Latecomers With a Hose

We have a new driveway at the house, and a fine one it is, too!  The original drive-up had been blacktop, and as blacktop does, it had become pretty granular.  The new one is concrete, and the contractor did a superb job.

As you quite likely know, concrete cures, not by drying, but through hydration:  the cement and water react to create a very hard material.  If you have ever tried to break up a thirty-year-old slab of properly cured concrete, you know it is wickedly hard.  In short, Jao and I have committed ourselves to keeping the concrete damp.

When Biosphere II--a kind of giant test-greenhouse intended to be able to support life in isolation--was built north of Tucson, one of the problems that developed was that no one remembered that concrete cures.  Together with the rotting of biological material in the soil, nearly all of the oxygen in the bubble was depleted, and more had to be pumped in.  Jao and I do not want that to happen in our driveway, so we keep the slab moist.  And we get along better than the Biosphere crew, too.  The hose makes all the difference.

It is March, a morning in March, and Mari has a book club meeting coming up soon, so she has ensconced herself in the back yard, book in hand, occasionally calling to me that I should read the book.  I do not know why.  I don't have to go to a book club meeting.  My job is to keep the recoil from the hose from knocking Jao over backward.  Truth be told, I don't care whether he blows over:  I am more interested in staying out of the line of fire.

Patti and Mark, from Minneapolis, visited us last week.  They had heard rumors that not all of the water pipes in the world had frozen fast.  It took all four of us to herd Jao through the Desert Museum: "The world," he kept saying, "is a marvelous place, requiring that life be conducted at a dead run!"  He stayed in the stroller long enough to get to the bronze javelinas at the front gate, after which he refused to ride in it.  The stroller was useful only for temporarily blocking paths when we tried to steer him back toward civilization.

 Another day, we drove south to Tubac, a little "art colony" town south of us, but it might have been the stop at Mission San Xavier del bac--there where once and sometimes there is water in the Santa Cruz River--that most captured our attention.  It is scarcely outside Tucson itself, and is appropriately on Indian land.  Father Kino founded the mission in 1692, and about a hundred years later the present structure was essentially finished.

We keep forgetting, not just that there have been people in this place for about 10,000 years, probably hunting and gathering along the river, but agricultural settlements for at least the last 3000 years.  The Pima and Tohono O'odham nations are the descendents of those people.  So even Father Kino, who came here 300 years ago, was a late-comer.  A hundred and fifty years before him, the Coronado Expedition wandered across Arizona in search of "The Seven Cities of Gold".  And even the present city of Tucson has its roots deep into the soil of history, having been established as a presidio in 1775.  Once, and for a while a part of Mexico, Tucson, which has never forgotten its Native American and Mexican ancestry, was part of the Gadsden Purchase in 1854 that made it a part of the United States.

And that is why Jao and I are watering the driveway; I, a second-generation Norwegian, and he of Thai and African descent.  We are latecomers with a hose.