Southwestern Homelands

by William Kittredge

  It was a threat that set off alarms in the Southwest. Crazies were threatening the water supply. It wasn’t taken too seriously in New Mexico, where the major population lives near the Rio Grande. But Arizona is mostly an oasis culture. Without water Tucson and Phoenix wither.

  Southwestern agriculture involved irrigation before the ancients came to the idea of tillage. Ancient people led water from streams to native plants, which they later harvested. The Papago practiced arroyo mouth irrigation; they led flash floods into catchment basins where cottonwoods, willows, and burro-brushes were planted in rows across a watercourse to slow the current and trap rich silts, and planted quickly germinating tepary beans in tiny irregular fields after a rain, harvesting before the desert soils dried and turned bricklike again. And then, of course, the Hohokam built the first large-scale irrigation project in what’s now the United States along the Gila River and the Salt River just south of present-day Phoenix. Their largest canal was eleven miles long, and carried water to irrigate eight thousand acres.

  Anglo irrigation began in 1867, with canals along traces of the Hohokam system. After serious feuding over water, the U.S. Reclamation Service was brought in to reorganize and develop the valley. In 1905 they began building a storage dam some sixty miles east of Phoenix. Finished in 1911, Roosevelt Dam was the highest in the world, 280 feet above bedrock, a 10.5-million-dollar project. Some 300,000 acres along the Salt River were opened to irrigation, and the economy in Phoenix began to cook. By the late 1930s, irrigators were using 95 percent of the waters in the Gila and Salt Rivers and coming up short. And the development of Tucson and Phoenix depended on water. Nobody is interested in a dry oasis. By 1953 Arizona was pumping 4.8 million acre-feet of water from underground, emptying ancient aquifers, a stopgap measure.

  So the state went to federal court and came out in 1964 with rights to 2.8 million acre-feet from the Colorado River plus the full flow of its own tributaries. In 1968 the U.S. Congress passed the Colorado River Basin Project Act, which authorized the Central Arizona Project (CAP). Beginning with Parker Dam, on the Colorado, which backed up Lake Havasu, builders tunneled through the Buckskin Mountains so they could dump 1.2 million acre-feet of water into the Granite Reef Aqueduct, which carried it to Orme Dam north of Phoenix, and then south in the Tucson Aqueduct. The total cost for lifting the water some 1,250 feet and carrying it more than 330 miles inland to dampen down the burning valleys around Phoenix and Tucson, was more than three billion dollars. The first water ran through the system in 1985.

  Trouble is, water from the canals of the CAP has turned out, because of evaporation, to be saline. And the historically fertile bottomlands in Arizona have already been salinated, the result of salty desert water and inadequate drainage; half have been abandoned. Many farmers want little to do with CAP water. A lot of it goes to recharge aquifers.

  Tucson and Phoenix, on the other hand, use enormous expanses of mown grass, lawns and golf courses, faux lakes and giant fountains to draw in tourists and retirees. The crop they raise is development; their economies run on water, which flows toward money. Is it any wonder, then, that the oasis seems increasingly citified?

  The grand hotels. Ain’t they something? I love the Biltmore, which in so many ways epitomizes Frank Lloyd Wright’s idea of an architecture that might help furnish our imaginations with intimations of order. (Wright doesn’t get credit for the construction, but it everywhere embodies his vision.) I love parking by the Arizona Canal as the last twilight golfers are putting out. The hotel hovers, telling me that my life can’t be insignificant if I get to come here.

  Since opening in 1929, not long before the Great Crash, the Biltmore has been a meticulously maintained Southwestern legitimizing dream. We, the story goes, have the Biltmore, and thus we’re anybody’s equal, in elegance, and in power if you want to think about it so crudely, and in our ability to withstand disappointment. “Bulletproof and invisible,” an old tavern haunting friend, long since dead, used to say.

  Bruce Berger, in The Telling Distance: Conversations with the American Desert, says, “If the forces responsible for the jagged gray ranges around Phoenix had conspired to create, on a dare, some Art Deco cliff dwellings, they might have come up with the Arizona Biltmore.

  “The facade, long and recessed, is regularly pocked and shadowed as if colonized by cliff swallows, while the interior seems a flow of elegant, rectilinear caves.”

  The building does indeed connect to Southwestern landforms. It sort of epitomized, maybe defined, when it was built, in those days some miles east of Phoenix, Southwestern bajada culture. It’s reminiscent of pueblos like Hopi and Taos, which also mirror and reflect.

  After locking my automobile, a gesture I find myself enjoying (it identifies me as one of the psychically unwoundable patrons here), and strolling inside as if we sure do belong in this setting, Annick and I claim one of the couches near the piano player, where I love sipping an “up” martini and digging into a crystal bowl of warm Brazil nuts. Later Annick and I wander into shops, where we consider and reject Hermès scarves, and out into the grounds where elaborate and immaculate beds of flowers smell in every season of spring.

  We covertly study the people who live in the casitas as they come and go and think they’re like us, only luckier, and we amble past swimming pools, abandoned for the evening, and smile at the well-to-do children running out of control on the lawns. But we’ve never gone to Wright’s, the signature dining room, for some dish like “Seared Scarlet Snapper served with Piquillo Peppers and Preserved Kumquats.” And we’ve never slept in one of the rooms. We’ll eat at the grill, on the patio by the mesquite fire in its big fireplace. Poor us. But we may, one of these times, like a movie star, following in the footsteps of Clark Gable and Lucy Arnaz, rent a casita.

  We go the Phoenician, a grandiose marble-floored foolishness, for other distractions. I’m a sucker for splendor tempered by heartbreak, stories reeking of contrary ambitions, monied dreamers acting out their aristocratic if semi-nonsensical dreams. Like Gatsby. So, on a terrace, gazing out to the grand and expanding glitter of Phoenix, more martinis, another attempt at timelessness.

  Charles Keating, the boy behind the Phoenician, fell from grace in the savings-and-loan fiasco, and so did thousands who trusted him with millions of dollars. Of Keating, in Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America, Charles Bowden writes, “His brilliance was in his knowing his emptiness, in sensing it and acting on it. He made money meaningless by squandering billions.” Hubris, and its rewards or not, as in the Iliad. We begin to feel perhaps that we’re in a movie.

  When I think of consulting a planning expert, trying to figure out which Phoenix fantasies are cooking now, and who’s at the stove, who’s cooking, I hear that old difficult ghost, Ed Abbey, at my ear, whispering, “Why bother, it’ll be bullshit anyhow.”

  Young coyotes, on a bright morning, ran routes around my new white ball. Sprinklers were sprinkling, the air smelled of fresh cut grass, and there we were, creatures on the fairway, at play. The coyotes ghosted off into a draw where the prickly pear were thick with blossoms the color of tea roses.

  Golf runs on simple pleasures. After breathing for a slow moment, I struck one of those occasional shots. It looked to be perfect as it lifted and hung, and fell soundlessly. For a moment it seemed pure, until the air went out of that balloon one more time. My ball was in the back bunker, buried in a coyote track.

  EPILOGUE

  Mudhead Dreaming

  Imagine the problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more.

  CHARLES BOWDEN

  Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

  Gary Paul Nabhan is an arid-lands ethno-botanist and former MacArthur Fellow now located at the University of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. In Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, Nabhan tells us of obesity and adult-onset diabetes among Tohono O’odham and Seri Indians, aberrant blood-sugar and insulin levels as a result of ea
ting fiber-poor junk foods and those provided by the federal-surplus commodities program. The average weight of O’odham men increased from 158 pounds in 1938 to 202 in 1978.

  The only widespread control turns out to be a return to traditional native plant foods, which are rich in soluble fiber and fructose, tannins, and other blood sugar-lowering substances. Nabhan quotes a Pima Indian friend, “To be Indian, you gotta eat Indian.” The need to rediscover the seeds of lost varieties, and get them back into cultivation and native diets, was formalized in Native Seeds/SEARCH. Nabhan’s leadership earned him the MacArthur Fellowship.

  Nabhan, I think, is partways an artist at play who enjoys finding foods growing lost under our feet, a joke on our dominant culture’s power to control the world. But his essential work is done in concert with others; he continually emphasizes that his work is communal.

  Nabhan’s worries are interrelated. Obesity and diabetes exist in growing dimensions everywhere. No doubt we should all, not just native peoples, be eating home-grown foods. Yet, as Americans eat more and more processed and prepared foods, conglomerates are buying seed stocks so as to control them worldwide and thus determine what they can eat. The world produces huge quantities of unused food and 35,000 people starve to death every day, their deaths often the result of inhumane decisions by “First World” agribusiness.

  Priorities, clearly, need some rethinking. But rethinking, if there’s any hope for a cutting edge to it, is not likely to come from the World Trade Organization and its bottom-line oriented corporate clients, folks with a serious interest in maintaining the status quo.

  On the other hand, thousands and thousands of world citizens, some working alone, others banded together in an almost endless variety of nongovernmental citizens’ organizations, are doing what they can to promote justice and preserve ecosystems. Transgressive thinking, as usual, is most likely going on in somebody’s kitchen.

  In tavern life a ration of chaos is taken to be normal. The world encountered by hunters and gatherers is also understood to be unpredictable. It’s accepted that events are governed by the laws of chance. As a consequence their myths tend to be about tricksters and sly transformational creators—coyotes, ravens, or hunchbacked Kokopelli dancing around and playing his flute, stories about the pleasures of surprise, the joke of living successfully.

  Settled agricultural people, on the other hand, as in the Southwestern pueblos, see chaos as randomness, confusion, and incoherence that existed at the time of creation. Their primary myths tend to be stories about progressing toward order. They regard unpredictability as an evil to be fought at all costs. Alfonso Ortiz, writing about the village where he grew up, says, “This quest for and tradition of peace has imbued the lives of the San Juan people with a sense of ultimate sanctuary, with a belief that there are places so sacred that one can be safe from harm while there.”

  But pueblo people also want the rains to fall. And however reluctantly, they are forced to recognize that events outside the pueblo will never be entirely predictable, and that the world inside the pueblo can grow blind-eyed, make mistakes, and need correcting, that some fracturing may occasionally be necessary in order to facilitate reseeing.

  Opening doors, undercutting received opinion, letting in air, sticking pins into sacred balloons, irreverence, refusing to go on being somebody else’s baby—they’re life affirming. The Hopi and the Zuni and other pueblos know this and include mudhead mockery, tricksters, chaos, in their sacred ceremonies. As did and do the Yaqui in their sacred deer dance.

  Thinking accurately, thus surviving, depends on our ability to recognize what’s really going on instead of what’s supposed to be going on, and on that basis to rethink our most basic relationships—to one another and where we live. Stories and the arts help us see, as Coleridge says, by “disassociating the sensibilities,” fracturing the ordinary. Chemicals, alcohol, and other drugs often figure in shamanistic traditions. But as we so sadly know, they can lead to disassociations which are beyond useless into tragically dysfunctional.

  What are frolics for? Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian sociopolitical theorist, says, “Carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.” Pleasure seeking, the upsetting of apple carts, recognitions and reversals, casting off our official personas (game faces which feel like sanctioned straightjackets) may be related activities.

  Carnivals, Bahktin writes, are feasts of “becoming, change and renewal.” We break patterns so as to free ourselves, move on. Most of us, when we feel secure, enjoy liberation from the repetitions of established order. We embrace psychic and social change and renewal. During medieval carnivals, Bakhtin writes, “all were considered equal. People were, so to speak, reborn to new, purely human relations.”

  The arts of carnival can be considered techniques for bloodless uprisings. During a carnival we take off and put on masks, real or metaphoric, trying to sense what it would be like if we were someone else.

  Carnivals are political events. Permissiveness is all; we celebrate otherness, and bring down the elegant or mighty through mockery and satire. And what are parties, the good ones, but private carnivals? We go out, we travel, with the deliberate intention of re-seeing, rethinking. Travel can be a fracturing ritual, a version of carnival, the fleshly feast, the party.

  Useful stories are reaffirming while simultaneously fracturing. They remind us of who and what we are, an evolving creature who’s profoundly dependent on the good will of others. They remind us to stay alert because our relationships, if only to ourselves, must be constantly, all day, every day, reinvented.

  Ceremonies can work the same way, as with the Yaqui or in the pueblo villages. So stories, parties, ceremonies laced with humor, parody, humiliations, triumphs, profanations, mudhead clowning, crowning and uncrowning, all helping us to see, and evolve.

  As early as the seventh century B.C., clowns wandered the marketplaces of Greece, lampooning soldiers and slaves, senators, and even idiots and gods. Political and social satire evolved into dramatic comedy, an occasionally profound art, as in Aristophanes. The Fool, as jester in medieval courts, said the unsayable, scattered anarchy, allowing nobility and kings to laugh at and see through their otherwise untouchable personas. The Fool is essential in King Lear, and Falstaff is an emblematic figure we recognize in taverns today.

  In the early eleventh century, the Roma began leaving their homelands in Tajikistan and northern India, and made their way to Europe around the year 1300, telling fortunes, among other things, with Tarot decks featuring one unnumbered card, that of the Fool. They became known as Gypsies, and were popular entertainers in marketplaces and courts all over Europe. Street comedy in Italy evolved into the commedia dell’arte with its stock figures, the Harlequin in patchwork and Pierrot with the elegant white face. Bawdy songs went with the comic skits. In America commedia became vaudeville, the popular public entertainment of the late nineteenth century, formative in the evolution of early jazz, and at the core of classical film comedies.

  The Harlequin and his straight man, white-faced Pierrot, we recognize them in Abbot and Costello, in the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges, in Lucy and Desi. We see the Fool tripping along innocently in Charlie Chaplin and Jerry Lewis, and thwarting the Trickster in “Krazy Kat,” and in “Tom and Jerry” and “Roadrunner” cartoons.

  Thinking transgressively is clearly an ancient and ongoing cross-cultural necessity. Fools, tricksters, jugglers, Gypsies, mimes, jugglers, contemporary mudheads and their flute-playing humpbacked predecessors, the Kokopelli, and surreal half-animal figures painted into Mimbres bowls, all of them sacred while at play—their wit fragments the ordinary.

  Maybe we could use ironic mouthy mudheads wandering around the halls of the U.S. Congress. Think of the Beatles and Dylan and hard-time rock-and-roll and Thomas Jefferson, who said, “I hold it a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in
the political world as storms in the physical.”

  Seeking homelands, we come and go, always hoping to nest in. We need and yearn to believe. Yet in order to survive we need to be deflated, and driven to continually start over by reexamining what we believe. Humor is a door to insight, and a survival skill. It is said that language was the singular human discovery. But maybe not, maybe it was laughter.

  Rethinking is going on all around the world, and preconceptions are changing, rapidly. Sacredness, recently, has actually been a consideration in economic decisions. For example, consider this problem, and this solution, which would never have had a chance without citizen values, and pressure.

  The problem: Crop engineers have inserted a hybrid maize with genes from Bacillus thuringiensis, a soil microbe toxic to a number of corn pests. But the pollen of what’s called Bt corn is toxic to monarch butterfly larvae. And 80 percent of the monarchs which overwinter in the mountains of central Mexico begin life in the Corn Belt.

  In Mexico, going to see the monarchs a couple of years ago, Annick and I were on dusty trails at an elevation of over ten thousand feet, alongside fathers carrying their children, pregnant women and grandmothers, old men with crutches, all marching or struggling along to pay homage to the hundreds of millions of clustered butterflies. Alison Hawthorne Deming, who teaches at the University of Arizona, in a book of poems, The Monarchs, says,

  From the village tourists ride

  in cattle trucks up to the El Rosario site,

  swimming, on warm days, through

  a tide of evanescent fluttering.