Underlying Phoenix

Phoenix basin, view from South Mountain.

Phoenix is confirmation that we made the right choice to live in Tucson.

Some 4.2 million people live in a huge sprawl of houses, six-lane streets, freeways, shopping centers, industrial sites, and office buildings variously called Phoenix, Tempe, Glendale, Peoria, Mesa, Chandler and Scottsdale. As some Tucsonans have described it to us, it's like living in L.A.

When we were migrating between Whidbey and Tucson, we either avoided Peenix or drove through and past it. I had some curiosity about the place, but Shari wouldn't let me get off the freeway. From its many freeways, there wasn't much to see that was inviting.

Park of the Canals, Mesa.

When a sister needed a ride back to Mesa, I got to see tragically sad developments: impressive entrance gates, blocks and blocks of little houses, all pretty much the same shape, compressed together, driveways and garage doors, tiny manicured gravel yards with an occasional cactus. The most nightmarish feature was that every house was painted with the identical color.

A friend flew into Phoenix to attend a conference in Scottsdale. I drove up to bring her back home. So I can say I've also been to Scottsdale. But I don't think I really have been because Scottsdale is supposed to be impressive and I was not impressed driving its main street.

Then a few weeks back, another sister flew into Peenix to attend spring graining in Peoria. I finally got my chance to explore for a couple of days. Peenix has its attractions. The ones that interested me the most were the remaining Hohokam sites.

The platform mound at Pueblo Grande.

There was a time -- before the Corps of Engineers, commercial cotton and citrus farming, and climate change -- when the Salt and Gila Rivers flowed through the Phoenix basin year round. The Hohokam excelled in creating extensive irrigation canal systems that supported agriculture, fishing, water fowl, and the largest concentration of Hohokam settlements.

In the Park of the Canals, a somewhat shabby looking place in Mesa, one can see a remnant of the Hohokam canals. When the Merkins replaced Mexicans and O'odham to settle and farm, engineers laid out irrigation lines using the ancient Hohokam canals.

The ball court at Pueblo Grande.

The Pueblo Grande Museum, just east of downtown Phoenix, is the site of one of the largest Hohokam settlements, one that probably controlled access to the Salt River waters and therefore grew politically. It has a partially restored ball court and a large platform mound.

The museum itself is well worth the visit. Now the area is desert scrub scattered with industrial buildings, and the nearby Phoenix Sky Harbor airport looks barren and ugly. But the museum can excite the imagination to wonder how the small Hohokam city flourished among water streams and irrigated fields.

Which is what my sister's companion remarked taking in the view of the Phoenix basin from the top of South Mountain: Imagine what this vast area looked like when water flowed and it was farmed by the Hohokam.

Typical Desert Botanical Garden sculpture (on the left).

There are things to see in Peenix. Driving around trying to find Park of the Canals and then Pueblo Grande, then the motel in Glendale, I got to see downtown Tempe and Phoenix. I can see why ASU is a popular party school. Downtown Tempe is impressive. There's money in serving beer and pizza to college kids.

My sister, her friend, and I spent a wonderful couple of hours at the Desert Botanical Garden, beautifully laid out and maintained. Gourmet food in its main restaurant, an $18 admission, and a pleasant Sunday, it was crowded with better heeled sorts. The metal sculptures in the park were silly, perhaps reflecting the tastes and personal friendships of the museum's trustees. But the succulent gardens are spectacular.

There remain plenty of other sights I would like to see in Peenix, but I wouldn't want to live there.

Blog for Blog's Sake

Writing, like anything else well done in life, is a craft and an art.

For those who like to write, posts on a blog can become a personal expression of thoughts. Ideas or inspirations come and I get in the mood. I play with the ideas, thinking about what and how I want to express, and then the words flow out with a pattern of their own.

The work takes on a life of its own. More ideas come: metaphors, examples and tangents; symbols within symbols.

My favorite part, perhaps the most important, is the editing. The best editing is to take out the extraneous. Ideas become clear and a gift is made to the patient reader.

Readers may be few. Still, the satisfaction remains of writing; hopefully well. We garden, sing, cook, sew, play and paint with the slightly selfish hope that others may admire. But if others' admiration is the reason for what we do, we surely will be disappointed. I think it's good to have some consideration for how others might take in what we have done. The quality of our work is raised. But I think the practical and the ultimate realities are that we work for work's own sake.

Recently two good friends have been inspired to blog, and they in turn have inspired me. So let's all blog for blog's sake.

A fundamental tenet in most spiritual traditions is the attitude memorialized in MGM's lion-roaring motto: Ars Gratia Artis (Art for the Sake of Art). Therefore, bloggers who craft their posts can honestly consider themselves performing a religious duty.

Snow in Tucson

That big winter storm from Alaska that's sweeping across the Midwest had its effect on Baja Arizona yesterday.

Yesterday's low in Tucson itself -- a smidgeon warmer than us in the Foothills -- was 33 degrees with a high of 52. More impressive, we got about a third of an inch of precipitation, much of it in the form of wet snow.

Where we live, local rainloggers logged over a half an inch.

We spent yesterday in a gray snow-clouds, but as I like to say, if you don't like the weather here, wait a few hours.

It's still early morning and the clouds over the Santa Catalina Mountains are just beginning to clear. The big payoff is seeing sunlight playing over the snow-clad mountains.

For local skiers, the pay-off is skiing on top of Mount Lemmon (9157 feet elevation) or, as the Tohona O'odham call it, Frog Mountain (Babad Doʼag). It's the summit of the Catalinas. There's a chairlift there among the aspens, but the slope really only merits a rope tow.

