Category Archives: Days in My Life

I don’t just sit around and watch TV.

It’s Not Just Sand

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I have to explain to passengers that the desert is more than sand dunes.

I had some passengers on a helicopter flight a few weeks back who were just visiting the Phoenix area from somewhere back east. At sometime during the flight, they told me they were hoping to see the real desert.

My DesertI was confused. Wickenburg sits in the Sonoran desert. That’s the desert with the big saguaro cacti all over the place. It rains, on average, less than 8 inches a year. The desert can’t get any more real than that.

My passenger clarified. “Well, where’s the sand?”

The sand, unfortunately, is all over the place. In washes, in my front yard, in my shoes and cars, and in my hair and eyes during a dust storm. Sand (and dust) is a part of life here.

But not the kind of sand my passenger was thinking about. He was thinking of sand dunes. You know. Like the kind in movies that take place in the Sahara desert.

I began to understand. His mental picture of the desert included the rolling sand dunes from the movies. The same sand dunes that had hazards like quicksand and oasises with palm trees and ponds of water.

I explained that there were sand dunes in the southwest desert, but they were only part of the desert landscape — not the whole thing. I told him about the big sand dunes west of Yuma on I-8, and the small sand dunes west of Blythe off of I-10 (I’m not even sure if you can see those from the road, but I see them from the helicopter when I fly that way), and the medium sized sand dunes in Death Valley.

Then I put on my tour conductor voice and gave him a summary description of the Sonoran desert landscape, including information about its cacti, trees, animal life, and other features.

Of course, all this has me wondering how many people think the desert is just a big sand dune.

Monument ValleyOne of the things I love about the desert is its diversity. There are so many kinds of desert, each with their own little ecosystem. Drive 50 or 100 miles in any direction and you’re likely to be in a whole different kind of desert. For example, if you drive up route 93 from Wickenburg, you’ll enter another kind of desert where there are no saguaro cacti, but plenty of Joshua trees. Drive up to Monument Valley and you’ll see the layers of underlying rock exposed in magnificent formations, with scrubby trees and bushes hanging on for life in the fine red sand.

Just don’t go down to Phoenix. There isn’t much of the desert left down there, with all the asphalt, golf courses, non-native plants (like palm trees, for heaven’s sake!), and irrigation.

Mexican Labor

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Why we need immigrants.

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, I’ve been sitting on the fence about the immigration issue. But yesterday, something happened that gave me some more food for thought.

The phone company sent a pair of Mexican laborers to my house to do some work.

My house sits on the side of a hill. Between it and the telephone pole that brings service to my house is a large wash (dry river bed that sometimes isn’t dry) and my paved driveway, which curves up a pretty steep hill. There are no overhead wires going to my house. Electricity and telephone service are underground (the way they should be).

When we first moved to our home 10 years ago, Mike and I each had a home office. To handle home, business, and Internet (ISDN in those days) service, we needed six telephone lines. The phone company only had two lines in the conduit that ran under the wash. So they brought in a team of Mexican workers and a ditch-witch to dig a 3-foot-deep trench from the pole, across the wash, up the side of the driveway, and to our telephone box.

This worked fine until my neighbor, while playing with a backhoe in the wash, severed the phone lines. Mike and I spent half the day sitting in the wash under an umbrella, splicing in a new segment of phone line to restore our service. We didn’t want our neighbor to get hit with a bill from the phone company.

I think Mike did severed the lines next. (What is it with men and heavy machinery?) This time we had the phone company come in. We no longer had the offices in the house, so we didn’t need that 6-pair. Could they just use the phone lines in the original conduit? Sure. And they did.

Time passed. Those phone lines went bad. The phone company fixed the line in the wash and routed service through two of those pairs.

More time passed. Now phone service isn’t working reliably again. Sometimes it’ll be fine for days. Other times it’ll have a cracking sound that makes it nearly impossible to use. Once in a while, the lines will be dead. We called the phone company.

It took them about a month to admit that all the lines going to our house were shorted out. They couldn’t find two good pairs of wires in the ten pairs available. They needed to run a new cable.

They sent a guy in to check out the situation. He wanted to run the lines up the back of our property, up a 60° solid rock hill covered with desert vegetation. I was doubtful, worried about erosion in the new trench over time.

Yesterday I stayed home to rest (trying to speed recovery for my surgery). I was filling the hummingbird feeders in the backyard when I spotted the phone company truck trying to zero in on my house. (My house is hard to find and we like it that way.) They visited every house in the neighborhood before they finally climbed up my driveway.

“You finally found us,” I said.

The man in the passenger seat of the truck looked at me blankly and showed me a piece of paper. It was a work order for our home. I looked at him and realized he was Mexican. I looked at the driver. He was Mexican, too.

“Do you speak English?” I asked the passenger.

“A little,” he said.

I looked at the driver. “How about you?”

He laughed. “No Ingles.”

Great.

“I’ll call the phone company,” I said.

They understood that. They parked the truck and I went inside to use the phone, which was working well that day. I finally got through to someone. By that time, the two Mexicans were checking out the side of the driveway, where the old cable was.

