In our day many people feel revulsion towards the Valley of the Sun, metropolitan Phoenix. And yet people are still moving here. If ever there was a proof that 'Reputation is a Lagging Indicator..."
I've avoided this smoggy monstrosity for most of my career as a full time RVer. It has been a pleasant surprise this winter to find some areas on the western fringe that are still nice. This was probably the largest, irrigable, agricultural valley in the Colorado River system. Only the Grand Valley near Grand Junction, CO, or the Dome Valley east of Yuma come close. And yet the specialness of this never made much of an impression on me before.
Just after sunrise one morning I noticed pendulous bulbs of dew hanging on the side of the van. But just barely. Tap the van, and they collapsed like a monsoon downpour. They were accentuated by the rays of the sun striking them at a glancing angle.
I've avoided this smoggy monstrosity for most of my career as a full time RVer. It has been a pleasant surprise this winter to find some areas on the western fringe that are still nice. This was probably the largest, irrigable, agricultural valley in the Colorado River system. Only the Grand Valley near Grand Junction, CO, or the Dome Valley east of Yuma come close. And yet the specialness of this never made much of an impression on me before.
Just after sunrise one morning I noticed pendulous bulbs of dew hanging on the side of the van. But just barely. Tap the van, and they collapsed like a monsoon downpour. They were accentuated by the rays of the sun striking them at a glancing angle.
Suddenly I was a schoolboy doodling at the blackboard, and why not? Our imaginations need to overflow the narrow embankments of adulthood, every now and then. Touch one of these heavy drops and it coalesces with a neighbor. Now too heavy to just sit there, it sloughs downward, pauses, and then blasts down the side, like a flash flood.
I wanted to draw the river-scape of the major rivers of the West with my finger tip -- drawing in just a few seconds what time and geology have spent eons doing. But it was difficult to write because of scratches in the paint; they are the latent image of thorny mesquite trees that scratched the van, and now they have been developed by the morning dew.
I couldn't help smiling. These scratches were like the vast array of irrigation canals dug by the Hohokams, without metal tools. What did they use--wood shovels and adzes? Perhaps that's not the disadvantage it first seems, if they used the ironwood that grows in the Sonoran desert.
What happened here, along the Salt and Gila rivers, happened elsewhere: between the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, and along the Nile and Indus, back when civilization was taking its first steps, like children starting to organize a game on the playground.
Comments