Friday, September 30, 2005
I got a kick today out of this column. Please, someone, buy my blog.
Back from a quick trip to Phoenix to visit my in-laws. It was like going back in time to July and its heat... only (all together now) WITHOUT THE HUMIDITY! My ILs live in Laveen, in the formerly farm-filled southwestern quadrant of the greater Phoenix area, a land still sprinkled with agriculture. But if the bulldozers dotting the landscape have their way, the remaining cotton fields and cornfields will soon be covered by the acres of buff-colored, xeriscaped, Spanish-tiled identical houses that are already spilling across them. “Warning: Anachronism crossing,” Leon snorted when we passed a highway sign of a farmer on a tractor.
You can still see the old Laveen. The Spurr Lounge is around the corner from my ILs' place. It's a beat-up dirty-white cinderblock cowboy bar, pickup trucks piled with hay parked in the lot and the occasional horse or two tied up out front. The high school has an agriculture bent and its own rodeo grounds. A nearby … feedlot? dairy? someplace with a lot of cows… can be smelled in their neighborhood when the wind’s just right. Many of the old homesteads – sprawling, ramshackle ranch-style houses -- are built on a good half-acre or acre or more of land, with actual lawns, roamed by menageries. We saw horses, goats, sheep, burros, geese and ducks pecking about in people’s yards, and even the really run-down places, places with busted-up cars in dirt yards and windows falling off, often had a horse or two in a side paddock.
Before the houses were the farms, and before the farms was the desert. Should we get upset about the next layer of civilization? Now that the desert is gone, what difference does it make what is there?
Back from a quick trip to Phoenix to visit my in-laws. It was like going back in time to July and its heat... only (all together now) WITHOUT THE HUMIDITY! My ILs live in Laveen, in the formerly farm-filled southwestern quadrant of the greater Phoenix area, a land still sprinkled with agriculture. But if the bulldozers dotting the landscape have their way, the remaining cotton fields and cornfields will soon be covered by the acres of buff-colored, xeriscaped, Spanish-tiled identical houses that are already spilling across them. “Warning: Anachronism crossing,” Leon snorted when we passed a highway sign of a farmer on a tractor.
You can still see the old Laveen. The Spurr Lounge is around the corner from my ILs' place. It's a beat-up dirty-white cinderblock cowboy bar, pickup trucks piled with hay parked in the lot and the occasional horse or two tied up out front. The high school has an agriculture bent and its own rodeo grounds. A nearby … feedlot? dairy? someplace with a lot of cows… can be smelled in their neighborhood when the wind’s just right. Many of the old homesteads – sprawling, ramshackle ranch-style houses -- are built on a good half-acre or acre or more of land, with actual lawns, roamed by menageries. We saw horses, goats, sheep, burros, geese and ducks pecking about in people’s yards, and even the really run-down places, places with busted-up cars in dirt yards and windows falling off, often had a horse or two in a side paddock.
Before the houses were the farms, and before the farms was the desert. Should we get upset about the next layer of civilization? Now that the desert is gone, what difference does it make what is there?
