Like Leading a Fish to Sand

Pretty exciting! It is getting to the time of the year when it might rain, again.

It rained last year. In fact, on the day when we drove into town, on our move back from Minneapolis, it rained so hard that we could not get up the hillside to our house. El Camino del Cerro--The Highway of the Hill--had so much water crossing it that we had to wait for the dry season to begin, an hour later. I waited at the gas station.

In the meantime, we have not really had any rain worth noting, but we have had snow. I took Jao outside, where a snowflake fell on him, and explained that there were places where the snowflake was several feet deep. Ever since, whenever I say "rain", he has shrugged and given the look that says, "Oh, Jesus! Another 'riding to school on a pony in a snowstorm' story".

But I am serene in the confidence that the monsoon season nears, again. It says so right on the front page of the newspaper. It also says that the temperature is about 105 degrees.

You must remember that I was born in Tacoma, Washington. I understand Jao's incredulity. I recall hearing stories from Watkins' salesmen who told of places where the sun shined so intensely that people's skin turned brown. You can imagine what that meant to a kid who had fish scales on his arms, and water up his nose: it meant that Watkins' salesmen were bald-faced liars. It was not until I, myself, became a Fuller Brush Man that I began to appreciate how to tell the truth carefully.

Nearly sixty years ago, I moved from Washington State to California, and since then, finally, to Arizona (for about the fourth time). I am not so much drawn to the desert as I am riding a crest down from a deluge. There is something comforting about living in a place where tangible humidity is called a monsoon.

The Santa Cruz River cruises north, scarcely a mile from our house. All the water in the Santa Cruz comes from the the discharge pipe at the treatment plant, about two miles from our house.

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog