Water Music in the Sonora Desert
Aravaipa River spouts from stone and flows over the desert floor like musical notes across a staff. It nourishes a bed of willows, cottonwoods, ash trees, and sycamores. Swifts and swallows buzz the water surface and a black phoebe watches them, calls fee-bee, and snaps up a skimmer. Just above us a vermilion flycatcher perches on a branch like a ruby embedded in a crown. There is plenty of food for the fish and plenty of fish for the hawks. We follow the lush trail the river paves west. Its water plays over rounded rocks. From here, where the canyon walls are high, we can forget that we’re in a desert.
We are however: the Sonora Desert, which spreads from this land in southeast Arizona aslant to Mexican Baja. Sonora isn’t a desert the uninitiated would expect, who bring Lawrence of Arabia visions of sand dunes and Bedouins. (Though there is something American Bedouin about many of the people who move there, something migratory and unfixed.) In relation to Sahara, Sonora is verdant, its slopes covered with cactus and other obstinate scrublife. If we had come here in spring we would be shocked by a profusion and palette of wildflowers: golden Mexican poppies, red fireweed, and white chicory rising from what literally is a rubble of rocks. (By some glorious poetic justice the grisliest plants here produce the most gorgeous flowers. Witness the papery delicacy of the prickly poppy’s bloom or the burst of sunset hues from the prickly pear.)
Sonora gets twelve inches of water a year. As a comparative yardstick, during Hurricane Frances in 2004 some places in central Florida received twelve inches in one day. Then what is all this greenery doing here? How can it be that a desert is recognizable by its flowers? And what about Aravaipa, that diapason of singing life, the apotheosis of Eden-like fertility?
Water, not dunes or camels or quicksand, is the strongest presence in Sonora. Like the ghost rattling chains in an old mansion, water’s potency and power is increased by the eerie fact that it is not in substance there. But in every direction you can find its signs and symbols and mostly its warnings. To come to Sonora is to become more acutely aware of water than ever before; it is to learn, through plain habit of survival, to adduce its coded speech and to seek out its sources like a pilgrim on a path to Truth.
But it’s a hard path, and despite ourselves, it’s time to leave the generous anomaly of Aravaipa. Sure enough, as we travel west the river loses momentum and soon piddles out, though the soil has moisture enough to carry on the flow of trees. As we draw upward and look down on the land, we’ll see a thinning defile of Arizona Sycamores, unmistakable by their blanched, bone-white bark. We see that Aravaipa ends at the San Pedro River, which is also dry and even more barren.
In Sonora the first thing to learn is that a river is still a river if it is empty. Dry rivers cut in all directions over southern Arizona like scars or skid marks from some dramatic episode long ago. Tucson is located on the confluence of three, Tanque Verde, Rillito, and Santa Cruz. But that the land was once a watershed is just a quaint piece of lore today: the Santa Cruz dried up over a century ago. How can a dry depression still be called a river? It is a title retained by stubbornly hopeful people. When it does rain, especially in August during the monsoons, they gush with water exactly as other rivers do. It’s best to allow for a broader definition. A little bit of deluded optimism is quite simply needed to persevere here – and sometimes persistence is rewarded. Anyone who follows his divining rod far enough south on the San Pedro will eventually find that the river is in fact extant just before he reaches Mexico. Spongy soil, great blue herons, and the whispering shade of cottonwoods are his prize.
But as we look down on this dry debouchment it is neither the season for wildflowers nor for monsoons – it is June, the temperature under the sun is one hundred degrees, there is no rain and there is no chance of it. The ground burns, but also has some respite of shade: this basinland is studded with a series of ranges, rounded eroding buttes and mesas that pounce thousands of feet against the skyline. What we’re overlooking is a four thousand foot butte – it’s not tall enough to provoke rain, yet it is relatively advantageous for life anyhow.
Pick out the thin veined seams projecting downward from the summit. When the monsoons do come, the water collects in these grooves. As it tumbles down it takes with it particles of dirt. The more ground matter it holds the “harder” it becomes. Like an avalanche gathering speed and strength the water can now dislodge huge chunks of earth and carry down boulders – here is the real danger of the infamous flash floods that strike and kill every desert year. There is no shield against the debris in that sudden tide.
We see that the seams in the range have enlarged considerably in the descent, so that the depression is now roughly half the width and depth of the riverbeds. This is called a barranca, an arroyo, or a wash, depending on its size and your mood at the time. A wash is usually a reliable way to peak a hill, even if it meanders some. In and around them – anywhere on this range where speeding water churns up the earth and makes it loose and rubbly – cacti have their best chance for survival. The mightiest of all is the Saguaro Cactus, which can grow to be thirty feet tall. How can something so hearty and plump exist in parched soil? The Saguaro survives because it is a master hoarder – its roots don’t sink very deeply, but radiate to cover a large surface area, and can retain up to two tons of water at a time. Moreover, the cactus has no leaves through which water can evaporate, its chlorophyll instead working where the bark of other trees would be.
Every plant and animal in this rocky desert (with one notable exception) has adapted to meet the strict requirements water shortages impose. Leaves, which are major culprits of transpiration – the release of oxygen into the air; the “breath” of a plant – are either absent or very small on the branch. Creosotebush leaves are shielded by a waxy integument that inhibits water loss. When the ocotillo gets too dry it sheds its leaves and goes dormant until times are riper. In the animal world, the kangaroo rat doesn’t drink at all, instead metabolizing what it needs from its diet of seeds.
And even having been so flexible, having bent to the limit in nature’s unsympathetic vise, survival is still dependant on a stingy trickle-down largesse. These plants are peasants bowing before water’s royal processional, their fates resting on its arbitrary alms.
We can follow the wash for a long way beyond the butte, but the reduction of flora indicates the decrease of water’s welfare. By this point runoff momentum has diminished and the flow has only the power to carry microscopic pieces of earth. When even these particles drop out they pack together and form a floor as dense and impenetrable as concrete. Here is the alluvial basin: it has neither soil nor space for roots. Water cannot enter, so it sits on the surface and burns away, scorching the ground. We will see only creosotebush, and even those are sparse because every bush secretes a poison to insure that nothing can encroach on its space. We don’t even see birds here.
A frightfully big portion of Sonora consists of the deathly alluvial basin, and once you are in it, there is no way of finding water. Unless, that is, you know about the exception.
In the mid nineteenth century white prospectors seeking gold – those famously foolhardy forty-niners – began to search for routes to the fertile vales and climes of Southern California. They followed what was called the Coronado Trail, and known as the Devil’s Highway, between the northern frontier in Mexico to the Colorado River in Yuma, a barren pioneer’s path with tenfold the hazards. (It is easy enough to imagine the rigors of this trail: take your car to Highway 10 and drive anywhere between El Paso and the San Bernadino Mountains in Palm Springs. Even in a car you’ll feel the onset of inanition that the grim landscape brings.) The trail was a tenuous connect-the-dots westward, a zigzag between watering holes. But there weren’t nearly enough Aravaipas for a smooth travel; moreover, the perennial springs and streams were naturally under the jealous lock and key of American Indians who made strongholds of the hills and would not be completely dislodged for another century. The pioneers could only roam the dessert in summer, when Indians seeking verdure would have less interest in harassing them.
There was therefore only one unpalatable option for water. When rains fall in the desert the water is either absorbed into the soil and plants or else it is promptly vaporized and reclaimed by the clouds. But putting water in a bucket or jar safeguards from absorption and retards evaporation. In Sonora there are natural jars, named by the Spanish equivalent tinaja. These are depressions carved over eons in protruding stone. Sealed by a lid of fetid-smelling algae, some of these resultant pools can be abundantly plentiful. And for the prospectors, this foul standing water was the stuff of life, as saving as that which burst from stone for the Israelites wandering the desert with Moses. Losing the trail meant extinction; and finding the tinajas insured nothing more than hope. A tinaja is not a cornucopia and sometimes the horn was sucked dry by the thirsty travelers who had come before.
With these morbid thoughts it is a relief that we begin again to rise from the funereal basin that inhumed so many pioneers and ascend a mountain tall enough to turn the deadly climate completely on its head. Continuing south, we’ve reached the Catalina Mountains, a sheer burst of igneous in line with the long arm of the Rockies. At first our elevation is as before, with cactus life in the winding narrowing washes. But now, at about five thousand feet, we notice a change. Saguaros disappear, replaced by junipers and pinyon pines. Ground squirrels and other rodents show themselves, no longer needing to hide underground during day. Jays and lesser goldfinch make a hubbub. The terrain is greener, grassier, and scrubby. We go higher. Now we have Ponderosa pines – and quickly a forest full, their rich black trunks evidence to the fecundity they help promote. Under the mothering canopy of these wind-twisted pines there is actual soil, protected by a duff of soft needles. In these glades are some of the only cushions from the fierce rock that is general to the skin of Sonora.
