Where Cattails Want to Go When They Die, and Do

"Sweetwater": straight from the "Sanitary District"!

It was not sweet when first I tasted it; still unused. Water in the Sonora Desert does not evoke images of rainforests and mountain snows; no surge of salty seas. It tastes of minerals and open pit mines.

But the County, or City, or Someone Responsible has created a wetland on the west side of town, alongside the dust-dry Santa Cruz River, to reclaim as much of the water we waste as it can, and in doing so, has created not just a process and a place for water to be sifted and sanitized and sent back into the ground, but a kind of park, with ponds lined to frustrate the desire of water to run downhill, down into the ground, so it ponds up, nourishing the happiest cattails God ever created, surrounded by what might have been riverside trees. It is a magnet for water-loving birds, and bird-loving, ankle-booted, binocular-bearing aviary statisticians.

I go there to take pictures, watching where I step. Things that crawl on their ribs go there, too, as do raccoons sometimes, snorting and family-quarreling with each other like javelinas. They take the easy way out into the reeds on fallen tree trunks, fishing for small critters; probably turtles I should guess, so many of them there are.

Sometimes the water surface divides the world into parts above and reflections below.

I do not often invite Mari to come along: she never saw a cattail she did not wish for.

There are viewing platforms built out over the water, and where Mother Sonora did not provide waterways, the Sanitary District did.

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