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rclark51

The Basics

• Name: rclark51
• Age: 58
• Email

Stuff I Like

Natural history, reading, writing, hiking, rafting, thinking

More About Me

I first saw the Grand Canyon in the fall of 1952. I was 18-months old.I first saw Glen Canyon in July of 1958. It was sun scorched and dusty, with dam builders and dynamite. My fourth grade teacher at Orangewood elementary school in Phoenix taught me that Arizona’s five most important resources were climate, copper, citrus, cattle, and cotton. She called them our “five Cs.” She said that the Salt River created the basin where we lived. It was called the “Valley of the Sun.” My grandparents arrived from Joplin, Missouri in 1919. Mustard gas burned my grandfather’s lungs during World War One. Doctors recommended moving to Arizona because of its dry climate. His first job was as an electrician in a copper mine near Globe. They later lived in Prescott, where he was electrocuted on a power pole. My grandmother became a single parent in 1938. She had one daughter. A decade later, a young man left Texas to learn Portuguese at a school near Phoenix. But he became a newspaper reporter and my father instead. Cousins from Oklahoma decided to move to the Valley of the Sun in 1961. They liked what they saw in Arizona Highways magazine.“Oranges, pick’em yourself, 10 cents a dozen” read an ad I placed in the Phoenix Gazette when I was ten. Snowbirds from places like Minnesota flocked to our yard to have their picture made picking oranges in December. I earned enough to buy Christmas presents for my two younger sisters and my parents and grandmothers. Sometimes in spring, the scent of orange blossoms was fouled by the stench of cattle corralled along the bone dry Salt River. Every two weeks in summer, Salt River Project would flood our lawn with a foot of water. It soon smelled of rotting fish that had finned their way from reservoirs before dying in Bermuda grass where cactus once grew.Awhile ago, I learned that “cheap water” is just another “C” that’s killing our deserts. In the 1960s, Salt River Project became an electrical utility, which spurred on the sprawling Valley of the Sun. It built a behemoth coal-fired power plant on Navajo land near Glen Canyon Dam. I learned something else: Burning coal to cool places like Phoenix is cooking all hope for life on earth as we know it. There’s this picture of me standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. My mom is clutching the back of my Levis. They are cuffed and made from cotton.