And when we go higher still, to the nine thousand-foot peak of Mount Lemmon, there are Douglas firs and Quivering Aspens, trees that the mind must associate with Colorado and the high Canadian Rockies. How does a few thousand feet carry us to a world a thousand miles away.
Rain, of course rain. Above the basins there is no rain (monsoons being the exception that proves the rule) because the warm water vapor – the precious little that remains after the San Bernadinos claim their lode – stays low. The Catalinas force it to rise just as we rose; the vapor cools in the thinner air (as we have cooled) and condenses. Amazingly, snow is just as likely as rain in the winter, and the small lodges in Summerhaven before us are seasonal ski resorts.
The snow packs up knee-high. The soil takes its keep and runoff flows to pools and washes and canyons. In spring, when the sun scorches again, Romero Pools and Tanque Verde Falls and other natural reservoirs are boisterous hubs of life, where humans and other animals have followed the lute-song to congregate. (Some humans are far too lemming-like in their response: a few drown each year in the falls.) And thus we come to understand water’s natural transience in Sonora: for looking now, these playgrounds are virtually empty, all dry ditches and empty limestone waterslides, and the lone drake dabbling in shallows appears lost and pitiable.
But as soon as we think we comprehend something of the seasonal cycle of water and life we are challenged afresh when we crest the Catalinas and see below us – Tucson! It is a shock indeed to come from a nearly empty desert basin and now overlook its topographical twin turned into the second largest city in the state. When we descend back below five thousand feet we pass the first mansions. The houses, notched into the foothills, are all of a design that might be called colonial-adobe. The Manichean style doesn’t take, but the homes do offer new founts in our quest for water. Now there are swimming pools, man-made lakes (in which we spot a few sailboats), ponds for Japanese gardens, gargling terra cotta cherubim fountains, and, perhaps more commonly than might make us comfortable, spouting sprinkler heads. Such plenty out of nothing! It is as if Moses’ stone will provide forever. Coyotes and bands of collared peccaries creep past the guards of the gated communities to the open water’s edge. Mountain lions do too, but if they are ever seen the city hires bounty hunters to tranquilize them and ship them away.
We’ve left the Catalinas behind, but the city sprawls on, subdivision upon subdivision in ever-increasing concentricity around the small downtown, the houses meaner now but still filled with thirsty consumers. Beside a well-manicured golf course and the dusty Santa Cruz River there is a fenced-in marsh and smokestacked factory. This is the wastewater treatment plant and beneath it is what remains of Tucson’s watershed. Today the water table is five hundred feet underground. It verges on exhaustion, and what is left cannot provide for the city on its own. And so all this life – and that is what we are looking upon, the extravagant trappings of human life – hangs from a pipeline that starts in Havasu City on the Colorado River.
The Central Arizona Project canal is in truth not a pipe but a deep narrow trough; in any case it is the city’s literal lifeline. In a year twenty billion gallons of water are pumped through and blended with the scanty groundwater that remains, a 336 mile odyssey to help a Tusconan rinse after brushing. Having seen all that we’ve seen, this strikes us as pointedly unnatural, a meddlesome tampering with the ebb and flow of desert tides. Hitherto life was the slave of water, conforming to appease its harshness, adapting hidden tricks and cunning, killing its cousins for their share; and still surviving only by chance and fate.
But humans have evolved differently. Like it was a pet we’ve husbanded water, domesticated it, and kept it on a short leash. There is scarcely any more staggering human accomplishment than the Hoover Dam, which metes out hydroelectric energy to the entire southwest United States, from Tucson to Los Angeles (with Phoenix, the fifth largest city in the country in between). To build it we blasted a hole through the canyon wall and forcibly shifted the entire course of the Colorado River. Human hands diverting a river: Moses indeed!
