I'm Not A Real Cowboy I Just Found The Hat

If only granddad Dennis, when I was a child in knee pants, had never let me ride a broken down old plow horse named “Old Roan” bareback around the cotton fields where he was plowing, I might never have had to miss that touch of earth overgrown with trees and bushes, moist cool air, and being part and parcel of a huge animal sprung from that dark ground and primal energy.   But  around and around I went, much too young to realize I wasn’t getting anywhere, a pattern which I would get to know better.   Like the time my friend was building an adobe house  and there happened to be a horse next door and I made a rope halter and rode it bareback around and around the “construction site” to “help” him.   And the time my girlfriend and I rode together from the stables in Albuquerque, and on another date….but that's all too weird to talk about now, how much time there was to kill, now that the hands of the clock are jerking spasmodically toward, "game over".

But it was experience that qualified me to ride around and around as an extra in a movie based on Paul Horgan’s “A Distant Trumpet”.  It was set in Gallup, New Mexico, about a day’s drive from Albuquerque, where I was going to college for a Master’s in English Lit. and so brought Keats, Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth to visit the Absurd in the image of Troy Donahue and Susanne Plashette, and myself as one of about fifty Calvarymen.  The daily routine was to get a horse, and get in line to have dirt and water thrown on us to make it look like we’d been riding hard and fighting for days without a bath.  The Navajo kids they had playing Apaches would grin at us as we came in to suit up and saddle up and say,

“We’re gonna get you.”

But not even that, not even close,  it was mostly unintentional comedy.  A writer from Albuquerque who lived in abandoned houses and wrote huge novels in which all the characters had names from comic strips and went around and around (and around), always got a broken down old horse that couldn’t keep up and he would talk to it as it plodded along,

“You’re the best damn horse in this WHOLE outfit, yes sir, you’re the BEST horse…..”

And White Cloud, the Navajo chief, playing an Apache chief, was instructed to ride down a cliff and up to Troy and get off and say something in (Navajo) “Apache”. The first time he did it the director hollered at him that  he was going so slow it lost interest, so the next time he ROARED down the cliff, jumped off, ran up to Troy and started shouting rapidly and startled Troy so that he broke up laughing.

A lot of Westerns are so romantic it probably takes twice as long to film them just because of laughter breaks. And just in case we forgot it was mostly a fairy tale reality, a member of our group was suffering from a bad marriage that he got into because he got someone pregnant.  And his obsessive talk about it seemed to point to all the reasons for the comfortable illusions of identity in Westerns, sad heights from which we could look down into his abyss. 

And all night we’d hear drunk Indians roaming the streets beneath our sleazebag hotel, and all day we’d ride into the romance of Indian and Cowboy.  One morning I got a horse that didn’t walk, it danced.  It reminded me of Crazy Horse’s dream of “dancing horses” from which he got his Indian Name, "Dancing Horses", which the whites translated as “Crazy Horse”. Every step of my dancing horse was springy and strong.  I couldn’t believe it was real and then it wasn’t.  Some guy came up and said,

“That’s MY goddam horse, get off it!”

And so I did because what did I know? And that's the way, in some sense, it would always be.

On the way “home”  we all sang a chorus from a song by Buck Owens that was on the top ten charts at the time:

THEY’RE gonna PUT me in the movies,
THEY’RE gonna make a BIG star outa me,
BIGGEST FOOL that ever hit the BIG TIME,
And all I gotta do is act NATURALLEEE.

And then there was the night in Albuquerque around 1962 when I skipped a very important poetry class, in which tapes of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Gregory Corso, Charles Olson, Fielding Dawson, Michael McLure and a host of other interesting poets were being played (and played on my nerves), and discussed by a poet I've had to learn a lot from and also had to learn a lot about how not to try to be him, Robert Creeley.  Just be myself, easy for him to say, but that group ego was giving my self a pounding, and Mark Twain was saying,

"Just be yourself is the worst advice you can give some people."

