The following column is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
I waved my hand over the faucet and waited for the water to trickle into my glass. The taste left something to be desired. βWater is water,β I thought.
Iβve seen the videos from the 20th century. In one an old man said, βThe water was better when I was a kid. Back then it was pure aquifer,β as if describing a fine vintage champagne so delicious, so prized, no one could imagine it.
We couldnβt imagine seeing our grandchildren again yet they were coming.
I looked out my kitchen window and admired our zen garden. Beyond our wall the sea of shade sails and solar panels shimmered. In the distance the bleached barren mountains baked in their perpetual haze. Momma used to say, βI swear, itβll rain diamonds before it rains actual water here.β
Earlier I took a walk around the neighborhood, inspecting the shade cast by the ever present canopy of sunscreen sails and solar panels that cover the length of every footpath here. As electric vehicles whirred past I noticed the only other sound I heard was the hum of the carbon collectors.
What must it have been like to hear a mourning dove? Iβd been told it was a lush desert, alive with wildlife and even, on some occasions, wildflowers. No one I know has ever seen a wildflower. Not here.
Weβve seen the holograms of the bobcats, tortoises and javelina that once lived here. Too bad what happened. The electric charging station down the street has a quail design on it, a tribute to the departed, I guess.
I was born long after the die-offs. Not even creosote could survive the Great Drought coupled with the Great Warming. Wildfires took the junipers and chaparral. Water became so precious in the last century we couldnβt even share it with the saguaros that withered and fell.
A convoy of driverless tankers, filled with desalinated water from the Sea of Cortez, rolled past. When I saw the 1,000-foot-high salt dunes near the desalination plant in Puerto PeΓ±asco for the first time I wondered if this was what the Rockies looked like back when snow fell in the lower 48.
De-Sal. Twice the cost, half the taste. Water is not always water.
Above me an elegant shuttle, bound for Tucsonβs aging spaceport, banked over the barren Catalinas, ferrying hydro-archaeologists back home from a water conference on Mars.
Thatβs my field. I took that flight many times myself. Every time we passed over Hoover Dam, the antiquated relic, the long abandoned 726-foot wall dividing sand from sand, I wondered why our ancestors were so foolish, so blind.
I was always happy to return to Tucson, a desert metropolis thriving beneath a vast patchwork quilt of thousands of solar rectangles and triangular sails, cooling towers and water collectors, completely surrounded by dunes, dunes and more dunes, linked to distant communities by road and rail snaking to the north, west, south and east beneath elevated ribbons of the omnipresent solar collectors casting welcome shade.
Soon the kids will be here. I set my glass of De-Sal on the counter. On our kitchen window sill I keep my prized pottery shards. My favorite shard, a small beige triangle, was once part of a large water jug made by an Indigenous potter, long ago, back when Tucson was an Eden. And a river flowed.
Imagine that.
I read that it snowed here. More than once.
Imagine that!
I licked my thumb and used the spit to dab the shard and darken the pale red jagged line that represented flowing water. By the 13th century the Great Drought drove the Hohokam away.
In the 21st century the Great Mega-Drought came along with a vengeance, fueled by climate change, denial and an insatiable thirst for profit that led our ancestors to encourage growth even as the desert began to dry and die around us.
Decades later, refugees from warming in the south overwhelmed our desert city. Thereβs only so much water in the canteen. Restrict your population size or perish.
Thanks to todayβs blistering sandstorm, our kids will begin their day with a beautiful crimson sunset. Theyβre coming for our 400th Annual All-Soulsβ Procession set to begin at 3 a.m. Hereβs hoping theyβre rested and ready for the night ahead. Adapting to siesta culture was easy when I was kid, sleeping the endless hot days away, rising at sunset to attend school.
Like our Chamber of Commerce says, βEvery night Tucson comes to life as the nocturnals rise to work or play beneath their neon.β They donβt mention water, the lack of it or the price of it.
One adapts. Water is water. The kids will be here soon. Hope they like the weather.
