Living in a Park

Shari and I live in a park. We have park benches, cleared areas and various tended plantings, paths, different park attractions and follies, and a couple of parking areas.

What's a park? A place someone takes care of. Or, in correct English, a place of which someone takes care.

Attractions we have. There's Coathanger Valley and views from its East, West and North Rims. There's a white quartz quarry by the East Rim.

In the cirque we have a thicket of giant agave americanus and a seasonal creek. When it rains heavily enough, water drains from the scuppers and a torrent flows into the cirque.

The Valley has its arroyo, but it's mostly dry. Someone blocked its natural flow with a house, the cirque, and a driveway, so it takes a lot of heavy rain and drenching for the arroyo to trickle to the creosote flats below. But I've seen it flow and flood several times over the last few months.

We have a much admired and remarkable golden barrel specimen. Not only is it a giant by golden barrel standards, it has morphed into three barrels in one.

We have the garden itself which is a reproduction of the wonderous Hanging Gardens of Babylon — minus the Euphrates.

Tomato plants hang and sprawl over elegant mud-brick walls that contain exotic basils, pasillas, and lemon grass, shaded by canopies and framed with varieties of grape vines and all types of fruit trees: apricot, peach, loquat, fig and pomegranate.

On the garden's east side, there is the ramada which provides shade from the bright but nurturing sun. This is where the Laird and Lady of the Park sit and admire their domain, protected by the Great Fence of San Simeon and its three Gates.

We have areas carefully tended to preserve the natural vegetation of the Sonoran Desert. Creosote, sage, palo verde, acacia, pin cushion, cholla, barrel cactus and agaves are plentiful, six mesquite and four ocotillo are growing, and a quick count reveals over thirty mature saguaros and easily as many babies. The Park ranger is reintroducing native wildflowers including brittle bush and globe mallow.

Like a good English garden, we have follies. The Grand Gate is a prominent feature of our Park, and the broken amphora adds a touch of antiquity to the East Rim.

Then our Park has its grand staircase, its minor staircase, several solitary steps, and two boulder-hop staircases.

Particularly convenient for the Laird, Lady and Park rangers, we have guest quarters adjacent to the Park so we don't have to sleep on the park benches or under the palo verde trees. It has showers, beds, a working kitchen, and dish television. And talk about follies! There's the cement pond, a goldfish pond, two automatic cooking pits, and a tower which serves as an observatory.

Autumn and Halloween

Some time about a fortnight ago it became autumn. Overnight, the monsoon heat left and we were wearing long sleeves in the morning.

Cliff and I talked about it last week and again yesterday. Cliff comes weekly to our backyard to maintain the clear water in our cement pond. We both complained about suddenly cool weather and unfamiliar sleeves.

The pool water temperature was down to eighty. That's too cool for Shari so she signed up to swim in the indoor, heated pool at the local Hollywood Fitness gym -- no, Planet LA, or Bodies R Us, or whatever. (Planet of the Apes? Gymnasiums go against my religion.) The point of this paragraph is that we took the pool cover off yesterday.

We'll sweep and dry it off, fold it up and hide it until maybe March. It's like what we do with Christmas decorations, except that we don't have any and, unlike the Holiday Season, Pool Time lasts over half of the year.

So do the five seasons pass in the Sonoran Desert. Halloween is almost upon us.

I know it's Halloween because of the fright I got last night watching just a few minutes of the Republican (and CNBC) Buffoon Show. Those guys are really scary. You think they are pretending? It is the trick-or-treat season. Or maybe they actually believe what they mean? Either way, it was Halloween horrible.

Despite the jack-o-lanterns in the big box stores, Halloween comes and goes in a trice compared to Presidential elections. If we granted Iowa access easements to the oceans, could we have it secede so we don't have to deal with its early primary?

When it takes a year and a half to complete any cyclical season, you know it's out of touch with reality. Heck, even Greece can hold national elections within a week.

Rain in the Old Pueblo

"Just think," says Shari to me at six in the morning. "If we were in the Northwest, it would be like this every day."

Well, not every day, but the point was well understood.

It started raining at about four-thirty. Lightening lit up our dark bedroom. The sound of torrential rain followed thunder. Three hours later, it's still raining. The sky is overcast, it's cold, and our moods are a trifle grey.

"Think of the energy you are saving not having to mow lawns." Once again, Shari was right.

Dr. Ben and Politicians

Last night, Shari and I watched some of Charlie Rose's interview of Ben Carson. We often tune in to Charlie to check out who is on his show. My impression was that Charlie was pretty disgusted with Dr. Ben, but Charlie is an experienced and professional interviewer. He didn't reveal too much in his facial expressions, and nothing in the tone of his questions.

What got my goat, aside from Dr. Ben's glib attitude, was towards the end of the segment when Charlie asked what Dr. Ben thought distinguished him from the other presidential candidates. The answer? "I'm not a politician."

Okay. What do you call someone who has entered an election race for office? An electrician?

Dr. Ben's distinction is that he is a politician without any experience whatsoever. So when is inexperience a qualification for a profession? But, among some of our less critical thinking electorate, inexperience is the ultimate qualification for the highest office in the land.