Or get over yourself or let yourself go, but how, with the collective angst hanging over me like a thunderhead.  I used to tell friends I majored in Theatre but had to get out because there was too much drama.  And now there was too much drama in literature.  I liked the poetry but the endless ego bashing talk about it set up a mental dissonance that made me feel crazy and I had to get out, out, OUT, anywhere.  Or would you just shut up! Would you....just tell me from WHENCE this anxiety that has to always be marking, remarking, like a dog pissing to mark out his territory, and for what this need to pass judgement on everything? What's that supposed to buy you?  Play our games, win our prizes? Baby you ain't nothin BUT a game, I'm walking away from the table....

"Where the hell were you?" he asked, "I NEEDED you in that class."

---YOU needed ME! But I'm just a kid.---I thought, but all I could do was blurt out that I went up in the Sandia Mountains overlooking Albuquerque to go horseback riding, but the stable gave me a horse that I felt was too old to be riding, so I just walked him around and looked down at the lights of town....
And he just grinned and shook my hand and walked away.
For the rest of my life I would realize how important his class was to me, and how important it was to get over it and not give a shit about its proposed values to become myself.  Later he would tell me he was sorry I had to bear the brunt of his ambition, because he was big that way, and it was gratifying, but my actual grief was for another kind of conversation. I never failed to always get my performance pieces completed too late to let him see what I had learned, what I had tried to tell him, that there was poetic speech that tried to hit things dead on and stumbled into black holes of absolute truth and absolute self and there was dramatic speech in which the ignorance of one character could tell us more about the relativity of truth than the intelligence of all the others.
“Well, I think it’s important to be a intelligent as you can at all times.” He said.
But that's not where it's at for me.  I'd rather be a clown than to try to participate in seminars full of people trying to be as intelligent as they can at all times and just sounding dumb and dumber.  If Jerzy Grotowski knew anything when he told a super serious actor,

"It is important not to die too intellectually."

It is also important not to be too self consciously intelligent, and to be as stupid and silly as you can sometimes in order to show, like the justice system, that the search for the truth has to be a dramatic conflict or an arbitration if it's not to be a masturbation, and the dreary lives of ordinary and ignorant people  speak volumes that we are deaf to at our peril.  Through the years I would wish to hell he was there at magic moments when I could make silences speak in musical comedies where subscripts took it to the limit.  And I would turn to his ghost and say,
“Where were you!?  I needed you in that 'class'!”

 He wrote on the blackboard once:
“What do you have to say?”
More importantly, what do other people have to say? Yes WHAT? I wondered back then when there were solid lines between people and places nobody could argue with.  And now there are no places, much less safe ones and no lines and so no “away” in which to throw the garbage, or as Sartre and Camus realized, people we don't like.  The crime scene is everywhere.  The disaster is everywhere.  Where can we run to?  How can we relax?  Only the tightrope walker knows.  Who are we?  What would be real fulfillment?  Only the SHADOW KNOWS!!! Yes just keep on talking, keep on walking, but for godsake, keep on listening...

And what did I need that old horse for?  What did HE have to say?  There was a feeling of wholeness and quiet out there, nothing that thought it had to last forever, the sky like a huge silent cry and yet whole, complete, time no longer moving and every so called "moment" already gone by the time you could say "now".  THAT was the Big Time, and I prayed to the god of clowns to let me be the "biggest fool that ever hit the big time",

the Big time Big Self of childhood and night sky with starlight streaming straight into your brain on a lost two lane New Mexico road one night, and the wind whispering a thousand miles,

"You're nobody, you're nobody, you're nobody...." and that's OK...

...FOOL! FOOL!  God Damned Fool, that constantly echoing self flagellating refrain of Country And Western songs OUGHTA have qualified me as a Cowboy, but the Big Time Big Self was to become a totally different, audience participation, labor of lovelessness.  FOOL! FOOL!  Well I'd rather be a fool than any serious man flinging feces and words at the wall to see what will stick and driving nails to prove he's a carpenter...
But if that’s what you believe you have to believe it alone, she said.
In years to come I would go back to those poets and their precious pain, their nursery rhymes trying to be  projective verse and/or drama, their dead right moments held like a pearl growing inside an oyster, a precious hurt saved by a professional victim unwilling to let it out and diminish its power, like the line from HOWL (speaking of animals),
“…the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit.”
and then torn and unfulfilled, I would go back to nature for relief from their terrible beauty and remember “an incredibly fucked up young man” (as he had once described me) and an old horse who had a lot to say to each other,

