Construction Zone

The approved submittal sketch.

Well, it's been about ten weeks since they started digging up our backyard with the intention that it will look a little like the artist's conception image we submitted to the HOA police (the Architectural Review Committee of the Homeowner's Association) for approval.

So we've joined the Construction Zone.

There are scores and scores of new houses under construction to the north of us. By morning twilight, the warning bells of trucks in reverse gear can be heard together with the fire of nail guns and, occasionally, boomboxes playing Sonoran pop songs. Dove Mountain Blvd. becomes a regular stream of pick-up trucks and various construction company trucks, large and small, whether infrastructure businesses (licensed in Texas), concrete trucks, concrete pumps, cranes, plumbers, roofers, HVAC businesses, hardware delivery, landscape outfits, pest control firms — anything and everything you can imagine.

Then there are the swimming pools. Being a new development, every backyard comes with plain dirt, weeds, and construction debris. Many buyers decide to have a swimming pool constructed in their backyards, so there is a regular parade of worker bees and their trucks digging, laying rebar and concrete, etc., etc.

We've joined the club and we are having our own parade of workers: laborers digging holes and trenches, laborers using concrete blocks to fashion raised planting beds and an outdoor barbecue island, plumbers adding outdoor faucets and a natural gas connection for the barbecue, a crew setting up our backyard pagoda, electricians adding outdoor plugs and wiring for the adjustable louvers.

The plan involves a tall pergola over a concrete pad that extends out from the back patio, concrete paths from the side gate to the pergola, a barbecue area (of course), one raised garden for Shari, one raised garden for Tom (with trellis), a trellis outside our bedroom window, and a layer of crushed rock over all the dirt to keep the dust down.

The biggest spectacle was the concrete pour complete with concrete truck and concrete pump. In the morning, a team of workers showed up to finish laying the forms, digging out the cavities to be filled with concrete, and laying a crisscross of rebar, all just in time before the scheduled 8 a.m. arrival of the concrete truck. Also on site was a concrete pump with long sections of hose. Then, to the sound of a boombox dialed to Sonoran pop songs, the crew went at it. By noon, the concrete was all shaped and smoothed.

The building department inspector comes tomorrow to check electrical, plumbing and gas connections. Then, hopefully, we can complete the backfill.

For now, it's all still a bit of a mess ... a promising mess, but a mess. It will probably be several weeks before all the hired work is done, then more time for Shari and me to do clean-up and finish. When the workers are done hauling and spreading ten tons of crushed rock, we might have our backyard ready for our use — but I am trying to be upbeat. Rome was not built in a day.

So if anyone has been wondering what we've been up to this year, now you know.

Tortolita Preserve in March

One of the pleasures of living in the Dove Mountain development is easy walking distance to the Tortolita Preserve. I have no need to get into my car. An alley a few houses down gets me to the Dove Mountain West Park where I follow the wash down and cross the barbed wire fence that surrounds the Preserve. Nature has graciously washed down a section of the fencing so it takes only a couple of ginger steps to walk over the barbed wire. Then it's cross-country following game trails, crossing under another barbed wire fence (the City of Marana leases the Preserve for cattle grazing), to reach the dirt road where there is an access point over a cattle guard. The formal trail starts there.

Or I can walk a few blocks along the streets of the Blue Agave developments to reach that cattle guard then walk the trail.

Walking through the Preserve one encounters countless magical scenes of greenery and budding wildflowers. This early spring, March, the lush greenery is simply stunning after the generous rains we have had over this winter.

The Tortolitas (Spanish for "doves") are a mountain range that peaks at 4,696 feet (1,431 m.). Some three decades ago, the Anglos who set out to develop the slopes used the name "Red Hawk." It took then a few years to realize that the Spanish name, dove, was a wee bit more inviting for new home buyers than hawk (especially a red hawk), so the name "Dove Mountain" was born. The area is incorporated within the town of Marana, also originally a Spanish name, "maraña," which means "thicket." The story goes that laborers dubbed the area Maraña on account of the thick vegetation they had to clear to make way for the railroad.

