Dead End Street?

It’s been nearly six years since I last put up a piece of writing on this site. When I placed the last post, something told me, “I’m done.” And I thought I would move on to another frontier above and beyond the irregular musings I had been writing for this website about war, remembrance, country, travels.

If I recall correctly, I even decided I might not ever write again. But when COVID endured, I found myself on the back porch, in the morning dark, writing short poems about dog barks, mysterious bird calls, motorcycle engines revving.

And now, here I sit, pecking away at the keyboard.

And why?

I am pushing eighty years of age, and I have had lots of thoughts about when is a good time to stop traveling, writing, taking photos, learning. Am I done, and if not, when will I be done, and the unthinkable that keeps kicking out the windows of my thoughts: when will I be gone?

Earlier this year, my former Boise Radio writing program co-host Rebecca Evans invited me to join a panel of combat vets at the 2027 American Writing Program’s (AWP) annual convention in Chicago next March to talk about war and veterans and aftermath of combat.

Chicago. In March. Made me think of Lou Rawls and the song he sang about the hawk, the wind. The song was called “Dead End Street” and in Nam, all my soul brothers sang that song and I liked it.

Not sure I’d appreciate the cold, snow, bluster, ice now.  Did I want to fly into that? And hang out around thousands of people, almost none of whom I know?

Did I think I really had something to say that would matter, that hasn’t already been said, that might change things about war and remembrance and survival and coming home—the long home, the lonely home, where once you’ve tasted the blood of combat, becomes for the most part, a home lived in by you alone.

But I said yes.

And AWP wants photos and bios and websites, and I have a website. This one, and I have others that I am associated with.

I gave them this website’s address and there it was, boom! The posts on the site were from a gone-by time and I suddenly felt like a naked kid at the swimming pool in the middle of the day, with all the cool girls watching.

Yikes, all my writing old and stale…well, maybe not stale, but old.

So, If I’m going to do this, I need to get cracking with some writing for this website.

So, today it starts.

Betty and I have summered in the mountains looking for elk and bighorn sheep, mule deer and pronghorn.

We’ve had enough rain from Summer’s monsoon to dampen the woods and limit the fire danger.

The flowers, asters and daisies, primrose and penstemon, the sneezeweed and sunflowers and mullein have been in full regalia: yellows and purples and reds and whites and pinks. The rainbow of color stops you in your tracks.

And mushrooms—some red, deadly and psychedelic and others edible—thrive, although I don’t trust my ability to tell the difference.

The Mountain Bluebirds tinted as blue as I have ever seen, although maybe they were that blue last year and the year before and the year before that.

Nevertheless, birds have bred and nested and fledged in multitudes, and the insect population is long and strong, so the birds that eat bugs must be happy.

The weather prognosticators predict heavy moisture for the year here in Arizona due to an anticipated Super El Niño. We are, as the old timers say, “drouthed out,” and have been for over twenty years. The federal government has cut the Colorado River allocation for farms and big metro areas in Arizona by something like 27%.  That hurts, but still the politicians promote growth and with it, the concomitant extras—parks, swimming pools, golf courses and locations and activities that consume a lot of water and which are not part and parcel to our natural desert environment.

To complicate matters, lawsuits about who gets what water and how much have begun and will take decades for the law to sort.

Some tree ring records for this part of the world from back in the 12 and 1300s indicate there was a drought that lasted a hundred years, or maybe more…one hundred twenty, one hundred twenty-five.

We need snow in the mountains for years to come—maybe ten or twenty—in piles and drifts and blasts of cold. That also needs to happen in Utah and Wyoming, and Colorado and New Mexico or this region is going to dry up like a winter leaf and blow off in massive curtains of brown dust and all the human dreams of happiness and wealth and industry, and what then?

Are we doomed to be ruins like Mohenjo Daro in the Indus River Valley or the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia? Are Phoenix and Tucson going to be nothing but remnants, like the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado, or Chaco Canyon? Or Montezuma’s Castle outside Camp Verde, AZ?

The powers that be are scrambling to find water. When they should have been paying attention to this, twenty years ago or longer, they were selling land and begging people to move to the Valley of the Sun.

Well, what now?

We have fires so monstrous they create their own weather and defeat the firefighters’ attempts to put them out. The trees are sick. Bark beetles are eating them to death. Every year I come north to the high country, lines and spots of chocolate brown pine and fir and spruce infest locations where once the green beauty of the land stunned me.

Again, what now?

Pray for rain?

Pray for cold?

Pray for snow?

Dirty Jim Morriison, in the Doors’ song Soft Parade, shouted, “You cannot petition the lord with prayer.”

Most people who know me will not be surprised when I say I tend to agree with Dirty Jim.

We’ve been sending out kind thoughts and prayers for all sorts of disasters large and small, but the prayers don’t seem to stop anything from happening, and they don’t heal the wounds caused by so much of what happens in this world.

So, then what?

Don’t misunderstand what I am getting at here. This essay won’t be about me bitching about human-forced climate change, yet maybe it is, and maybe we will only know sometime in the future.

For decades, I fought the notion of climate change—human-induced—and maybe it is happening.

But what I am writing isn’t about you necessarily giving up your big pickup.

Your big car.

Going electric vehicle or any of that.

This is about water.

Or no water.

And what if the drought ends in one hundred years, or eighty or fifty, do we think we can continue on like we are, drinking and drinking and drying out this land, and still exist as we have been?

Maybe I’m missing something, but I wonder if, in some instances, saying a prayer isn’t a way to say to yourself, “Well, I did something.” I suspect I will get a little hostility from some of my prayerful friends, but I wonder if they might think it’s time to do something else, too?

Yeah, kneel, pray, chant.

But how about we try some action, too?

The big lakes that store our water and help make power are dangerously low.

Our rivers are out of gas.

My uncle hand dug a well outside Maricopa, Arizona, in the 1920s and powered it with a Model T engine. Now the water level in that location is hundreds of feet below what it was one hundred years ago. Aquifers all over the west, and even the Midwest, are being drained and not recharged.

Yeah, maybe we can pay someone else in the Colorado River system to not use their water and to sell it to us. But if we remain dry longer than hoped, that’s going to be a tough sell to keep them from at some point telling us to go float a boat.

Or we can desalinate. Expensive. But the pipelines and the vulnerabilities of that: terrorists, culprits, earthquakes, etc., etc., etc.

It’s all going to cost us a hell of a lot more money than what we’ve paid for water in the past and now.

But maybe expensive is an answer to the profligate uses of water. The more we have to pay, the more efficient the use. Think Dune, the book by Frank Hebert, and the movies made from that tale that showed how a place with almost no water could maintain humanity.                                                                                                                                    

I reckon we better get our butts in high gear. Fill in swimming pools. With dirt, like my father did in the late 1980s when everybody laughed at him for such idiosyncratic, even crazy, behavior.

Make lawns harsh landscapes of cactus and rock. Plant species native to this environment. Kill your grass.

We wasted water.

We grow crops that are not suited to this land.

What are we going to do when our crops can’t grow because there is no H2O?

Maybe we will end up eating hearts of Agave cactus.

And mesquite beans.

I ask myself, Is this a dead-end street?

We shall see.