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Saturday, January 17, 2009

Digging Dirt and the Blues








"Connie's taking a class in water conservation" Dianna said last night at the first bar. Well, that's partially true. It's the rain water harvesting class through the UA campus but it's not so much the conservation part, but rather the harveting and management of it I'm studying on the weekends. The class teaches Mast er Gardeners how to best divert water for optimum usage and what kinds of materials to use and how to design retaining and diverting devices.
Kevin was still feeding a hang-over this morning as I was ready to leave for my class. He really did overdo it last night, but at least he's a cute drunk and not a mean or assholic one. He and Tommy were fun to watch for the first two hours we were in Bisbee. But both just never knew when to quit.

"Aren't you going to get up and have some coffee?" I asked him as he was still splayed on the bed. It was already past 7am. We almost always share our first cup before sunrise every day, even on the weekends.
"Go to class!" he grumbled back at me.
"Ooooh, I see someone's not feeling too great right now, eh?" I was asking for trouble.
"Eeerrrrrrrrrr!" he fired back. He was lucky I had to leave at 8am or else I would have made his morning more miserable by clancking pots in the bedroom or pulling on certain body parts.

Our class today met on a commercial cattle ranch outside Huachuca City, in an area I have never been before: Sanders and Bowers Road both east of Mustang Corners. The ranch was just west of the River. A thin layer of fog drifted over the wash as I arrived at the meeting site. It was quite cold as we gathered in the parking lot.

We had two additional speakers this time: Gerry, from the Natural Resources Conservation (NRC) who showed us how to built berms across low-lying flood areas, and Mike, the owner of the Hayhurst Ranch. Both gave good viewpoints of water management.

"The biggest enemy of a rancher is the land developer" said Mike. Whew, as I was expecting him to say "The biggest enemey is the environmentalist." Mike is a new generation of ranchers and his management made sense. We were in what he described as the "worst part of the ranch" with nothing more than creosote and mesquite, some thornbush and a lot of caliche and eroded areas. This was very poor grazing land because it had been badly eroded in years of heavy flooding here. And it was our job to build a berm to help control the flow of water through the wash.

The work didn't take too long. We had enough workers and were done in three hours. We dug, carried haystacks, cut wire, collected BFRs (Big Fcking Rocks), shoveled dirt and completed two berms. Neither Gerry nor Mike expected us to get the task done so fast. And although I am poor with mechanics, once we got started I quickly learned how the berm was to be built. And who ever thought that ten-year-old haystacks could last so long AND be the primary substance of a berm? By next monsoon the hay will be covered in a layer of dirt that will actually fasten the hay rather than promote its decomposition. All the materials were old materials that were donated by the BLM. So not only did we built a low-cost berm, we were able to reuse the materials for this project.

Mike's ranch is several miles long in all directions.

The one person I enjoyed listening to was Gerry, though. According to Gerry, we weren't managing the land, we were "healing" the land. The berms will allow native grasses to grow during the next monsoon, which in turn will bring food to the cattle. When the grasses die Mike will be able to set a fire to burn down the creosote and mesquite. And when those two flora are dead, more grasses will be able to grow, further growing the land back to a more usable manner.

"Water can not be controlled. We can not stop it. We can only slow it down or divert it."

There was something about Gerry that I found mystifying. His manner of speech, his choices of words, his calm demeanor prompted me to ask him where he was from.

"I am Mexican-Apache. My father's side came to this area as early as 1547." He looked Mexican but his clear speech is something I have noticed among the Natives. They don't talk fast, they never interrupt others, and they speak each word as if they were all carefully chosen. It's the kind of speech that makes people listen.

"I love working with the land" he told me. "I love teaching others. But sometimes I just want to go into nature and be alone to listen to the sounds." I could definitely relate to all that.

We were released an hour earlier than planned. I got home and drove Kevin back to Bisbee so he could pick up his truck. The dogs were in the back so that I could take them back to the river for a quick 30-minute splash.
A cowboy-hatted fat man in a red Dodge Dakota pick-up (529WGS) gave me "the finger" as he passed me on Hereford Road toward Bisbee. He had a "Proud Republican" and "US Army Retired" and "First Cavalry" bumper sticker on the back of his truck. The finger, I'm sure, was because of my Obama-Biden bumper sticker on my truck. I sped up just enough to get a photo of his license plate. My spedometer got up to 80mph (in a 45 mph zone...)
"Easy Connie..." said Kevin.
"Why? What do you think I'm going to do?" Kevin didn't answer. But he HAS seen me in rage before over rude drivers like that "Proud Republican (Asshole)."
FatMan turned west toward Patagonia. I turned east toward Bisbee. FatMan was lucky that time. FatMan is also going to be spending the next four years in misery with Democrats in office. Geez.
We had a quick lunch at Mexico Lindo and went our separate ways: he went to SV for grocery shopping and I turned south to head toward the river.

But as I got to the Bisbee Coffee Company I heard good, live music. It was Blues music, one of my favorite live music. I parked the car behind the coffee shop, again, apologized to the dogs for keeping them waiting (they retaliated by eating our left-over lunch) and walked back to the stage to hear the band.

I recognized Leo and his brother and mom right away. Leo! He was one of my favoite students last year when I taught 6th grade. I sat down with them and chatted, and Sheryl filled me in on all the happenings at that school since I had left in October: there have been 15 substitute teachers there since I quit. And apparently I still hold the record time at that place. The man after me only lasted 2.5 weeks, and he was a retired school principal from a nearby town. (He quit because of disagreements with the pay).

Everyone in Bisbee knows the troubles with that school, and I still find blogs talking about certain disciplinary kids or psycho problems (The mother of one of my students who lost an eye in a home invasion: several armed drug dealers broke into her home looking for her husband. He wasn't there so they attacked her with a baseball bat. The parents of two of my students were cocaine dealers. The woman now will live the rest of her life with a fake eye and a large scar around her eye.)

Scott, Leo's dad, was in the band. That's when I remembered he had told me he played in a local band, "Out of the Blue," which has a few good tracks on YouTube.

I chatted for a while with the family. The crowd got bigger but I also knew I had to get going because the dogs were in the truck (in the shade) and I had promised them a walk along the river. I said my good-byes and left Bisbee at 4pm.

And as usual, the dogs had fun splashing around in the shallow waters of the San Pedro. The grasshoppers have finally all died back but now there are more javelina and coyote holes near the river one must watch out for. The holes are big enough to twist an ankle in. The dogs sniffed every hole, and if Sammy could, peed in every hole as well. Sara got wet and came out of the water smelling like funky algae.

Kevin cooked dinner and I planned tomorrow's roadtrip: a loop drive north toward Copper Creek. It's a 200-mile day drive with lots of stops and explorations. The old ruins of Copper Creek town are still there, and old mining trails beckon me to climb the summits. I've been wanting to explore that area ever since I first read about the Copper Creek Trail in a Backroad guide to southern Arizona. The land looks similar to the land around Oatman on Route 66.

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