TUCSON, Ariz. – Death, from even just a little distance, seems so complete on this waterless, siccative land, so unmistakable. But it’s a mirage.

The Sonoran Desert, it turns out, is simply ablaze with life. And not just life itself but also the remarkably tenacious will to live. Here where the summer sun feels like hell’s heat lamp, where rain is so often just a delusional dream, life insists on having a future. It finds a way. As must we.

The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum here collects about 1,200 kinds of plants – to say nothing of more than 300 animal species – that somehow make a home in this enervating aridity. The animal life is interesting, but it’s the plants I admire, and for the perfectly obvious reason that they, unlike the animals, can’t roam the desert floor in search of sustenance, can’t circle hungrily overhead waiting to slam-dunk themselves on careless prey.

No, the plants put down roots, stretch up bioflesh into the thirsty air and are obliged to live or die only by whatever is there or by whatever comes near them to keep life going. They can’t be nomads, can’t uproot themselves and move to Vermont, can’t order a 1.5-liter bottle of water from room service.

Instead, they must be wily, cunning. They must adapt or die. And they do. My lord, how they do.

Saguaro cactus – those tall, rough things with arms, the ones you see in Roadrunner cartoons – cover the rocky hills here like tall beard stubble. They are patient. They are resourceful. They don’t begin to bear fruit until they are well past 50 years of age. And they don’t grow those arms until they reach about 75.

Summer after fiery summer, they must stand out in the heat, day and night, night and day, waiting for some internal alarm clock to ring, telling them to grow fruit, to grow arms, to reproduce.

All this while, they are sucking up what little water comes by. And if woodpeckers drill holes in them to make nests – as woodpeckers here are wont to do – they heal their wounds quickly so they won’t lose precious moisture to evaporation.

That’s how desperately life wants to go on, how insistent it is on not giving in to death’s compelling allure.

And it’s not only the saguaro, either. It’s all kinds of plants that have established residence in this inhospitable land. It’s the barrel cactus and the jojoba, which produces a high grade of oil used in cosmetics. It’s the paloverde, Arizona’s state tree. When its tiny leaves require more moisture than the land or air has to give, the tree drops them overboard like so much jetsam – and survives.

Trees turn lighter and lighter shades of green to keep from absorbing the sun’s full heat and dying of it. They adapt. They slip-slide around death. And as they do, they challenge us to avoid the countless ways we are sometimes tempted to give in to physical, emotional and spiritual death.

It might be simply interesting or even amusing if one or two or three plants or trees fought their way to life in this desert, but life here is simply extravagant.

When you pay attention, you find that there’s aloe and red bird of paradise. There are Joshua and acacia trees and creosote bushes. There’s the soaptree yucca and many kinds of desert grasses.

There’s organ pipe, Turk’s head and Nichol’s Turk’s head cacti. There’s strawberry hedgehog, robust prickly pear, Arizona claret cup. And, unlike the desert itself, I’m hardly warming up.

I haven’t yet pointed to the mesquite trees, the Parry penstemon. I haven’t mentioned the fishhook pincushion, the dicliptera, desert mallow, chain fruit cholla, brittlebush or fairyduster. And on and on and on.

At the opening of the Hebrew scriptures, Genesis says God spoke all this – and more – into existence, creating incarnate poetry, words made flesh. It’s a lovely story that speaks profound truths, but it somehow fails to acknowledge how fiercely, once life was launched, it has had to contend for existence.

Here on parched Arizona land, you can watch life do that – and win. If that doesn’t make your heart race, you’ve already given in to death.

Bill Tammeus is an editorial page columnist for The Kansas City Star.