Even today, there is plenty of uncleared land with dense thickets of cholla, prickly pear and sage brush. On the upper slopes of Marana, in the Tortolita Preserve, there is plenty of maraña plus saguaros, ironwood, and palo verde trees.

Wildlife on San Simeon

A video collection of wildlife taken on our little acre of the Sonoran Desert, including bobcats, javalina, mourning doves, Gila woodpecker, king snake, hummingbirds, chipmunks, rabbits, rattlesnake, Gamble's quail, Cooper's hawk, owls, bats, kangaroo mice, lizards, coyote, grackle, Colorado River toad, and even a raccoon.

Some are taken on my video camera; some on repurposed security cameras.

Foreign Life

The name of our sprawling detached hotel
development is lit up in the hours of darkness,

I feel like we moved to a foreign land and that we are camping in a nice hotel.

We lived on a secluded little acre for almost seventeen years, longer than either of us had lived any other one place. The Sonoran Desert, the Catalina Foothills, and Finger Rock wash became the home that we identified with and San Simeon reflected our identity for friends and family. The house itself with its sunken living room and huge window looking at Finger Rock, its walled backyard with a tower that viewed mountains in all directions, secluded swimming pool, and goldfish pond, its long driveway, eucalyptus trees, sixty saguaro cacti and similar number of palo verde trees, private gully and paths, its raised beds, shade covered garden protected from javalina, rabbit and serpent are all unique, unlike any other property, and all remodeled and fashioned with our own hands. Our two furry children are buried there. It's an acre like no other.

We knew our few neighbors, their properties similarly sprinkled an acre at a time by the Finger Rock wash. From our house, we could hardly see any of theirs. Standing at the south point of our own acre, even our own house was not visible. Of the ten neighbors on San Simeon, only two had lived there longer than we carpetbaggers from Puget Sound. Many were retired, or retired over the time we lived there — like us. I don't think any of us play golf and there are no snowbirds. It's a neighborhood established some fifty years ago. Families had been raised there, but over our years only one home had children.

We had lived in a very unique place so, of course, any other place would be different by definition. We moved only 25 miles away, but it is a completely different world; a foreign country. True, our new home is definitely within the Sonoran Desert and is situated about the same elevation as San Simeon, Dove Mountain folk speak the same languages as those in the Foothills, and the Tortolita Mountains are similarly spectacular with familiar pale Catalina granite and caliche, views, and majestic saguaro cacti, palo verde, mesquite, acacia, ironwood, barrel cacti, cholla, prickly pear opuntia, and desert wildflowers. But Dove Mountain is also very different.

Typical street scene in Dove Mountain: a line of garages with attached living quarters.

Everywhere it's a new development with many unoccupied houses and new areas under construction. Small lots. Huge houses packed next to each other in strips separated by common areas. Intentional builder and covenant-restricted uniformity in appearance, whether colors, fixtures, layouts and landscaping. In our development, Blue Agave II, every house number is uniform and advertises the builder whose name I will not mention. (Say, whose house is this anyway?) Properties look like lines of garages with attached dwellings. Boundary walls (two types: sloped rip-rap over concrete block base and thin red-brown concrete blocks). Flimsy iron gates and fencing. Backyards are left stripped down to the hard soil, barren, dusty, muddy when it rains, and generously sprinkled with half-buried construction debris.

We have lots of neighbors. It's been twenty-three years since I made my home in a small lot neighborhood. All kinds of people: lots of retired couples both permanent and snow birds, young families with kids, professional and military retired. Some folk have dark skin but most with white. Children accompanied by a parent walk past our house to the corner where school buses promptly arrive.

But all folk have something in common: enough money to buy a large, expensive and newly built house, able to spend even more money to finish fixturing it so it's livable, and — in about one in four properties — spend another hundred thousand having a large hole dug in their small backyard to accommodate a swimming pool, ramada and outdoor kitchen.

Our detached hotel on Chaparral Sage will become our home. Like San Simeon, the desert setting is gorgeous and the views stunning. We have discovered walks in the Tortolita Preserve that we can take without having to get inside a car and drive somewhere. And, to be honest, it's interesting to walk the manicured lines of garages with attached living spaces. But right now, I still have feelings like we are camping in a large hotel complex

Tortolita Preserve. A quiet, private walk past a hole in the barbed wire perimeter.
That's Baboquivari in the middle distance just to the left of the solitary saguaro.

