The desert symbolizes individual beauty emerging from conformity, and—related to that—the magic that can be seen in everyday things, when someone knows how to look. For example, Leo describes the Sonoran mud frogs in the desert that suddenly emerge from long months of dormancy after the rains come, comparing the frogs’ singing to Mica High students’ awakening to friendship and empathy, following Stargirl’s lead. When Leo and Stargirl have an unconventional first date in the desert, Leo observes how surprising the desert is to someone who only expects sand and rocks—besides the towering saguaros, there’s “porcupiny yucca, the beaver tail and prickly pear and barrel cacti, buckhorn and staghorn and devil’s fingers, the tall, sky-reaching tendrils of the ocotillo.” Just as the diversity of the desert belies an outsider’s expectations, the whole world harbors unsuspected beauties, which become even more noticeable to Leo after the nonconformist Stargirl teaches him to open his senses and emotions to them.
The Desert Quotes in Stargirl
And each night in bed I thought of her as the moon came through my window. I could have lowered my shade to make it darker and easier to sleep, but I never did. In that moonlit hour, I acquired a sense of the otherness of things. I liked the feeling the moonlight gave me, as if it wasn’t the opposite of day, but its underside, its private side, when the fabulous purred on my snow-white sheet like some dark cat come in from the desert.
It was during one of these nightmoon times that it came to me that Hillari Kimble was wrong. Stargirl was real.
In the Sonoran Desert there are ponds. You could be standing in the middle of one and not know it, because the ponds are usually dry. Nor would you know that inches below your feet, frogs are sleeping, their heartbeats down to once or twice per minute. They lie dormant and waiting, these mud frogs, for without water their lives are incomplete, they are not fully themselves. For many months they sleep like this within the earth. And then the rain comes. And a hundred pairs of eyes pop out of the mud, and at night a hundred voices call across the moonlit water.
It was wonderful to see, wonderful to be in the middle of: we mud frogs awakening all around. We were awash in tiny attentions. Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life.
To the person who expects every desert to be barren sand dunes, the Sonoran must come as a surprise. Not only are there no dunes, there’s no sand. […]
What you notice are the saguaros. To the newcomer from the East, it’s as simple as that. The desert seems to be a brown wasteland of dry, prickly scrub whose only purpose is to serve as a setting for the majestic saguaros. Then, little by little, the plants of the desert begin to identify themselves: the porcupiny yucca, the beaver tail and prickly pear and barrel cacti, buckhorn and staghorn and devil’s fingers, the tall, sky-reaching tendrils of the ocotillo.
Susan’s eyes were glistening. “Did moas have a voice?”
The teacher thought about it. “I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody knows.”
Susan looked out the window at the passing desert. “I heard a mockingbird back there. And it made me think of something Archie said […] He said he believes mockingbirds may do more than imitate other birds. I mean, other living birds. He thinks they may also imitate the sounds of birds that are no longer around. He thinks the sounds of extinct birds are passed down the years from mockingbird to mockingbird […] He says when a mockingbird sings, for all we know it’s pitching fossils into the air. He says who knows what songs of ancient creatures we may be hearing out there.”
The Desert Symbol Timeline in Stargirl