and all the rest of a hurting broken world that also had nothing to say. 
And there was a cold winter morning in Kansas when I rode out with my then brother-in-law and his son to find a Cow who was pregnant and had not shown up at feeding time.  He took it personally.  When his animals were hurt, he seemed to hurt worse than they did.  We took a horse trailer out to where the road ended and then took our horses off in separate directions across the snow covered hills but not so far apart that we couldn’t see each other from the ridges.  I saw her first, down in a gully partially hidden in some scrub trees, and waved to him and he waved to his son and I saw them coming at a gallop as I rode down the hill, got off and dropped the reins in the snow beside her.  She was lying on her side with her womb prolapsed and lying flat and bloody on the ground. The calf was dead.  We had to get the vet to come with  a boom and a sling, put the womb back in and  transport her and hold her up in the barn until she’d recovered enough to start eating. 
Something about that life and death scene, has stuck with me through the years.  The feel of old oiled leather saddles and bridles, the smell and mass and energy of big animals and blood on the snow...what you came from and all to which you can aspire.  And seeing a womb all flattened out, without shape, was as if all space-time had flattened and so was no longer infinite.  It was only the angle, the curvature that gave life and death any meaning, or as someone said,
“All meaning is an angle.”

Or as Conrad Aiken wrote in "Blues For Ruby Matrix",
Those curves of hers
That curve beyond
Geometry of hand, or eye
Or mind.

( And, if you ask me, are not kind.)

It all plays over and over in my mind through the years, the grey skies, the gently rolling hills, the cow, the calf, my ex brother in law dead now.  Part of me will never leave that place but the rest of me can't stay there, because the whole scene is a creation of time as moments instead of flow, something that is and is not, is just a THING we want that just points to a hole that can't be filled, too perfect, like European cattle in the Western U.S., unsustainable. 

Maybe that’s why, at the end of the movie, the cowboy is always riding away. 

A River doesn’t run through it anymore.   In the early 1900s it ran through the center of my two lots, the center of my house, and the center of the golf course.  It was a tributary of the Santa Cruz.  (I found nine feet of sand below the basement as I was digging the underground Air Conditioning ducts.) The Army Corps of Engineers damned up that tributary with a berm that sits over a sand trap just outside my back yard.  They tried to make water run uphill, resulting in floods in my and my neighbors’ back yards when the big storms come in from the Baja.  That was when the Santa Cruz ran year round and my farmer friend, Bob Sotomayor, who died in his 90s, about teen years ago, was a kid in knee pants and fished for Crawdads and got chased by the Chinese farmers whose little truck farms lined the river banks.  Then farming, mining and the City sucked the water table down and you could watch one Cottonwood after another dying on the road down from Mt. Lemmon as the water table dropped foot by foot.  

Then the well near my camper went dry and the settlers had to abandon the huge reservoir they used to water their fields.  And then the golf course managers planted tamarisks and 114 acres of Bermuda grass… 

But there was still something left to hold on to in the 80s, when I first started building in the El Rio Neighborhood. I could walk out on the golf course at night to a big pond in the center where moonlight filtered down through the shimmering leaves of a giant Cottonwood that stood beside it.  It was a magical kingdom teeming with wild smells and insects and water plants.   Frogs and fish were jumping and water fowl would drop in on their way North or South.  I could hear them from my bedroom window chattering all night in the reeds.  Then Ronstadt , in response to golfers’ complaints that they were losing their balls in the pond, had the bottom cemented and had the Cottonwood cut down.  Nothing could grow in the chlorinated water and the wild water birds didn’t fly in anymore.  It was kind of sad, in a way.

But nature fought back.  The grass and trees and “weeds” in course,  for all our resistance and ingratitude,  still kept our air fresher and cleaner and up to ten degrees cooler, than the rest of the city in the summer.  It is also still, in spite of ourselves, a haven for wildlife.  Hundreds of birds have been documented there by the Audobon Society.  Hawks, Javelina and Foxes can still be seen and Coyotes still sing there at night because the wildlife corridors that join it extend through local arroyos up to the Colorado River basin.  But now, once again, the golf course as a living ecosystem and the neighborhoods it supports, are under attack. 