These feelings will be forgotten as Dove Mountain becomes all too familiar and the thrill of something foreign fades.

The House at the End of the Universe

Dove Mountain Boulevard runs about seven miles from Tangerine Road up into the foothills of the Tortolita Mountains past innumerable residential, golf club, and resort developments. The road is landscaped and maintained, lined with hiking and biking trails through saguaro forests and thickets (maraña) of cholla and bushes, and graced with views of the Tortolitas, the Tuscon and Santa Cruz River lowlands, the Pusch Ridge side of in the Santa Catalina Mountains, and the successive ridges and peaks of the Rillito, Tucson, Santa Rita, Silver Bell, Baboquivari Mountains and beyond to the south and west.

The slopes of the Tortolitas and the ridges above the road are densely dotted with huge saguaro cacti. Pusch Ridge and the Tucson Mountains are in sharp relief. The ridges of the more distant mountain ranges are arranged in sharply distinct layers of increasingly blue-grey and vague outlines. These patterns of variegated mountain formations extend three, four, five deep into the horizon. One feels as if gazing over the roof of the world.

The boulevard reaches a dead end at Dove Mountain West Park and the Tortolita Preserve.

Our new home is almost at the end of the boulevard, and when we drive up and down through the Sonoran Desert landscaped terrain and savor the views to the basin below and mountains afar until we finally reach the end, we feel like we live in the house at the end of the universe.

P.S.  Credit to Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second in the series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Monsoon Windstorms . . . No Power for Four Days (Climate Change)

The first pole north of Alvernon.
The one behind on the other side of River Road
is metal and gives a sense of scale.

As if moving wasn't stressful enough, we had two particularly powerful monsoon storms with gusts stronger than we had ever seen.

Weather is always big news. After the polite "How are you?" — which never intends or elicits a real answer — the most common subject of polite conversation has to be the weather. "Lovely weather, isn't it?" When the weather gets a bit extreme, some of us reflect upon climate.

We are only in our seventeenth year in the Old Pueblo. Witnesses who have spent a lifetime here tell us how monsoon season used to be regular afternoon downpour. Nowadays, the afternoon clouds still gather but only occasionally do we actually get rain. Rain here is typically preceded by a vanguard of strong winds. The two monsoon windstorms we experienced last month are beyond anything we have seen. We are getting less rain overall, but more extreme weather.

A utility pole torn into toothpicks.

We were driving back home to San Simeon on the afternoon of July 17th when the first one hit. There was a big traffic jam on eastbound Skyline Drive. The traffic lights at Campbell Avenue were dark. Power outage. An extremely busy intersection had become a four-way stop. After about a half an hour we got through to Sunrise Drive and saw a half mile of devastation: scores of huge palo verde and mesquite trees broken, some completely uprooted, even saguaros, bus stop benches and commercial pylon signs blown away, and standing street signs twisted and deformed.

The only way to get to our house is via Alvernon Way.* The Finger Rock Wash cuts across Alvernon just north and just south of our street. We tried crossing from the north, turned around, tried crossing from the south, and turned around. The wash was dangerously flooded. So we had dinner at the Tucson Racquet Club and a couple of hours later the flood had receded to become a shallow, debris laden stream. We drove across.

There were ten huge and old wooden poles along this part of Alvernon.
Only part of one was left standing.

We were relieved to find our house still had power, but trees were broken and uprotted all along the way. Not just scores along Sunrise, but hundreds in the Foothills neighborhoods.

Two weeks later, Friday the 28th, the second storm hit. Rain always gets us outside to stare and marvel, but the wind gusts and hail we saw that afternoon were something we had never seen before. At six that evening, the power went out.

Saguaros were broken in two.

The next morning, we drove around. Alvernon by San Simeon used to be lined by ten huge wooden utility poles with wires and cables that ran up the hill from River Road to supply electricity and internet to thousands of residences. The eleventh is a huge metal pole. It remained standing. The ten old wooden poles had all snapped like toothpicks.