But we are different desert dwellers from the wandering Jews; we don’t rely on a providing God. And we are different from every other plant and animal around us, because the average human can take for granted water conservation entirely. The balance of our survival is weighed thus: we have pitted our intellect against the naturally occurring resources of the earth. By choosing to live in the desert we are tacitly pledging a trust that scientific ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of its environmental limitations and will always countermand any scarcity. We live by the power and glory of the engineer: as long as he can coerce, contrive, or create water in Sonora we’ll be all right. And so far his ability to sustain a city like present day Tucson must exceed anyone’s expectation.
But let us at least recognize the battle of brinkmanship we’ve waged with the earth. And likewise remember that if we ever go to the tinaja and find it empty, with all of our intellect, we’ll be at nature’s mercy, like any shrub or rodent.
We hasten south once more over an alluvial wasteland. The desert is predominant again, though human development persists: we pass Sahuarita, Amado, Tumacacori, Tubac – different names for the same sort of flyspecks with a few hundred houses pinioned together like ships in a squall. They seem like such meager fruits of battle, and so precariously upheld. In the wilderness beyond the towns, nearer the border, we might spot small orange flags. The flags are markers for plastic tubs with a nozzle and a reflective sticking reading “agua,” placed in the desert by some hopeful Samaritans (and now the hopefulness seems tinged with desperation) to save the lost border crosser. They imagine a Mexican adrift like Hagar in Arabia, her baby left to die of thirst in the bushes, stumbling across the orange beacon of this well of Zamzam. It is an act of planned providence. In the desert mercy comes only from humans – we have seen enough to know that it is a term unknown by nature.
Gradually – and then suddenly – we enter chaparral again, brown-green with sere grass and muscly Live Oaks. This new landscape of steady humps and shoulder blade ridges is an eroded caldera, the remains of an ancient volcano that collapsed on its own core and went dormant. We buzz a juniper tree and a dozen canyon wrens burst forth with taunting trills. There are even deer here and quail – it’s a place with a hunting season. And then, following the slope of the ridges we spot it, our long lost telltale: the trail of bone-white sycamore trunks. And finally we return to a gracious earth.
The creek in Sycamore Canyon spouts from stone and floods south to Mexico. It starts as a tinkling prelude but soon deepens and rushes fugue-like. Cataracts from canyon walls pour down in accompaniment, and now the desert has vanished – rather, water has transformed it. The stream runs in spate and, our cups running over, we stand in wonder, stunned in the rapture of music.
We are however: the Sonora Desert, which spreads from this land in southeast Arizona aslant to Mexican Baja. Sonora isn’t a desert the uninitiated would expect, who bring Lawrence of Arabia visions of sand dunes and Bedouins. (Though there is something American Bedouin about many of the people who move there, something migratory and unfixed.) In relation to Sahara, Sonora is verdant, its slopes covered with cactus and other obstinate scrublife. If we had come here in spring we would be shocked by a profusion and palette of wildflowers: golden Mexican poppies, red fireweed, and white chicory rising from what literally is a rubble of rocks. (By some glorious poetic justice the grisliest plants here produce the most gorgeous flowers. Witness the papery delicacy of the prickly poppy’s bloom or the burst of sunset hues from the prickly pear.)
Sonora gets twelve inches of water a year. As a comparative yardstick, during Hurricane Frances in 2004 some places in central Florida received twelve inches in one day. Then what is all this greenery doing here? How can it be that a desert is recognizable by its flowers? And what about Aravaipa, that diapason of singing life, the apotheosis of Eden-like fertility?
Water, not dunes or camels or quicksand, is the strongest presence in Sonora. Like the ghost rattling chains in an old mansion, water’s potency and power is increased by the eerie fact that it is not in substance there. But in every direction you can find its signs and symbols and mostly its warnings. To come to Sonora is to become more acutely aware of water than ever before; it is to learn, through plain habit of survival, to adduce its coded speech and to seek out its sources like a pilgrim on a path to Truth.
But it’s a hard path, and despite ourselves, it’s time to leave the generous anomaly of Aravaipa. Sure enough, as we travel west the river loses momentum and soon piddles out, though the soil has moisture enough to carry on the flow of trees. As we draw upward and look down on the land, we’ll see a thinning defile of Arizona Sycamores, unmistakable by their blanched, bone-white bark. We see that Aravaipa ends at the San Pedro River, which is also dry and even more barren.
