both hitting consistently to the right side of the course, and I was preparing to once again get back into the fairway from a little mogul while Julie stood somewhat behind me to help track the actual direction of this next whack. On this day my aim and the actual trajectory were conflicted, multiple personalities. There happened to be a relatively small, not tall, Palo Verde tree on the top of this mogul so Julie stood in its leeward shadow and before I could take my swing she said “It’s raining, I can feel it!.” Well, that brought a halt to golf right then and there because it was not raining anywhere else within a hundred kilometers.

I joined her in the rain shadow of the tree and sure enough we could see the small water droplets issuing from the thin little branches of the tree. But this is golf, a serious business to some, and we had been holding up the folks behind us with our zigzag play so I stepped back up and whacked the ball to the other side of the fairway, not too much closer to the hole. This is golf.

I grew up with Palo Verdes and cannot remember ever having one rain on me unless there were clouds above doing the actual raining. These trees offer as close to zero protection from rainfall as one could get - sort of like hiding behind a toothpick. But this was not rain from the sky above. My present theory is that these trees are equipped to suck up as much water as possible in a short amount of time when it happens to occasionally rain in the Sonoran Desert. But, being irrigated by the golf courses watering system, this one had no more room to hold water and had to release it somehow, so it decided that mega-transpiration would save itself from just splitting open. It’s a theory.

If any of my Tucson family knows a professor specializing in this sort of thing, please ask about our raining tree. It would be interesting to know the mechanism and reason for this phenomenon. We would have never experienced this except for the fact that we are not very good at the game of golf and do not know the local rules about whether or not one should pick up and take a drop from these moguls consisting of ¾ inch minus gravels. So the Golfish Theory of Palo Verde Mega-transpiration has been born on the San Carlos Club de Golf and who knows now how this may benefit humankind in the millennia to come. Where breakthroughs originate is sometimes just plain serendipity and who are we to judge the alignment of cosmic forces that get us past our simple curiosity and into the real mud of the universe. Nonsense, you say! I agree. But our tree did rain on us and how cool is that?