We had four days without power. By the first and second day Tucson Electric had restored power to all but thirty-one customers, the thirty-one clustered around our San Simeon Drive where we live at the dead end. We were in the dark until Tuesday afternoon.

At the top of the hill,
the metal utility pole stood its ground.

Inconvenient? People in the neighborhood fled to hotels, stayed with friends, and borrowed generators to keep refrigerators operating. Inconvenient? We are trying to move to our new house as quickly as reasonably possible so we can sell the old. Hell yes, inconvenient. We took a couple of pads and our small television to Dove Mountain and camped on the floor. Thank goodness we already had internet installed.

I read that this year is the hottest in recorded history, courtesy of modern life and our addiction to burning things for fuel. Regardless of the impact on climate, we as a society are unwilling to make changes. We are propelled by "freedom," the profit motive, and vested interests that buy politicians. We are a ship of fools.

Four days later, ten new metal poles.
The cable lines left dangling with a piece of the old wooden pole.

 

 

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* Alvernon sounds very Spanish, but it isn't. No one really knows the origin but there was an Al Vernon working for the developer of these parts.

Crossover Dinner & Calories

Last night we had our first home cooked dinner in our new tract home on Dove Mountain. Our very first dinner was about a month ago, a week or so after we closed the purchase. That was take-out pizza so it doesn't count as home cooked, but it was with family which made the gathering particularly special.

CS Road. We know which house is ours because its garage door opens when we press the remote.

Two days ago, Delivery Doctors brought over our heavy furniture, including our bed. I like the mover's name. It's a local moving company with the slogan, "We deliver everything except babies." We had brought over some frozen Bolognese sauce leftover from San Simeon, so last night Shari made some salad, we boiled some pasta and heated the sauce. Presto! Spaghetti Bolognese! A crossover dinner at CS (our abbreviation for our new street, Chaparral Sage).

Delivery Doctors carrying Shari's elliptical.
Backing up that truck in our driveway was no small feat.

Moving is complicated, confusing, discombobulating, exhausting, stressful, unpredictable and expensive. If the new house is a new build, triple the foregoing. The intended benefits from the move are there, but in the process, one has severe doubts. Simple pleasures, like a home cooked meal, even a crossover one, are significant milestones.

Among other expenses, moving costs calories. Every day for the last five weeks we have been driving one or both cars packed with boxes and small furniture the twenty-five miles from San Simeon to the End of the Universe on Dove Mountain Blvd. That's about a forty-five minute drive one way, which is about what our drive from Whidbey Island to Seattle used to take, assuming no ferry line or traffic (highly unlikely). Or, for those familiar with Seattle, the time it takes to drive from First Hill to South Lake Union.

Over three days we packed a fifteen foot rental truck twice. My god how Shari and Stephen labored to help! Then it was time for Delivery Doctors to do the heavy lifting.

Tom's new profession.
Phase I, getting the CS house habitable.

All that packing and carrying burns calories. Each day I stepped on our bathroom scale, I found I had lost yet another pound. Turns out, moving can be a good way to lose weight. My suspicion was confirmed by the three young men from Delivery Doctors who efficiently and energetically lifted refrigerator, couch, elliptical, stacked washer-dryer, beds, dining tables, and the rest of our heavy items, stuffed and tied them inside a truck too big to negotiate our driveway, then unpacked and positioned them inside our new home. Each of the three is muscular and trim. One admitted he eats seven meals a day

I expect to regain some weight but it may take a good many weeks. There is lots of stuff to move before we move into Phase III, getting San Simeon ready for sale. Phase I was getting CS habitable, a never ending process that takes either a lifetime or another move. In this case, the initial adaptations were garage floor coating, painting some spaces so they don't look institutional, installing window coverings, and a new fridge. Phase II is the move. Phase III by itself will be daunting. We will need a dumpster or two just to get rid of downed branches on our little acre from monsoon winds, an aspect of why we are motivated to make this move: too much to maintain.

Still, eating a spaghetti dinner at home is a step on the endless journey towards normalcy — and probably, towards gaining some weight.