“You sent two guys who don’t speak English,” I said. “I think you need to send a supervisor or someone who can communicate with them to make sure they do what the guy who was here yesterday wants them to do.”

A while later, the guy who’d been at my house the day before called. He confirmed with me where he wanted the new line to go. By this time, the Mexicans had shovels out and were digging in various areas alongside my driveway — not where he wanted the line to go. I told him this. “You want to talk to them?” I asked. “Do you speak Spanish?”

He told me he didn’t speak Spanish but he’d call their boss.

By that time, I was pooped. It’s the surgery recovery thing. I’m glad I stayed home yesterday to rest. I went back into the house, closed the windows, and turned the AC on. It was 10:30 AM and already about 85° in the shade.

The Mexicans continued to work. They pulled out their ditch-witch and dug a trench alongside my driveway right where the old trench was. I don’t think they hit the old cable because my telephone service was never interrupted. Around noon, one of them came to ask me to move the cars. We have a parking apron at the top of the driveway that was added after we moved in; they wanted to slice along the concrete seam to sink the wires there. I moved Mike’s truck, his old Mustang, and my Jeep.

I caught sight of their big, orange water bucket, which they’d put on top of my pop-up camper for easy access. Right out in the sun. I know how much I hate warm water, so I asked one of the guys if they wanted some ice for their water. I also offered them the only soda pop we had — diet Coke. (Mike drinks it; not me.) They accepted. I went inside, removed the ice maker’s bucket, put two Cokes on top, and brought it outside. When he opened the water bucket, it only had about 3 inches of water left in it. I dumped in all the ice, then told them to fill it at the hose spiggot at the side of the house. “Take the hose off,” I told them. “The hose water is dirty.” I don’t know if they understood, but I wasn’t about to hang out with them to find out. By this time, I was over 100° in the blazing sun and I wanted to be inside.

But those two guys didn’t seem to care. They worked away in the hot sun for the rest of the day. At one point, I looked outside to see one of them sweeping my driveway. At another point, they were down at the telephone pole digging with shovels. These two guys worked their butts off. I don’t know if they took any breaks or if they had lunch with them. All I know is that they were done by 5 PM and rolling back up the road when Mike got home from work.

Mike and I talked about it later. I told him that I couldn’t imagine any American working as hard as these two guys had worked in the hot sun all day long. “I hope they’re getting paid a decent amount of money,” I added.

“Probably about $15 per hour,” he told me.

Do you know any American laborers who would work like that for that kind of pay?

And therein lies the problem. We (Americans) have come to rely on immigrants for cheap labor. They’re willing and able to work. In fact, they’re eager to work. And they’ll do it for far less than most Americans would consider getting paid, without labor unions, strikes, or unreasonable demands for benefits.

What would happen in we suddenly cut off the inflow of immigrant labor?

What’s the answer to the immigration problem? Damned if I know.

It’s difficult to rest…

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…when there’s so much to do.

It’s been a week since my surgery and the pain is greatly diminished. My incision is healing nicely and my digestive system seems almost back to normal. I feel capable of doing things. Not physical things, mind you. Just things. Doing odd jobs around the house. Working on the WordPress book Miraz and I are trying to finish. Grocery shopping. Meeting with friends at the airport for one of Stan’s great lattes.

The trouble is, I can’t do “things” for more than an hour or two without getting completely exhausted.

As my friends keep reminding me, I need to slow down. I’m recovering from abdominal (or abominable, depending on how you look at it) surgery. My body’s trying to heal itself and I’m forcing it to do other things. At this rate, I’ll never recover.

So today I’m taking the day off (again). Rest and relaxation.

The pile of work waiting for me to get to won’t get any bigger. I’ll just have less time to get it done.

The Sleeping Tiger Stirs

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I get pretty fed up about what’s going on in Wickenburg…and start to do something about it.

Small town politics sucks. There’s no doubt about it. And it sucks even more when the politicians are fighting over a desert crossroads town with a weak economy and a part-time population.

When I moved to Wickenburg ten years ago, it was a small western town with a year-round population of about 4,000 people. Just enough shopping and services to make life convenient. Lots of space between the homes on the outskirts of town where I live. Privacy. Quiet. Clean air. Little crime. Slow pace of living. Just the thing a pair of New Yorkers needed to get a grip on their own lives.

One of the things we liked best about Wickenburg is that it didn’t have a lot of high density housing. Sure, it had some condos and apartments and the homes in the older downtown area were small and on small lots. But the rest of the town was zoned for one house per acre (or more) and the outskirts of town were zoned for one house per five acres. (We have 2-1/2.)

Fast forward to 2004. A developer proposes a high density housing development at the 9-hole golf course known as Wickenburg Country Club. He promises to expand the golf course to 18 holes. All the golfers want it. But the people who will soon have condo roofs in their back yards don’t. And neither do the people who see that one high-density development will open the floodgates to others.

Voters put together a referendum to get the issue on the ballot. Proposition 421 was the result. And the voters voted the development down.

Let me make sure you understand what I just wrote. The majority of voters who voted on Prop 421 voted against it. They were saying that they did not want the development to proceed.

