Skip to main content

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.










Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy.  Those were skills to be learned and practiced.   I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop.  He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes.  He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade.  Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore.  The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up.   I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth.  I knew how to do that.  Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down.  On the second try, aimi
Post a Comment
Read more

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.  Even when all they wanted to do w
Post a Comment
Read more