Scraping Arizona

Cheap Toddler had been a heroic explorer, hiking up and down dump-truck dirt piles in the lot across the street. The desert around Phoenix was always being scraped and built on. His dirt bike trails became eight lane highways. His teenage bonfire party zones lay silent, buried under shopping centers.

Now, from his front porch, the lights of his adopted little town glow like radioactive sprinkles across the Verde Valley. He raised his kids here and calls it home but it too is doomed. The place will be “improved” until it is wrecked, like the rest.

Mass migration to Arizona, still mostly European, boils and bubbles; some stay, some move on, some go back. Old meat from the Midwest, California’s backwash, and desperados from nations south. The bogus ‘old west’: most recently stolen from the last Indigenous tribes hunted down like dogs and whipped into submission. Everyone who moves here makes it worse.

Arizona towns are built on the premise of endless air conditioning, cheap gasoline, and intentional ignorance of the inevitable long-term drought. Over the grand scale of time the desert is certain to return.

The conquerors keep building anyhow, slowing only during these periodic episodes of nationwide economic fraud. With each land “development”, an absurd Certificate of Assured Water Supply, implying 100 years’ juice in the ground below, is required. Did the rain gods sign? The great grandkids will hope so.

No matter how many pristine canyons ruined by dams, no matter how many billion gallons sucked out of the ground: someday the swimming pools will be empty, the golf pastures and lawns brown, and all toilets ‘flush-free’. (Except for the richest folks of course.)

When the fake lakes fill with silt and coal gets scarce, air conditioning will be luxury too. Even Cheap Great-Granny’s backyard water-hose-soaked summer beds might be prohibited. Water will be to drink and grow food, period. Retirees from Minnesota will want to move back.

Clear cut, overgrazed, played out, the scraping of Arizona just a small chapter in the rise, fall, rise, now fall again, of nations on this hemisphere. A culture of land theft and exploitation inherently commits slow suicide. No one is innocent, least of all Cheap White Devil.

Many Indigenous folk have joined in the plunder. Survival: can’t beat ‘em, better join 'em. The rest wait patiently on third world poverty sidelines. Not a problem in the shade of a distant mesa, tending sheep. The meek may yet inherit the earth—what’s left of it.

Mr. Cheap can’t alter the fact that his ancestors tore themselves from their own history and homeland four generations ago. He can, however, try to think and act intelligently about where he lives and why, and try to live wisely and peaceably.

Which he does--except for helping destroy it. His work helps bring dams, nuclear facilities, highways, and bridges to keep people coming. Ugly business as usual, might as well be him as someone else, he figures. But he loves the wilderness and preaches voluntary poverty--what a hypocrite!

He continues to sacrifice his descendants for his personal tribe’s comfort today. A principled resignation would sacrifice his abode to the money gods and limit access to the medicine men. He stays, another whore for empire. Survival of the richest.

Still exploring, he sometimes backpacks for days at a time into the distant hills and canyons, as far away from the perpetual destruction as possible. He wishes desperately to make things right, to return what was stolen, to live life without eating the future. He resolves to keep trying, no matter how unsuccessfully.

His only solace is that all, still, is vanity.

That no civilization, no matter how wonderful, lasts forever.

That, in the end, after the last rattling gasps, the dirt always wins.

November Surf

Some lucky day each November great waves awake
    and are drawn
Like smoking mountains bright from the west
And come and cover the cliff with white violent cleanness:
    then suddenly
The old granite forgets half a year’s filth:
The orange-peel, egg-shells, papers, pieces of clothing,
    the clots
Of dung in corners of the rock, and used
Sheaths that make light love safe in the evenings: all
    the droppings of the summer
Idlers washed off in a winter ecstasy:
I think this cumbered continent envies its cliff then….
    But all seasons
The earth, in her childlike prophetic sleep,
Keeps dreaming of the bath of a storm that prepares up
    the long coast
Of the future to scour more than her sea-lines:
The cities gone down, the people fewer and the hawks
    more numerous,
The rivers mouth to source pure; when the two-footed
Mammal, being someways one of the nobler animals, regains
The dignity of room, the value of rareness.

Robinson Jeffers, 1887-1962

%$#@!

My dear brother e-mailed me after this entry. He is one of my favorite people on earth. Not a mean cell in his body:

“Dude. Perhaps you could try being thankful. For breath, trees, life. For the joy your family brings...something, you whiney bitch....”

He soon felt bad, and e-mailed this apology:

From: "Tom Jones"
To: "Jeffrey Jones" <biznatin@q.com>
Sent: Friday, April 13, 2012 2:51:10 PM
Subject: sorry

Sorry for the name calling. I dont think your a bitch. 2/3 of last blogs sound partially like your the victim of some kind of tragedy. Life is more than dreary suffering...matter of fact you nailed it in saying the only joy you get is selflessly serving others...Family i think you mentioned...





To which I replied:


From: Jones, Jeffrey
Sent: Friday, April 13, 2012 9:11 PM
To: 'redjones’



Hey! Maybe I am a whiny bitch! Don’t back down so soon. I count on my wife and sons to keep me humble, but you are welcome to help.


I assume you are referring to this piece and “Dropping the Ball.” In both I was trying to convey my own guilt and failure, I have been the perpetrator. In “Ball” I am facing the aftermath of dancing to my own tune, watching my sons dance to theirs. I had bought back into consumer culture to the point that I was deeply disappointed at first, like every parent I want my kids to be wildly successful. I was trying to convince myself that it was OK to be proud of them for choosing to dance to their own tune, not the culture’s or anyone else’s. That being true to yourself is success.


As for Scraping, this was written specifically to go with pics from my last Canyon hike, I finally transferred them to digital and I thought the cheap low-tech transfer made them look old-timey. I am addressing the fact that I love this place but I am a total hypocrite as I help pave it. No matter how much I recycle or share rides, this place is doomed, very soon on the cosmic scale, and I’m just as guilty as everyone.


My own criticism of the piece is that my answer to the dilemma is a cop out. I can’t stop the machines of destruction, so my consolation is that in the end the machines will all rust too? A real man would be out somewhere committing industrial sabotage. Or at least ranting at Town Council meetings occasionally.


I appreciate your reading and taking the time to comment. Remember, I work with a hundred miners, there is nothing you can say that will hurt my feelings. Profane insults just mean you’re one of the gang. Dick.


Love you bro,


jj