In Sonora the first thing to learn is that a river is still a river if it is empty. Dry rivers cut in all directions over southern Arizona like scars or skid marks from some dramatic episode long ago. Tucson is located on the confluence of three, Tanque Verde, Rillito, and Santa Cruz. But that the land was once a watershed is just a quaint piece of lore today: the Santa Cruz dried up over a century ago. How can a dry depression still be called a river? It is a title retained by stubbornly hopeful people. When it does rain, especially in August during the monsoons, they gush with water exactly as other rivers do. It’s best to allow for a broader definition. A little bit of deluded optimism is quite simply needed to persevere here – and sometimes persistence is rewarded. Anyone who follows his divining rod far enough south on the San Pedro will eventually find that the river is in fact extant just before he reaches Mexico. Spongy soil, great blue herons, and the whispering shade of cottonwoods are his prize.
But as we look down on this dry debouchment it is neither the season for wildflowers nor for monsoons – it is June, the temperature under the sun is one hundred degrees, there is no rain and there is no chance of it. The ground burns, but also has some respite of shade: this basinland is studded with a series of ranges, rounded eroding buttes and mesas that pounce thousands of feet against the skyline. What we’re overlooking is a four thousand foot butte – it’s not tall enough to provoke rain, yet it is relatively advantageous for life anyhow.
Pick out the thin veined seams projecting downward from the summit. When the monsoons do come, the water collects in these grooves. As it tumbles down it takes with it particles of dirt. The more ground matter it holds the “harder” it becomes. Like an avalanche gathering speed and strength the water can now dislodge huge chunks of earth and carry down boulders – here is the real danger of the infamous flash floods that strike and kill every desert year. There is no shield against the debris in that sudden tide.
We see that the seams in the range have enlarged considerably in the descent, so that the depression is now roughly half the width and depth of the riverbeds. This is called a barranca, an arroyo, or a wash, depending on its size and your mood at the time. A wash is usually a reliable way to peak a hill, even if it meanders some. In and around them – anywhere on this range where speeding water churns up the earth and makes it loose and rubbly – cacti have their best chance for survival. The mightiest of all is the Saguaro Cactus, which can grow to be thirty feet tall. How can something so hearty and plump exist in parched soil? The Saguaro survives because it is a master hoarder – its roots don’t sink very deeply, but radiate to cover a large surface area, and can retain up to two tons of water at a time. Moreover, the cactus has no leaves through which water can evaporate, its chlorophyll instead working where the bark of other trees would be.
Every plant and animal in this rocky desert (with one notable exception) has adapted to meet the strict requirements water shortages impose. Leaves, which are major culprits of transpiration – the release of oxygen into the air; the “breath” of a plant – are either absent or very small on the branch. Creosotebush leaves are shielded by a waxy integument that inhibits water loss. When the ocotillo gets too dry it sheds its leaves and goes dormant until times are riper. In the animal world, the kangaroo rat doesn’t drink at all, instead metabolizing what it needs from its diet of seeds.
And even having been so flexible, having bent to the limit in nature’s unsympathetic vise, survival is still dependant on a stingy trickle-down largesse. These plants are peasants bowing before water’s royal processional, their fates resting on its arbitrary alms.
We can follow the wash for a long way beyond the butte, but the reduction of flora indicates the decrease of water’s welfare. By this point runoff momentum has diminished and the flow has only the power to carry microscopic pieces of earth. When even these particles drop out they pack together and form a floor as dense and impenetrable as concrete. Here is the alluvial basin: it has neither soil nor space for roots. Water cannot enter, so it sits on the surface and burns away, scorching the ground. We will see only creosotebush, and even those are sparse because every bush secretes a poison to insure that nothing can encroach on its space. We don’t even see birds here.
A frightfully big portion of Sonora consists of the deathly alluvial basin, and once you are in it, there is no way of finding water. Unless, that is, you know about the exception.