Which makes Dr. Ben and Donald Trump similarly "qualified". In the world of demagoguery, "inexperience" means "qualified", and up is really down. The two leading Republican candidates for president are similarly inexperienced. So when Dr. Ben answered that not being a politician was his distinction, he also endorsed Trump's qualifications. Some distinction.

But there is an additional quality that Benny, Dumpy, and too many of the other Republican candidates share: intolerance. Among too many of the Republican base, the idea of compromise is heresy. Ask John Boehner. These people live in a world of black and white where facts, understanding, representing other views, and an exchange of ideas all disqualify a person for office. In a world where up is down, the quintessential qualities of a politician in a democracy — representation of others and compromise — are loathed as weaknesses.

Others, notably comedians, have already observed that the same egotistical demagoguery and simplistic intolerance of Trump are the qualities of dictators, not statesmen. I suggest that Dr. Ben is also better suited to serve as a dictator rather than a politician.

It's ironic that Dr. Ben interprets the Nazi holocaust in the light of gun control. Benny may be a highly educated brain surgeon, but he is a complete knee biter when it comes to social studies. Benny, the National Socialists obtained power in Germany during the Great Depression because they were popular. Enough people responded to simplistic demagoguery to form a base for the National Socialist party. Like Trump and Carson, the self-absorbed leader of that inter-war movement didn't care a whit for compromise or people with differing views. Enough people wanted a leader, and the leader thrived on simplistic solutions and scapegoats.

If Dr. Ben wants to draw a lesson from Nazi Germany for the voters in United States today, it's not the dangers of gun control. It's mistaking intolerance for leadership.

Mileage Marker 4, Reddington Pass

My job is to fill two large Waste Management garbage cans each week. I use a regular Rubbermaid can to collect "yard waste", then carry the can-full over to one of the large WM cans and dump the contents. Each Tuesday, the garbage truck comes and collects. In Pima County, WM doesn't segregate yard waste from ordinary garbage. Which is why we pay for two WM cans. On our acre of the Sonoran Desert, I pull a lot of yard waste.

This morning, I was trimming a palo verde tree in front, clipping the unruly, long branches into small pieces so they pack inside the regular garbage can. Then I dumped its contents into the large, two-wheeled WM can by the side of the garage. Twice I dumped and stuffed a load into the big can.

I keep a piece of 4x4 wood there. I use it to stomp down the branches to make room for more. "Stomp, stomp, stomp" as I jammed and flattened the branches inside the big WM can. I clipped another Rubbermaid can full of branches, then again dumped it into the bigger WM can. Again I smashed it down at least a dozen times. I can stuff a lot of branches inside a WM can.

Then I noticed something coiled between the two wheels of the WM can. It's amazing how time slows down as the mind catches up with a dangerous situation. It's a snake. Not just any snake. It's a rattlesnake taking a snooze under the WM can. It doesn't make a move.

I walked backwards really quickly. "Shit," I thought. Actually, I had lots of thoughts, mostly of surprise, fear, and relief. And within the same space of a few seconds, I thought a lot about how damned lucky I was that it was still early in the morning and it was still almost chilly. Maybe the snake wasn't too active to respond. Maybe it hadn't struck because the wheels of the can were facing sideways, so one of the wheels was blocking me from a direct lunge. But even so, "Shit" sums up the tenor of my feelings as the realization sank in that twice I had been standing within a couple of feet from that rattler, blithely smashing down branches inside the can, twenty or thirty times.

I suspect it was the same rattler I saw a month and a half ago sleeping on top of the east side of the gully. See the end of my Two and a Quarter Tons post.

"I have to discourage that snake from hanging around here," I thought to myself. I picked up a small rock and threw it. I had mixed feelings. Part of me doesn't like the idea of hurting snakes. The rest of me was scared and angry. It hissed and rattled. Then I thought, "I better shut the garage door" which was about four feet from the snake. I didn't want the rattler to take refuge inside our cluttered but cozy garage.

I ran inside the front door to get to the garage. I was too frightened to use the garage door. I went around the house away from the rattler. I told Shari about the rattler as I was running back out the front door. She came out to look. She was getting too close for my comfort -- maybe twenty feet away.

Her response to the situation was much more practical than just throwing a rock. She went inside to call Rural Metro. If you pay the monthly fee,* Rural Metro provides not only fire brigade and ambulance service, they also pick up rattlers. (If you don't subscribe and need the service, you pay through the nose.)

I kept an eye on the can and the rattler as I waited for the fire department truck to show up. I could barely see the edge of the rattler's coils in the space between the two wheels.

Same species; different specimen.

It took the guy about a half of a minute and a pair of snake tongs to pick up the writhing, hissing rattler and plop it inside a plastic bucket. "Ring tailed diamondback," he declared.

Shari asked if they dumped the snakes in the Mormon graveyard down the street. We had heard local rumors about the practice.

"No", he said. "We take them to Reddington Pass." Once a week, on Wednesdays, they take their collection there; about a dozen in the summers. "We leave them at mileage marker 4. Probably a place to avoid if you are hiking around."

Good idea.

*Erratum. Rural Metro bills annually.