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.

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

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. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog