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.”