Needless to say, water is important to us. This brings me back to my first comment; countless hours and days of labor and hope. We were building a water line, an underground pipeline 1 1/4" wide and 4 1/2 miles long. To those of us in ranching, nothing could be more ordinary, yet it is worth a pause to consider what it really means. Just beneath that sun-blasted gravel, sand and cracked clay, weaving between the parched roots of saguaros and deeply-buried limestone ledges, a trickle of water is flowing. What value does it have? I often think it would be instructive for the Bill Gateses, the Donald Trumps -- hey! the Enron execs! -- to park their soft, technocratic butts out here for just a few hours --let's say two days--, and then see how many Rolexes, condos and hotels they would be willing to trade for one glass of that secret trickle delivered from that pipeline. Not so fast, Bill; Don just bid his shipping company, and damn it's hot out here...
Troglodytes that we be, and with nary a 7-11 or Burger King in sight, we squat among the rocks and speculate on such things. As far too many pundits have observed far too often, the desert is an unforgiving place. We who struggle to survive here take a certain amusement from such thoughts, because whatever else we may have learned, we do know this: without a generous dose of that lowly dihydrogen oxide every day, there is nothing --not the Eiffel Tower, the Freeway System, the Three Gorges Dam, do-it-yourself teeth whitener, spiral binding, modern "country" music, DVDs, and yes, even a web site --that has any value at all! Guess living this close to the sharp edge makes it easier to understand that.
...which of course begs the questions. Isn't Arizona presently the second-fastest-growing state in the US? Aren't three of the five fastest-growing towns in the nation right here, in the Arizona desert? Aren't there more golf courses in Arizona than anywhere else on Earth?
Call me a dedicated disciple of John Wesley Powell; in 1880 he was already predicting this devil-take-the-hindmost rush to grab the water in the West. Today's booming housing developments are sucking at the most incredible legacy of Powell's foresight, the chain of enormous lakes strung along the Colorado meant to give the citizenry of Arizona a margin to carry us through the dry times. Well, the dry times are here; but greed and influence got to our better judgment. The lakes have never been lower since Powell's dream to create them was realized. Sitting up here among the rocks, I watch the trickle coming from our pipeline. None of what I see in the valley below is worth what I can cup in my hands or let trickle between my fingers.