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. 

“BUYING A BOOK” (“For Somebody Else To Read”----by Joe Tex)

(And aren’t we all?)                               

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU8JCzOKxKM

I sit on the back porch of Old Times Café feeling the cool wind off the trees in Kurt Brill’s  huge back yard full of  12 and 14 foot tall looming mythological slash Marvel Comic Book pinch clay figures.  They are cast in tons and tons of bronze but still they cry out, I told him once, for reflective pools like Marisol’s River Goddess in the Museum Of Modern Art sculpture garden.  We could have such pools for those sculptures with real fish and plants, I said, and people could sit and eat and talk on the sculptures. The pools would support fish and the fish would support garden plants.  It would make the Café a living work of art.  An architect laughed at me, at the ridiculous scope of my vision for a place where poor folks come to eat.  And so I thought I might have a career in sit down comedy but the joke was on me.  

Evangelos lost all his money and his restaurant up in the foothills because it was too big to handle and should have been four businesses in one building, and because his brother stole from the till.  I heard him play his own compositions of Greek songs on his Bouzouki while his brother and friends danced.  He had a huge garden there where he grew produce for the restaurant. I watched him snaking out the sewer and feeding the javelina that came to the back door of the kitchen.  Things seemed to be so good and natural, but he told me privately business was down.  

“People are scared.” He said.

“What of?” I asked. 

He didn’t know, finances he thought.  

I could also relate to the old horse drawn farm equipment he had drug up to line the parking lot of the little café he built by hand.  It was all like the some crime too brutal to believe as the restaurant crumbled and lack of maintenance caused exponential cascades of damage and metal thieves or antique fanciers stole the farm equipment from the café,  one piece at a time.  He and I shared something of farming from our childhoods, he from a Greek Island and I from Olton, Texas. I could sit here and look at the rusty farm equipment after finishing my refrigeration work and see Granddad Dennis driving a four horse team across his dry cotton farm in Olton, Texas, the rich smells of the moist earth, overgrowth of wild plants and cotton plants, hope and tragedy in the air as one and inseparable.  

Granddad was dying in the hospital of diabetes when a nurse named Beulah befriended him, married him and nursed him at home for a couple months and got half the farm.  I was eleven or twelve at the time, and fancied myself a cowboy as I rode a worn out plow horse named Old Roan, bareback, in the dirt roads around the fields.   But even at that age I felt something totally desolate in the all too human heart, something to do with the Dr. Peppers and pecan pies in the icebox, something missing in us all that had to crave a sweetness beyond our reach,  something about Beaulah trying so hard to cry in the funeral service in the little wooden clapboarded church, the cracked voices singing the pathos of the pathless land, boring a hole straight through my heart and keeping time for years to come with the sucker rods of the windmill going thwack thwack through the well pipe at night and pushing the best tasting water in the world through the old wooden sluice box where the milk jugs sat.  

“On a hill far away

Stood an old rugged cross

The emblem of suffering and pain….”

If only it didn’t feel so empty, if only he had had someone to really care for him, so he could have gone out with the dignity of an informed choice.  I loved him. He used to sit me on his knee while we listened to President Truman talking out of the warm yellow lights in the big console radio, telling us all not to hoard things because it was WWII and we didn’t know if we could survive, all that warmth and understanding, and now this, this stupid stuff, was hard to take, where was HIS kind old grandfather guardian when he needed him? Why was I so helpless to give something back when he needed it? 

If love is him playing her and her playing him, let the games begin, but, no it’s not OK when someone,  a child or childlike says they want to be used that way, because of a hunger for attention in the bones that bore them, not your or my grief, but a million years producing the soap opera this beautiful desolation demanded.  And even if it was a level playing field, did anybody have the time and money to really be there?  If there is time for playing games are even the loneliest of us here alone?   Even a stone dropped in a pond causes ripples that seem to go on forever back and forth like a refrain of a crazy song I wrote for “the crazy lady with the crooked grin, beside the road”:

“And they call it love

And they call it sin

And it starts all over again

With the howling and the banging

Of the screen door in the wind.”

When my sister was dying of the conglomeration of medicines, side effects and strains of insanity running through both sides of the family and me,  I wrote a letter to the doctor concerning when to pull the plug and said, 

“Nothing matters except the quality of the consciousness.”

But that was not a line for a doctor to draw, but for each of us on our own recognizance, and even then, the most difficult of bright lines. There are just crimes against consciousness that we live daily for which the law has no remedy and life has no solace.

As dad became more and more incontinent, Mom complained of having to wash the urine out of his pants, and I, at the time, took it upon myself, and at the time, had to go to a pharmacy to get adult diapers, and sent a package.  And he sent it back, with a note, 

“You were trying to be kind.  But there are some decisions I have to make for myself.” 

He always understood when my thoughtfulness took a wrong turn, and never overcorrected me.  But my mother should have had some freedom of choice and a vote on that.  Something we do, will be somebody else’s mess to clean up or manage or an empty place in which to do without.  

And we buried my mother, and then my sister, in a little clearing in a grove of scrub trees, a lone brave soprano sang without accompaniment, and my brother paced back and forth across the head of my sister’s casket shaking his head, at the insanity that sometimes turned her into an animal with the furniture piled up against the bedroom door and her smearing shit on the wall, and all the medicines, the electro shock and drug shock and nursing homes and nothing, nothing left except the bare brute facts.  There was somebody there but behind a chain mail veil that distorted every communication coming and going, just the bare horrible facts that all our love and words come from bodies and bodies come from dirt, and love and war are the same damn dumb hurt.  

Evangelos told me one day his doctor had seen a brain tumor in his head in a scan.  I asked where it was and he pointed to his temple.  I asked which ear he put his cell phone up to and he put his hand up to the same side of his head.  He started talking about how his strongest regret was he might leave his wife with the café to manage by herself.  She had stood by him for so long.  He also said, 

“Life is very precious.”

And I tried to balance that with how cheap and dirty and brutal it is, especially on the border.  But that’s just me I guess, always looking on the bright side.  

One day I was working on one of his reach in sandwich prep refrigerators and I was depressed and called him and said I needed his help.  Actually I just needed moral support. He was tired too but he turned his car around on his way home so he could help me.  We finished up and he said he felt dizzy and needed to lie down.  He lay down in one of the booths he’d upholstered himself and then got up and tried to talk to me but his speech was slurred and he couldn’t tell me which hospital he wanted to go to.  I said, 

“We’re wasting precious minutes.  We’re going to UMC.  If you remember where your hospital is on the way we’ll go there, but we’re going….NOW.”

He asked if I could drive his car and I said of course, but made a liar out of myself.  I couldn’t operate the A/C and when I tried to activate the windows and emergency flashers the rear trunk lid popped up but we got there just in time for him to start vomiting on the way in.  That’s the last I saw of him when I felt like he was really there.  

When I came back to the café after he had his operation, he looked at me and started crying, 

“You saved my life.”

“No.” I said, “I took you to the hospital.  The doctor saved your life.  Don’t argue with the English Major it just gets him all pissed off.”

He hugged me.  He was hugging everybody.  I think he was trying to say goodbye.  When I asked him questions about what he remembered of his past, he would look at me and then look down at the table and look away, and then this man who used to know seven languages said something that seemed to me to be irrelevant or nothing, but he could have been thinking something too deep for words, what the hell did I know? 

The tumor was in the same conical pattern of microwave radiation coming off a cell phone antenna.  The last scan he had was negative for even a trace of cancer, but he died of complications, side effects of the drugs and pneumonia, so it’s just an anecdote.  It will take thousands of anecdotes to make a theory and thousands of blind trials to prove it’s worth balancing our need for something we call communication with our need for consciousness. Ironic though, that the need for communication could turn brain cells into something like an endless subdivision or Israeli settlements on the West Bank? But, like they say on NPR “Marketplace”, 

“Let’s take a look at the numbers.” 

The numbers say the numbers win.  And money talks but it never says anything except “More.” The numbers left Evangelos’ wife with a 150,000 dollar mortgage on Old Times Café, and an invitation to a painful kind of freedom.  And those of us who share the misfortune of being mechanically inclined, pitch in and work for food or whatever.  We may not be able to fix anything else, but at least we can keep the equipment going.  So many times while I’m doing this I cry and curse him for making all those big deals on the cell phone, deals that some of us told him were just wrong, because his plans for condos were  crimes against nature and therefore crimes against our best chance at really being anywhere, because they involve tearing up more land and giving nothing back.  And that’s buying a book for his grand kids and everybody’s grand kids to read.  And he’d say, 

“Well something’s gotta happen out there. Might as well be condos.” 

But the argument was irrelevant because the deal fell through and the restaurant was auctioned off for not even enough to pay the taxes.  And he oughta known better, he coulda, shoulda, oughta not been like some drunk hanging limp on your elbow at the salad bar talking about this great deal he just did.  He coulda, shoulda, oughta, and for just a little humility he and we coulda had it all, but all his grand plans and bullshit were just part and parcel of the enthusiasm that let him love me and every other down and outer who ever crossed his threshold.  

I sit and watch the moon go through a few wisps of cumulus which I know is stratospheric ice crystals and then I hear the ice machine dump another load right on time.  And wonder how the time goes, and where it goes when it’s gone.  I think it goes to Cleveland where it gets made into dancing bananas for the Cleveland Performance Art Festival, but I wonder at that huge mass of a moon and all the other masses push pulling each other in the space/time continuum that always feels to me like it must be broken somewhere.  

And then I realize it is what it is.  And at the risk of sounding foolhardy I am still alive.  And he was right, life, for all of its predestined goneness, is precious, from a certain distance that we are charged with maintaining.  

It is what it is.  And I can’t complain.