Fast forward to 2006. The Mayor and Council voted in favor of allowing a virtually identical development on the same site by the same developer.

Huh?

Silly me. I thought we lived in a democracy.

But it gets worse.

Another group of voters put together another referendum to stop the development again. It was submitted the same way as the first one and should have been accepted. But they Mayor decided that because an attachment was made with a staple rather than a paper clip, it was not properly submitted. He directed the Town Clerk to reject it.

What?

I’ve been sitting back watching all this bullshit unfold for the past three years. Occasionally, I’d write an article or a letter to state my point of view. But I pretty much kept out of things — there were other people writing for my Web site, wickenburg-az.com who were saying pretty much what I would have said anyway.

But now I’m pissed. This little twerp who was voted in as Mayor — I couldn’t vote because I live outside of town limits, but I never would have voted for him — is making decisions that are not only beyond his authority, but they’re clearly against the will of the people.

This is wrong.

And I’m not going to sleep through this one. I’ve already made my first contribution to the voters efforts by writing an article about the paper clip rejection. More to come.

I promise.

Back from Surgery

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What a pain!

Most folks didn’t know I had surgery scheduled for last Wednesday. Although you might think I write in this blog about every aspect of my life as it unfolds, I don’t.

I didn’t want to write about it. There were too many unknowns. The huge lump in my abdomen could have been anything from a fibrous growth to a nasty bit of cancer. Surgery could have required removal of just the growth or removal of some important stuff it might have been attached to, with all kinds of reconstruction within. I could have come out of surgery and been back to normal in a week or two or the surgery might have been the first awful step in a slow spiral down to a painful death.

So I guess you can see why I didn’t want to write about it.

Surgery was Wednesday and it was the best case scenario all around. The growth was a hefty six pounds in weight, but it wasn’t attached to anything important. They took it out and, while they were in there, they took out a bunch of female parts a 44-year-old woman doesn’t really need anymore.

I was in the hospital for two nights and three days. I shared a room with a woman who was going through pretty much the same thing I was — but worse. I think she lost more parts.

The worse thing about the experience was the pain. We’re talking pain that just won’t go away. Pain when you move. Pain when you think about moving. I was screaming when I regained consciousness in post-op. They asked me, on a scale of one to ten with ten being the worse, what was my pain? Ten! I screamed at them. It was a question I’d hear over and over during my hospital stay. The answer ranged from four to eight after that initial ten.

They had me on three different pain killers. One was a device literally stitched into my wound area. It leaked out a novacaine-like substance to deaden the pain on contact. The other was morphine attached to an IV going into the inside of my elbow. I had a pain button and when I was in pain, I’d push the button. A bit of morphine would go into the drip. Of course, this was limited to one little bit every six minutes. If I pressed it every minute, I’d still get it just every six minutes. It made a reassuring beep-beep-beep sound every time I pushed the button, whether morphine went in or not. The third painkiller was oral and although it had a different name, it was based on morphine, too.

So it’s no wonder I couldn’t keep my eyes open in the hospital. I was doped up with morphine for three days straight. I felt pretty stupid bringing an overnight bag with two books and notebook in it. I couldn’t focus my eyes on anything long enough to see it, let alone read it. I listened to podcasts for a while, but even those put me to sleep.

Days and nights blended into each other. The clock on the wall showed five minutes later every time I looked at it, no matter what time I looked at it. The night nurse must have been bored the first night because she came in to do a survey at 2 AM and tried taking me for a walk at 4 AM. (I was too nauseous for the walk.) To make matters worse, the pre-op nurse had screwed up my IV by putting it in my elbow instead of my hand and the IV machine required a reset every 2 to 45 minutes. All day and all night. Every time it needed the reset, it would emit a loud beep-beeeep. I quickly learned how to reset it myself so I wouldn’t have to wait for the nurse. Not only did it keep me up, but it kept the woman on the other side of the curtain awake, too. When the nurses caught me resetting it, they weren’t happy. But I wasn’t happy listening to that thing beep for ten minutes while I was waiting for one of them to show up. Besides, the pain button didn’t work unless the IV machine was working.

Anyway, I’m home now. I dosed up with some morphine before leaving the hospital (I’m not an idiot, you know) and spent most of the ride from Banner Good Samaritan Hospital to Wickenburg in a state of semi-consciousness where my only thought was, are we there yet? I managed to throw up nothing — it’s when you go through the motions but nothing comes out — after a nice hot shower. Safeway brand Tums and Sea-bands (which I’m still wearing) helped out there. Yesterday afternoon was a drug-induced confusion of watching television through out-of-focus eyes and drifting off to sleep. Finally, I could stand it no longer. At 8 PM, I took the heavy-duty pain killers and went to sleep. I was up again when those wore off at midnight and managed to stick it out until 2 AM before taking another dose. Then slumber until 6 AM, our normal wake up time.

This morning, my coffee wasn’t very good so I switched to tea with some lightly toasted and buttered bread. It’s my first piece of really solid food since Tuesday night. Now my job is to get into some kind of ritual that’ll let me get on with my life while I recover.