In the mid nineteenth century white prospectors seeking gold – those famously foolhardy forty-niners – began to search for routes to the fertile vales and climes of Southern California. They followed what was called the Coronado Trail, and known as the Devil’s Highway, between the northern frontier in Mexico to the Colorado River in Yuma, a barren pioneer’s path with tenfold the hazards. (It is easy enough to imagine the rigors of this trail: take your car to Highway 10 and drive anywhere between El Paso and the San Bernadino Mountains in Palm Springs. Even in a car you’ll feel the onset of inanition that the grim landscape brings.) The trail was a tenuous connect-the-dots westward, a zigzag between watering holes. But there weren’t nearly enough Aravaipas for a smooth travel; moreover, the perennial springs and streams were naturally under the jealous lock and key of American Indians who made strongholds of the hills and would not be completely dislodged for another century. The pioneers could only roam the dessert in summer, when Indians seeking verdure would have less interest in harassing them.
There was therefore only one unpalatable option for water. When rains fall in the desert the water is either absorbed into the soil and plants or else it is promptly vaporized and reclaimed by the clouds. But putting water in a bucket or jar safeguards from absorption and retards evaporation. In Sonora there are natural jars, named by the Spanish equivalent tinaja. These are depressions carved over eons in protruding stone. Sealed by a lid of fetid-smelling algae, some of these resultant pools can be abundantly plentiful. And for the prospectors, this foul standing water was the stuff of life, as saving as that which burst from stone for the Israelites wandering the desert with Moses. Losing the trail meant extinction; and finding the tinajas insured nothing more than hope. A tinaja is not a cornucopia and sometimes the horn was sucked dry by the thirsty travelers who had come before.
With these morbid thoughts it is a relief that we begin again to rise from the funereal basin that inhumed so many pioneers and ascend a mountain tall enough to turn the deadly climate completely on its head. Continuing south, we’ve reached the Catalina Mountains, a sheer burst of igneous in line with the long arm of the Rockies. At first our elevation is as before, with cactus life in the winding narrowing washes. But now, at about five thousand feet, we notice a change. Saguaros disappear, replaced by junipers and pinyon pines. Ground squirrels and other rodents show themselves, no longer needing to hide underground during day. Jays and lesser goldfinch make a hubbub. The terrain is greener, grassier, and scrubby. We go higher. Now we have Ponderosa pines – and quickly a forest full, their rich black trunks evidence to the fecundity they help promote. Under the mothering canopy of these wind-twisted pines there is actual soil, protected by a duff of soft needles. In these glades are some of the only cushions from the fierce rock that is general to the skin of Sonora.
And when we go higher still, to the nine thousand-foot peak of Mount Lemmon, there are Douglas firs and Quivering Aspens, trees that the mind must associate with Colorado and the high Canadian Rockies. How does a few thousand feet carry us to a world a thousand miles away.
Rain, of course rain. Above the basins there is no rain (monsoons being the exception that proves the rule) because the warm water vapor – the precious little that remains after the San Bernadinos claim their lode – stays low. The Catalinas force it to rise just as we rose; the vapor cools in the thinner air (as we have cooled) and condenses. Amazingly, snow is just as likely as rain in the winter, and the small lodges in Summerhaven before us are seasonal ski resorts.
The snow packs up knee-high. The soil takes its keep and runoff flows to pools and washes and canyons. In spring, when the sun scorches again, Romero Pools and Tanque Verde Falls and other natural reservoirs are boisterous hubs of life, where humans and other animals have followed the lute-song to congregate. (Some humans are far too lemming-like in their response: a few drown each year in the falls.) And thus we come to understand water’s natural transience in Sonora: for looking now, these playgrounds are virtually empty, all dry ditches and empty limestone waterslides, and the lone drake dabbling in shallows appears lost and pitiable.
But as soon as we think we comprehend something of the seasonal cycle of water and life we are challenged afresh when we crest the Catalinas and see below us – Tucson! It is a shock indeed to come from a nearly empty desert basin and now overlook its topographical twin turned into the second largest city in the state. When we descend back below five thousand feet we pass the first mansions. The houses, notched into the foothills, are all of a design that might be called colonial-adobe. The Manichean style doesn’t take, but the homes do offer new founts in our quest for water. Now there are swimming pools, man-made lakes (in which we spot a few sailboats), ponds for Japanese gardens, gargling terra cotta cherubim fountains, and, perhaps more commonly than might make us comfortable, spouting sprinkler heads. Such plenty out of nothing! It is as if Moses’ stone will provide forever. Coyotes and bands of collared peccaries creep past the guards of the gated communities to the open water’s edge. Mountain lions do too, but if they are ever seen the city hires bounty hunters to tranquilize them and ship them away.