Then came the suit by The El Rio Coalition II to force the turnover of all documents relating to the sellout of our neighborhood resource to Grand Canyon University.  Judge Christopher Starring in his ruling said the deputy City Attorney lied on the witness stand. The evidence clearly showed that staff and developers colluded to bypass neighborhood input.  Shortly after that ruling there was a break-in at the Ward 1 office and only one thing was stolen, a computer whose hard drive could have contained that very information. 

It wasn’t like we had no warning. The first use of OVERLAY by which developers offer to remediate the obvious damage they’re going to do, came with the high rise dorms, office and apartment buildings, that destroyed the skyline and peace and quiet of West University Neighborhood in the 80s.  Chris Tanz said, at the time,

“We are just the canaries in the coal mine.  This should be a warning to all neighborhoods.” 

West University Neighborhood got twelve thousand signatures at the Street Fair, but the will of the people couldn’t hold a candle to the power of money.  In Barrio Calle, Cushing Street, the International Arts Center at the old Lohse Y, the Steinfeld Warehouse,  rich people used media code words like “crime ridden, drug havens, dilapidated eyesores, failing neighborhood, (failing golf course?) unsafe structures” in order to get the City Council to subvert and violate its own ordinances, and depreciate property values so their developer friends on the Tucson Regional  Economic Organization to erect posh office buildings and apartment complexes in the same places and sometimes the very buildings they had Code Enforcement condemn. 

And so the gentrification bulldozers may soon be clattering over invisible rivers in the golf course, and code enforcement will be here to clean things up for the developers and we’ll have to say,

“Come on  in.” and, like Don Rickles said to Frank Sinatra once,

“Make yourself at home, Frank, HIT somebody!”

Come on in, stomp around, make up the rules as you go along, draw lines, make marks, pretend nature will honor them.  Everybody needs to live the same way, otherwise chaos and anarchy and global warming might erupt.  Levy fines, assess liens. THAT’LL make people more competent!  It’s a proven medical fact, stress and sleepless nights can keep you young.  Send the poor to join the bowed heads at City Court where the Constitution has all the application of quantum physics because only the rich can afford lawyers.  Evict us from our unsafe houses.  We’ll be better off on the street where we’re entitled to one sleeping bag or one blanket and one bottle of water because neatness is key.  Batter our brains with the cowardly sameness of cars and the deadly dull whisper roar of millions of rush hours full of quiet desperation.  And the life of the mind and the adventure of consciousness can go to hell and stay there, and still the City coffers open their rotten mouths to be fed. Send the old to nursing homes to die of loneliness.  Talk about weeds, and property values like you HAD values. 

What can we do to keep hope alive?

We have a plan.  By scheduling instead of chopping the course up, we can keep “The First Tee”, 18 holes, add hiking, biking, nature and culture walks, gardening, aquaponics and other community activities.  If service to a broader demographic doesn’t have any sex appeal, making more money will.  If the City can charge fees for golf it can charge for the enjoyment  (and maintenance) of the natural resources within and surrounding the golf course.   Just a trickle of solar pumped water from the reclaimed water already in the course flowing north toward the decommissioned Roger Road Treatment Plant (soon to become a U of A aquaponics center) down the arroyos and through the ponds at Silverbell Golf Course can turn the area back into the riparian paradise it once was.  It can grow gardens, ponds and native food bearing plants.  We have a grant notification from Arizona State Forestry service to create “A Tucson Food Forest”.  We have model buildings and plans by an architect that will make it possible to build at a sizeable profit and still honor our rich cultural history and respect our children’s natural inheritance.   We have models in municipal projects in 18 cities across the country that saved their “failing” golf courses  by converting to this type of multi use.  We have models in New York City’s “Highline” and reclaimed land, San Francisco’s “The Farm” and San Antonio and New Orleans’ River Walks, reclamation projects these cities saw more value in than developments.  Nature and art are good for business and there is a 10x multiplier effect for tourist attractions and art events.   San Diego thought it could make more money on a waterfront walkway than 8 lanes of highway.   Just another good idea?  Did you ever stop to think short term profit might be just another good idea?  Or money itself as a reference to real world value?

