PHOENIX, March 9 — Thursday began like the 141 days before it, sunny and crisp, dust settling everywhere except on the record — set again — for the number of days without rain.Phoenix knows all about dry weather. It is a place where children are drilled throughout elementary school to conserve water, where hotels boast of covered parking areas not to protect from rain, but to offer a bit of shade. Grown men spread lotion all over their bodies every morning. Noses bleed. Newcomers watch in horror as their hands seem to age right in front of them.
That is the cleverest lede I’ve read in years, written by Michael Wilson for the New York Times. I love the opener (”Thursday began like the 141 days before it”) — informative, yet laden with the right mock-dramatic, almost detective-fiction tone. However, it’s the second paragraph that deserves a Pulitzer Prize for Wit.
It arranges dry facts (sorry) into a sort of Stephen King horror film. I honestly can’t wait for the movie adaptation. At first, Phoenix seems a little strange with its water education program and unconventional carports — and then we realize Phoenix is, in fact, Zombieville U.S.A. I love the sentence subject, “Grown men”; you know they are condemned to emasculation in the predicate, and sure enough, there they are slathering lotion where the sun does and does not shine.
The paragraph’s finest sentence is also its shortest, the veritable “Jesus wept” in this Gospel of Michael. “Noses bleed.” When I first read it, I recoiled with the same shock I would if it had said “Ears fester” or “Eyeballs explode”; only then did I realize that noses bleed because people are getting bloody noses. In two words the author turns a well-known fact about aridity into an X-Files special effect. I love it.
Lest we make any mistake about the author’s tone, the final sentence may well have been lifted from a B-movie horror script; can’t you picture those withering hands and campy screams on the big screen? By now we’re prepped for a semi-serious article on a serious subject. I can’t tell you whether the writer’s tone was appropriate for the article — indeed, it appears that Mr. Wilson has since been relegated to the Times’ Metro section — but boy, what clever language.