We’ve left the Catalinas behind, but the city sprawls on, subdivision upon subdivision in ever-increasing concentricity around the small downtown, the houses meaner now but still filled with thirsty consumers. Beside a well-manicured golf course and the dusty Santa Cruz River there is a fenced-in marsh and smokestacked factory. This is the wastewater treatment plant and beneath it is what remains of Tucson’s watershed. Today the water table is five hundred feet underground. It verges on exhaustion, and what is left cannot provide for the city on its own. And so all this life – and that is what we are looking upon, the extravagant trappings of human life – hangs from a pipeline that starts in Havasu City on the Colorado River.
The Central Arizona Project canal is in truth not a pipe but a deep narrow trough; in any case it is the city’s literal lifeline. In a year twenty billion gallons of water are pumped through and blended with the scanty groundwater that remains, a 336 mile odyssey to help a Tusconan rinse after brushing. Having seen all that we’ve seen, this strikes us as pointedly unnatural, a meddlesome tampering with the ebb and flow of desert tides. Hitherto life was the slave of water, conforming to appease its harshness, adapting hidden tricks and cunning, killing its cousins for their share; and still surviving only by chance and fate.
But humans have evolved differently. Like it was a pet we’ve husbanded water, domesticated it, and kept it on a short leash. There is scarcely any more staggering human accomplishment than the Hoover Dam, which metes out hydroelectric energy to the entire southwest United States, from Tucson to Los Angeles (with Phoenix, the fifth largest city in the country in between). To build it we blasted a hole through the canyon wall and forcibly shifted the entire course of the Colorado River. Human hands diverting a river: Moses indeed!
But we are different desert dwellers from the wandering Jews; we don’t rely on a providing God. And we are different from every other plant and animal around us, because the average human can take for granted water conservation entirely. The balance of our survival is weighed thus: we have pitted our intellect against the naturally occurring resources of the earth. By choosing to live in the desert we are tacitly pledging a trust that scientific ingenuity will always stay one step ahead of its environmental limitations and will always countermand any scarcity. We live by the power and glory of the engineer: as long as he can coerce, contrive, or create water in Sonora we’ll be all right. And so far his ability to sustain a city like present day Tucson must exceed anyone’s expectation.
But let us at least recognize the battle of brinkmanship we’ve waged with the earth. And likewise remember that if we ever go to the tinaja and find it empty, with all of our intellect, we’ll be at nature’s mercy, like any shrub or rodent.
We hasten south once more over an alluvial wasteland. The desert is predominant again, though human development persists: we pass Sahuarita, Amado, Tumacacori, Tubac – different names for the same sort of flyspecks with a few hundred houses pinioned together like ships in a squall. They seem like such meager fruits of battle, and so precariously upheld. In the wilderness beyond the towns, nearer the border, we might spot small orange flags. The flags are markers for plastic tubs with a nozzle and a reflective sticking reading “agua,” placed in the desert by some hopeful Samaritans (and now the hopefulness seems tinged with desperation) to save the lost border crosser. They imagine a Mexican adrift like Hagar in Arabia, her baby left to die of thirst in the bushes, stumbling across the orange beacon of this well of Zamzam. It is an act of planned providence. In the desert mercy comes only from humans – we have seen enough to know that it is a term unknown by nature.
Gradually – and then suddenly – we enter chaparral again, brown-green with sere grass and muscly Live Oaks. This new landscape of steady humps and shoulder blade ridges is an eroded caldera, the remains of an ancient volcano that collapsed on its own core and went dormant. We buzz a juniper tree and a dozen canyon wrens burst forth with taunting trills. There are even deer here and quail – it’s a place with a hunting season. And then, following the slope of the ridges we spot it, our long lost telltale: the trail of bone-white sycamore trunks. And finally we return to a gracious earth.
The creek in Sycamore Canyon spouts from stone and floods south to Mexico. It starts as a tinkling prelude but soon deepens and rushes fugue-like. Cataracts from canyon walls pour down in accompaniment, and now the desert has vanished – rather, water has transformed it. The stream runs in spate and, our cups running over, we stand in wonder, stunned in the rapture of music.
posted by Sam Sacks at
8:05 PM