But When I broached this to Ward 1 they said we were,

“…just a handful of neighbors”

There is no hope unless we make this a situation in which the movers and shakers have to act in public instead of in backroom deals.  The Request For Proposals process is the opposite of public.  The people of The El Rio Neighborhood are entitled to the dignity of an informed choice.  But getting to choice is a hard row to hoe because we’re dealing with very sad , cynical people.   Like Lily Tomlin said,

“No matter how cynical I get, I can’t keep up.”

But sooner or later cynicism will be meeting itself coming and going because,

“There are no jobs on a dead planet.”

Until then that big numbers game in the sky, like the poor, will always be with us. Journalist Lincoln Steffens documented a consistent pattern of corruption extending from local to national and business to government to organized crime. Corruption such as we must endure in, yes, Tucson  Arizona in 2015, he found in the thirties and forties in city after city throughout the U.S. .

“Tracey”, in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” said,

“Everybody gets corrupted.  You gotta have a little faith in people.”

What would give me another chance to have a little faith in people would be to hear those wildfowl in the big pond in the Golf Course again some night.  Until then I raise ducks, Muscovy Ducks, they are quackless (cheaper without the quacks).   I go out to their “duck tractor” late at night sometimes and they get up and waddle over to “talk” to me with voices that are like a whispered croak from Don Corleone.  As long as I stand there and talk they will stand there and wag their tails, raise their crests and poke their beaks at me and talk as enthusiastically at the end as at the beginning.  I don’t understand one damn thing they’re saying but something gets communicated that fills a little blue corner of my heart better than I think human speech ever will. Camus said life with others is absurd. Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” Do I and my neighbors have a chance (or a choice) in that hell?  Robert Creeley said,

“If you never do anything

For anybody you are spared

The tragedy of human relation

Ships…”  a solution that is its own problem  for which Camus said the primary motion before his court was,

  “Should I kill myself?”

Someone else said the answer to that question was,

“Eight Pelicans flying North under a grey sky.”

Call To Arms

HERE’S OUR PLAN

(FROM CASA GOOFY INTERNATIONAL)

With the help of volunteer-master gardeners from WWOOFUSA we have developed an area plan to preserve wild life corridors and habitat in and around the El Rio Golf Course. We have maps from Google,the map store, and GIS which will be combined into an area plan with a house model that will work with the resulting river walk to promote sustainable development.  Part of the plan has already been proven by the Civilian Conservation Corps under Roosevelt in which swales created with horse and wagon, (between Saguaro National Park and Kinney Road and Sandario Road

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tucson,+AZ/@32.2363261,-111.2024774,657m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x86d665410b2ced2b:0x73c32d384d16c715?hl=en

), to prevent erosion had a serendipitous effect  of creating  permaculture basins with lush growth and unusually rich dark soil all done by natural processes. 

http://permaculturenews.org/2014/10/11/discovering-oasis-american-desert/

We seek to honor this local and natural history, by creating our own swales and resulting permaculture basins.  Since, according to Code Enforcement, we are jointly and severally liable with the Golf Course for the maintenance of the alleyway between our art & aquaponics center, Casa Goofy International, and the El Rio Golf Course we have created a similar swale situation there.  Around the turn of the century the Army Corps Of Engineers left a huge berm on the course which damned up a tributary arroyo of the Santa Cruz which caused the dumping of up to a foot of storm runoff into our back yards. We created a small opposite berm along our back fence which created a swale and to repeat the CCC example we’re putting organic compost, mulch, manure, and seeds into the basin and the bank by the fence.  Free range chickens and ducks bred to be good foragers complete the cycle of life. 

Our neighbors are cooperating in this combined maintenance and permaculture gardening effort so we currently have 200 X 12 feet (2400 square feet and growing) of rich more or less permanently watered  soil to work with.  This won’t  be a community garden because we can’t handle the traffic, but extra produce will be offered periodically to the community and the Food Bank. 

This is part of a plan to make the course solvent the way 18 other “failing” courses across the country have done by converting to multi use through scheduling and temporary fences with no loss of golfing area or times.  This will promote use of the resources in The El Rio Neighborhood Center, and hiking, biking and wildlife viewing at the sanctuary created by joining the arroyos around the Golf Course and Joaquin Murietta Park and letting wildlife come in to the park through a large culvert. 

