Sweetwater Swamp

Its real name, of course, is Sweetwater Wetlands. In a runoff contest between Sweetwater Wetlands and Sweetwater Drylands, they chose Wet.

Our city parents collect our waste, purport to treat it, and then drain it into pits and ponds where it becomes sweet. You might notice, in the photo below, that you cannot see any part of the duck that is below the plimsoll line. I rather imagine that, for any plant that requires wet feet and food, that heaven is a spot just west of I-10 north of Prince Road.

Diving tortoises and ducks disappear from view within microns. Frogs fumble about trying to locate where the sun might be, and having stumbled onto it, walk across the ponds to the reeds at shoreline.

But we live in the Sonora, and any semblance of water is sweet (we say to ourselves, hoping that we do not fall in).

Our struggle, here in Tucson, and in much of Arizona, is to treasure the water we have, almost all of which now is below ground. Developers of housing tracts want all of it, and more. Our elected officials seem willing to trade away even our waste water for "development". The trickle of waste water from places like Sweetwater Wetlands, now released into the bone dry Santa Cruz river bed is, for all practical purposes, the only water in the Santa Cruz most of the time.

Swamp it is, but it is the only swamp we have, and we love it.

Comments

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

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

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. ...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog