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A Modest Proposal to Refocus the Rio Nuevo Project



Not the Cat of Santa Lena,
but close enough
I am easily astounded.
That is another way of saying that
I am ignorant of almost everything.

It astounds me, for instance, that
having grown up in the Pacific Northwest,
of good, wormy Norwegian stock,
reeking still of cod fish and boiled potatoes,
that I love the Sonoran Desert as much as I do,
and that having been nurtured on a diet
in which the most common spices were
sugar and salt and butter,
with a holiday hint of cardamom,
I like really spicy food.

How did that happen?

There are mountains in this desert.
One of them--Mt. Lemmon--stands on the north edge of Tucson.
It is by no means the tallest mountain in the neighborhood,
but it measures up respectably well.
The little mountain range in which it is the tallest
is named the Santa Catalina.
For reasons that probably have to do with
Norwegian spice and cardamom,
or perhaps because of a steady diet of Hola and Lena jokes,
I hear myself calling it the Cat of Santa Lena Mountains.

One can drive almost to the top of Mr. Lemmon.
In fact, I assume someone has:
there is an observatory up there.
Sometimes there is snow up there, too,
but as mountains go, it is a high hill:
it is 9,157 feet, or 2,791 meters, tall.

When I was a callow youth--
I am now a callow old codger--

[Did you know that "callow" (meaning
"inexperienced") comes from Old English, "calu",
meaning bald?  So, once a callow youth,
I am now a callow old codger.]

. . . Mt. Rainier was 14, 407 feet tall.
Now, probably by virtue of better measurements,
it is 14,410 feet, or 4,392 meters, tall.
So maybe it is the mountains that have drawn me
to the Cat of Santa Lenas.  No, not!  However. . . .
Mt. Rainier is a real mountain; snow covered,
and biding its time until it blows its top, again,
as its relative, Mt. St. Helens did a few years ago.
Mt. Lemmon is blowing the dust off its pate,
wearing itself down to a golf course.

Then, in what for me is a fit of unfettered curiosity,
I wondered about the height of the tallest mountain in Norway.
Norway is the Land of our Foreskins, after all,
and a passing hint of cardamom urged me to wonder.
After, all, Norway is the land of fjords and mountains.
Galdhøpiggen is 8,100 feet, or 2,469 meters, tall.  

What!

[I told you I am easily astounded, and ignorant.]

Mt. Lemmon is a generous 1,000 feet taller 
than the tallest mountain in Norway,
which is, itself, also the tallest mountain in northern Europe!
There are lots of mountains taller than Mt. Lemmon, 
and the tallest one of all--taller even than Mt. Everest
at 29,035 feet, or 8,850 meters--is Mauna Kea in, and on, Hawaii.
Mauna Kea sits on the ocean floor, 
so while only 13,796 feet of its height are above sea level,
its overall height is 33,500 feet, or 10,210 meters
from its foot to its peak.  

It stands in deep water.

But no matter!  
Personally, I think the future for Tucson
lies in the Norwegian model for fame:
fjords and mountains!

The future for us, here in southern Arizona,
the sane part of Arizona, 
almost far enough away from Phoenix 
and from the Welfare Cowboy across the State line in Nevada,
lies--as I see it--in deepening, widening, and diverting
the Santa Cruz River, already wending through our downtown,
just a bit east to cause it to brush up against the Cat of Santa Lena Mountains, 
thereby creating a natural cruise ship journey through Pima County.
A course right through the Sunrise Country Club golf course
would be just about right.
The Country Club is going broke, anyway,
and who would not rather have a home
at the edge of a fjord than on the tenth tee?

It is a manageable proposal:
the Santa Cruz River has no water in it most of the time,
so, unlike the construction of fjords in Norway,
there will be no need, here,
to dam off the ocean while the fjord is being dug.  
The Rio Nuevo Project, downtown, needs imagination.
Their earlier proposal to build an aquarium 
to showcase fish that live somewhere else
did not quite distinguish us from Phoenix
and the Arizona Legislature.  A fjord would.

We have a mountain.
We have a river,
and we have water:
we bring it down from the Colorado.
And every once in a while
water pours off the Cat of Santa Lenas,
down Sabino Canyon.  
We could build a waterfall.

I think you can understand, now,
how I got from my first paragraph
to the last.










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