It will take a few days for all the snow to melt. The forecast is for increasingly warmer and sunnier days -- today some clouds; then all clear by mañana.

The nearby Rillito River should be flowing with the runoff. It's not like monsoon rains when we can get several inches of wet in a day, but there will be a pretty decent flow moving debris towards the Santa Cruz River (the main river by which Tucson was founded) and helping replenish our underground aquifers.

All in all, very nice weather for us -- it's the ornamental plants and trees that can't take frost that take a beating.

Snow-Clad Mountains

Last couple of nights, temperatures have again dipped below freezing. It began with some winter rain, so there was ice everywhere. The clouds on the Catalina Mountains hung low, revealing the snow on the higher elevations.

This isn't Salt Lake City, Denver or Vancouver B.C. with snow-covered mountains reaching down to the city limits, but it's still beautiful.

Ploughs in Tucson

The corn shucker. If you look inside, there are some really nasty
metal teeth. Maybe it makes corn flakes or corn meal.

The Binghamton area, by the Rillito River just below where we live, used to be farmed by Mormon settlers until the 1930's when the water table had dropped and Tucson was growing. The area where we live, on San Simeon Drive, used to be a cattle ranch named, oddly enough, San Simeon.

So it is apropos to have some reminders of those earlier, pioneer days. At least something more attractive than the ubiquitous broken bottles and other trash -- some of it possibly quite historic -- that one can find lying around.

That's also a part of Arizona tradition: chucking empty whiskey bottles from stage coaches. The local cowboys weren't very ecologically minded either. Their genes live on in the people who chuck trash by the side of the road. But I digress.

We lucked out. Our neighbors decided to move to Scottsdale and were willing to let go of some of the old, rusty, and really keen farm implements they had on display by their driveway.

Some sort of cultivator.

Shari thought we'd buy one and display it in the otherwise somewhat barren center of the roundabout at the dead-end of San Simeon Drive. I shouldn't describe it as barren. The ocotillo there is stunning. But since we neighbors got together and cleared it of chollas and trimmed the blue agave leaves, there's not much to catch the eye.

We got eight old relics: one corn shucker, three wheels, and three ploughs/cultivators and a potato harvester.

One of the big wheels is earmarked for the dead-end circle. The other seven are way too cute for me to leave them out-of-sight from the front door.

I started putting them by the driveway away from the house. But I liked them too much. I wanted to be able to see them sitting in front of the house. I moved them way closer.

Somehow, simply seeing some old farm implements on the property brings back a bit of the old settler culture. Or so I'd like to flatter myself. At minimum, they remind me of outside work, so they invite me to step outside and do some gardening.

I wonder where we can find more of these rusty rural relics.

Say, are we going native? Not if I have to keep a horse or a donkey to pull these things. Guns and horses are big in Arizona, but I'm not going there.

Winter

Well, I suppose it is a desert. It's not only hot, it's also cold. Come the cold of winter and we forget the heat of summer. Plus we get thirty or more degrees difference between daily highs and lows. By comparison, Seattle can be as low as eight.

We just got through some five nights of freezing weather. When it's thirty or twenty-eight degrees in "Tucson" (that mythical place designated by weather bureaus, usually near airports), it's several degrees colder a few hundred feet higher in elevation here in the Foothills. Plus, if you are near a wash, the temperatures drop even more from the cold air pushed down from the Catalina Mountains. So we've had a series of early mornings in the very low twenties.

Last year, 2012, overall was the warmest year on record in Tucson. We had forgotten about warm socks, thick pants, polypropylene sweaters, coats, and wool clothing. Come winter, we remember why we have such things. It's the swimming pool that seems out of place. It's down to 46 degrees. I have to do a polar bear dip -- just to say I did it.

The goldfish pond was covered with ice. Fish are fine.

We are more prepared than a couple of winters ago when it got down to seventeen and our palm trees lost their leaves. That winter, irrigation water lines burst around three faucets. This winter, I used a trick suggested by our good neighbor Denard -- put a trouble-light with an incandescent, soon-to-be-outlawed, heat-generating light bulb near the exposed water pipes, cover it with cloth, and leave the light on overnight. Plus we covered the plants that are more susceptible to frost. The one citrus tree we have is still small enough to cover, as is the Mexican salvia and our potted geranium and petunia collection.

Wednesday morning was the last of this stretch of freezing. The ten-day forecast has no freezing, and highs will be in the seventies. I took off the sheets yesterday afternoon. My god that was exhilarating to be outside in warmth. After highs reaching only the mid-forties, it got up to sixty. It was still a bright blue sky, but the iced chill was gone.

Citrus leaves are curled, plumeria doesn't like frost even if covered, and the Moses-in-the-cradle is almost as frost-intolerant, but the other covered plants did okay. Some we should have covered -- jade plant (duh) and a South African succulent should have been covered. They look wilted, but I'm hopeful.

The leaves on the two queen palm trees, way too high up to attempt a cover, are also shriveled, but I think they will survive. Queen palms are readily available at local nurseries, often on sale, but they don't tolerate the freezing we get in the Sonoran desert -- better to chose the California palm. Our two queens were planted a long time ago, and we almost lost them a couple of winters ago. They still haven't grown the lush foliage that they have in photos from before the Great Freeze. Smaller queens in the neighborhood didn't do so well.

We're still wearing mukluk boots and wool throws in the morning, and the air-conditioning system is still working in the "heat" direction, but layers get shed as the sun ascends. Snowbirds will be seen wearings shorts and T-shirts in the Safeway parking lot, but year-around locals like us have developed thinner blood. We'll still wear long sleeves.

I should take my polar bear dip before the swimming pool warms up.

Happy New Mayan Long Count

When words fail . . .

. . .  there is the long count.