Desecration

 Sunday was Peak Scottsdale. It was the last day of the golf tournament, which usually falls on the day of the Super Bowl as well.  Neither J or I are golf fans, and the players meant nothing to us per se. but we turned on the television during the day to watch coverage, if nothing else to experience surreality of having something on television which is also happening in real life around you. 

During various shots we got catch glimpses on television of the background of the mountains which are so familiar to us nearby. From our kitchen window we could see plane circling over the golf course on the other side of 101 with its advertising banner. 

Two men named Xander and Justin were competing for the lead. In a normal year, up until a year ago, the sides of the fairways would be crammed with people watching, and sometimes scurrying to get from one hole to another to follow a player, or staying put to watch the flow of players come through part of the course, all climaxing in the hole that is surrounded by the outdoor stadium where the crowd cheers on the players as they put, looking down from the stands as in a theater. This year the fairways were empty. The crowds in the stands, unseen, were enough to produce cheers. But the atmosphere felt drained of its hype.

I went out walking in the late afternoon before the football game. I noticed a city worker's truck parked in the small stub of blocked-off road by the undeveloped desert. The next morning I discovered what they had been up to. All of the trees and large shrubs in my familiar patch, including the Ironwood and the Palo Verde, bore plastic tags, either red or blue, with a number written on them with a black sharpie. The Saguaro was tagged by having a red cord wrapped around its base. I had seen such tagging before on plants in the property, seemingly randomly assigned, but now there were many more. I shuddered to think what they could mean, and what was about to happen.

Worst yet, the secret of the Ironwood was desecrated. It was ejected, presumably by a city inspector, who removed it and took it to the edge of the property line by the road, leaving it in the bushes there. It was not the first time the secret had been desecrated. Teenagers had destroyed it in the past, and whoever was curating it had replaced it dutifully. But no more, I think. The city was telling us that such frivolities would no longer be welcome. 

All during this week---perhaps the last quiet week this bit of the desert will experience---I walked over to continue my normal paths and passed by the ejected secret. It saddened to me to think that the secret community I had formed with the person who also cherished the Ironwood was now broken. We were all of us exiles now. I would continue to sneak into the property for my walks, but with the trucks now parked in the stub of the road where I cross, I now feel not only like an interloper but a trespasser. I have already begun altering my route when there are workers visible. 

Yesterday I watched as contractors arrived to deliver the equipment to begin excavating the lake. From the shelter of the Ironwood, I  spied on one of the crew members as they drove a truck across the dirt road that they have created to access the part of the property where the lake will be excavated. I watched as he stopped his truck, got out, and removed the makeshift ramp of plywood that the teenagers had erected, and which had stood there since I arrived a couple years ago. The era of their usage of the land was now over as well.

Still I thought that the wash would be untouched. I was wrong. Later in the afternoon I went out again, after the crews had left. To my horror I found deep rutted tracks from a truck or other equipment that had rammed its wash across the wash, just next to the Palo Verde, slashing across the Natural Causeway where the roadrunner would run, and crushing the main wash in the part that I call the Rocky Ford, since it is natural place to cross. I could not imagine what business they would have, driving some piece of power equipment through the bushes there, flattening them and leaving a destructive trail there. It was a brutal reminder that the city crew will do whatever it wants to with the land, and there is nothing I can do about it.