Small Walls, Big Difference

Front yards covered with crushed rock.

The way developers of residential tracts work, they do some basic wholesale landscaping in the front yards so the streets and houses all look neat, nice and ready to move in. Each front yard gets a tree or two (mesquite, palo verde or shoestring acacia), some bushes (Mexican bird of paradise, cenizo, or trumpet flower), maybe a golden barrel cactus, and lots of hardy, flowery lantana plants, all planted on small mounds of topsoil because each site has been stripped of its native soil down to the hard caliche.

Each front yard is dotted with three or four large boulders, weighing probably one or two hundred pounds each. The boulders are jagged, easily fractured reddish rocks of a variety mined some place else because, like the ubiquitous crushed rock, they are very different from the local native rock, especially the pale granite Catalina rock that is common to the Tortolitas as well as the Santa Catalina Mountains.

An automatic irrigation system is installed so the plants do not wither, die, or look bad over the weeks or months it takes to sell the house. Plus, many buyers are not into gardening and without automatic sprinkling, some lots would end up with dead plantings. That ruins the ambience of the developer’s neighborhood.

One of the grand entrances to the “Saguaro Reserve” tracts being developed just north of our tract.

When the developers bulldoze native vegetation, roads and building sites for a new tract, they always begin with the entrance and a grand monument bearing the pretentiously magnificent name for the tract, often named after a native plant that was bulldozed to clear the lots; like, “Saguaro Reserve,” “Blue Agave” and “Blue Agave II.” The entrance is the first area that the developers landscape. It makes a nice, finished first impression while the tract itself looks like an open pit mine.

The grand entrances and the front yards of each finished tract house are uniformly covered with the same crushed rock. In addition to desert-color conformity and the need to discourage lawns, the crushed rock serves to cover and hide a considerable amount of construction waste: bits of roof tiles and perimeter wall concrete blocks, plastic sheeting, styrofoam, nails, caffeine drink cans, candy wrappers, cardboard, and layers of concrete left over from when they mixed it on the caliche.

Digging the trench for the larger wall requires a jackhammer
to break up the caliche and some place to pile the dirt.

In short, we live in a neighborhood where the front yards look alike and somewhat unnatural.

We inherited two mounds in our front yard that are a bit larger than what the developer dumped on other front yards. Looking out front at the mound outside my new office window, I would see the uniformly crushed rock everywhere, as well as three large, black plastic clean-out sanitary sewer drain caps. The front yard is also adorned with two storm drain outlets and a flat, rectangular metal cover with “Tuscon Water” written on it. To hide these embellishments, I covered the clean out caps and lined the house-facing sides of both mounds with native rock. Over the weeks we were moving in, I employed Agamemnon each day to bring a load of plants and rocks from our little acre on San Simeon. Now when I gaze out from my office window, I see my private view of native rock.

Shari’s very excellent stucco finish.

I tore out each lantana plant in the front yard (Shari is allergic to their pungent fragrance), and planted some small saguaros, barrel cacti, hedgehog cactus, pincushion cactus, a sotol (desert spoon), a Mexican fence post, and Mexican aloes to begin the process of making the front yard Tom-friendly.

Since March, out attention has been towards making the backyard livable. Now that the back is substantially completed, we have started work on redefining the two mounds where they face the street with low, cement block walls. Trenches have to be dug and it doesn’t take long before shovel meets caliche. Out comes my trusty electric jackhammer. Excavated dirt is neatly piled on double layered drop cloths until a level plane is carved out, pea gravel spread, and blocks placed.

Agamemnon’s load number four:
fifteen blocks, two 60 lb. bags of concrete mix,
and two tubes of Liquid Nails.

I can rough in the wall and stucco, but it takes Shari to smooth the cement finish so evenly that a stucco professional would be envious. Neighbors passing by on their walks stop to praise the work — in large part because of Shari’s finish.

Agamemnon has served valiantly hauling some eighty concrete blocks (2700 lbs), 28 concrete caps (some 225 lbs.), 360 lbs. of concrete mix, 120 lbs. of pea gravel, and 160 lbs. of stucco mix — six or seven trips; all in all some 3500 lbs. or over 1600 kg. Only one or two 80 lb. bags of stucco mix and a tube of Liquid Nails left to haul.

I used to identify our house by clicking the remote garage door opener. The house with the garage door opening was ours. Now guests can identify our house by the small, architectural walls in the front yard. Nice.

After seven days of work.

Backyard Bliss

It is a much smaller canvas than the little acre we had at San Simeon, but it has its charm and it requires a lot less work.

The huge pergola and two trellises provide shade, as will the two mesquite as they grow and spread wide. The planter on the right has already grown a bumper crop of basil, and the recently planted seeds of Chinese broccoli (gail lan or kailan), arugula, and dill have sprouted. The rest of the yard is devoted to drought-tolerant cactus, agave, yucca and euphorbia — “drought” being a somewhat odd term to use in the Sonoran Desert as the climate is mostly drought. Maybe “desert-tolerant” would be more appropriate.

“B-island” L to R: octopus agave, saguaro, totem pole cactus & behind it a golden torch cactus, joshua tree yucca.

From the drone perspective, the yard isn’t quite as interesting as from ground level. In my imaginative mind’s eye, I think of the rocks as Yosemite-sized walls.

“B-island” L to R: Hedgehog cactus, totem pole cactus, saguaro, artichoke agave (foreground), octopus agave.

“A-island,” “B-island,”
and the corn-husker.

As I carefully place large, medium and small rocks then scatter pebbles and sand scraped from wash deposits, I feel as if my childhood love of model trains has found a new expression.

Here we are in November and we have some flowers blooming. I like to think that is evidence that the plants are happy. (The alternative explanation is that the plants are desperately trying to propagate before they croak.)

Most plants don’t like being dug up and moved. It’s certainly true of cacti. I know the torch cacti we brought over in pots from San Simeon had trouble adjusting as their pots got moved out of the way several times over some nine months. I finally planted them under the big trellis over the raised desert garden.

A couple of smaller torches are still struggling, poor things, but two of the tall specimens seem to be happy being freed from the confines of a pot and finally planted. Either that, or the trellis shade allowed them to survive the summer sun, and now that the sun is lower on the horizon, they are able to enjoy its less fierce sunshine and decided to bloom. That's the fourth flower on the one on the left.

We still have several places available for additional plantings in C- and D-islands, but the sense of urgency has diminished because I know enough that some of these plant get big. For some like saguaros and joshua trees, that will take decades; for others, a couple of years and they will be crowded.

Another reason to shift attention is that we are now tackling the two “pony” walls in the front yard. The smaller one is up and I am using my trusty electric jackhammer to dig into the caliche for the trench in which the larger one will rest its bottom row of concrete blocks. Stay tuned.

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.