Reclaimed water is already in the Golf Course.  Through Xeriscaping some of the (113 acres of) Bermuda Grass,  (like in Fred Enke Course), we can use the water saved to run a trickle back down the arroyos (North) into the Santa Cruz to the Roger Road Treatment Plant and the Sweetwater Reclamation area.  One or two pair of Beavers can multiply fast enough to do the work of creating swales in these arroyos to support native food forests, and continue that work on into the Santa Cruz.  With the same 18 inch trickle of water proposed a year ago to the County to make the Santa Cruz flow again, our plan addresses the expenses of that plan by not having to run a pipeline, by using solar pumping, by letting nature do the work, and by reducing the scale so that it can be repeated modularly as money, time and paid and volunteer labor permit. 

We are up against a City Bureaucracy and government which have been proven time and again to be corrupt and/or incompetent, it doesn’t much matter which, because they go together. As one Warden explained to his prisoners, after he went over the time they spent in jail compared to the time they got to live by stealing,

“You guys really ought to go into some other line of work because you’re no good at this one.”

But detective work, punishment and reasoning, although necessary, don’t finish the job.  As with children, we have to SHOW The City what competent government would look like.  The City, with the collusion of City Manager, TREO, Chris Kaselemis, Ward 1, Don Diamond, Jerry Collangelo, and others, tried to sell the golf course to Grand Canyon University.  The resulting destruction of millions of dollars worth of wildlife habitat, the creation of dorms, apartments, and parking lots would have been an economic and ecological disaster had the deal gone through.  The jobs, the students who would theoretically rent apartments in the City and buy goods there, the improved property values, were nothing but smoke and mirrors.  (Nobody’s property values go up next to a Wal Mart.) Ward One went back on its promises to the neighborhood which I personally witnessed in a neighborhood meeting.  Instead of taking down the fences between our neighborhood and the course,  and Joaquin Murietta Park, our councilperson tried to prove how business friendly the council could be by throwing city property at Grand Canyon University virtually for free. 

In documents recovered during a two year court battle with the City, El Rio Coalition II has uncovered a systematic and systemic pattern of corruption and collusion in regard to Grand Canyon University and other attempts to sell the Course and other City dealings in general.  Judge Christopher Staring in his statement from the bench at the end of the two year suit, said, there was a consistent pattern of lying and obfuscation, by the City Attorney and other City Officials.  He ordered ALL the documents be given to Ceci Cruz on behalf of El Rio Coalition II.  This was a good result but it should never have taken two years out of a person’s life just to get at the truth. 

Now that the selection process for the new City Manager has been shown to be corrupt and/or incompetent (again it doesn’t matter which) in several media outlets, there can be no doubt that we in this community are in for the struggle, not just of our lives, but our children’s lives.  Our City is ranked very low on the scale of Cities offering open space.  Open space is our children’s natural inheritance.  It has been proven time and again to cut down on crime and vandalism and to promote mental and physical health, happiness and yes, and of course, along with that, BUSINESS, which, in our case, would be sustainable development around a renewed Golf Course and park and a river walk.  The new economists call it “intergenerational well being”.  I just call it common sense, something that singer, songwriter John Prine says isn’t common anymore.  I’m asking for your help in reversing that trend.

So what would it take to SHOW what competent City Management would look like for El Rio?  People providing food and entertainment and attending meetings to talk about what they need in order to utilize the course and the El Rio Neighborhood Center, maps and house models and pictures of volunteers helping with the labor of finishing out the permaculture basins/gardens in the access alley,. people writing letters to their council person and to the newspapers, talking on the radio,  but most of all: IMAGES, pictures speaking louder than words.  That’s where art comes in, community and individual.  We need an artist to do a major work of art featuring permaculture basins.  Until then yours truly will try to erect some minor works of art.

 And because Code Enforcement has been used, with regard to the GCU deal and other deals, as a tool of individual spite and developmental greed, we need to meet and document particular individual instances of abuse of authority by City employees.  We need to make it impossible for the entire City government to operate outside of public scrutiny.  Attorney General Holder in his statement on Ferguson, said the whole problem stemmed from an incompetent City Council using the police as a tool for revenue collection.  Does that ring any bells in Tucson?  If it does, we’ve got a long road to hoe but nothing like what the brave men and women of the Civilian Conservation Corps had to do.