Arizona on Parade

by Pa Rock
Desert Observer

It is the best time of year in the desert. The days are still relatively tolerable, and the evenings are cool, but not so cool as to prohibit riding around town with the top down. Tempers remain subdued, but they will begin to flare with the advent of the hard, miserable summer.

The cacti are just beginning to bloom, and they look especially vibrant with their crowns of blossoms. They will hold their blooms for a month or so, and then go to seed. The little cactus wrens are starting to drag straw into the upturned armpits of the giant saguaros, building nests that no sensible predator would dare to invade. And the little doves will soon begin their family planning by building nests on the tops of buildings. Soon they will all be chirping and raising their babies.

My favorite bird, however, is the desert goober. While this doofus species acts too dumb to reproduce, something must be happening somewhere because they keep on appearing year after year. Yesterday I was heading out to the Arizona State in Glendale when one especially heinous desert goober pulled up beside me on a motorcycle. I was fairly certain that he was a true goober because he wasn't wearing a helmet, and my suspicion was confirmed when I looked closely and noticed that he also had a pistol holstered to his expansive girth. While a desert goober, particularly one with prison tattoos, may strut his stuff and act as though he is one bad dude, he is generally too dimwitted to pose any serious danger to the other desert creatures.

It's springtime in the desert, and me and all of my fine feathered friends are enjoying the last of the nice weather!

Desert Vistas

by Pa Rock
Desert Rat

It was a beautiful day for the drive from Luke AFB to Las Vegas. I anticipated that the jaunt would take four hours, but it was closer to six. The big hangup was Hoover Dam! Damn! Damn! Highway 93 North goes right over the dam - an old two-lane roadway that had tourist traffic snarled for about ten miles, or one hour. But, we were traveling so slowly that I was able to get some great pictures from the car! I think that I may stop there and look around on my return trip Sunday.

Things that I learned on the road today include the fact that the roadside cacti between Phoenix and Wickenberg are much healthier, and of a wider variety, than those between Phoenix and Flagstaff. The Giant Saguaro, in particular, are awesome. I learned that the small theatre on the main drag of Wickenberg, AZ, aptly called "The Saguaro," is currently playing Slumdog Millionaire, indicating that Wickenberg may not be as "small town" as it lets on. And I now know what a Joshua Tree is, and even got out of my car at one point and walked among several of them.

Las Vegas has changed a great deal since I was last here fifteen years ago. Gail and I are staying at the Tropicana, one of the older hotels on the strip. Tonight we went out with her son, Reed, who lives here, and had a nice meal and saw some of the sights. We caught the volcano erupting at the Mirage, went into the Venetia and watched as the gondoliers languidly transported tourists up and down the Grand Canal, and capped the evening off with a breath-taking view of all of Las Vegas from the top of the Mandalay Bay Resort.

Las Vegas is much quieter than the last time I was here. We heard that tourism is off as much as 40 percent. Many of the slot machines looked forlorn.

More on the Mighty Saguaros

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Old friend and young grandfather, Michael Box, from the state of Kansas, posted a reply to my article yesterday regarding the growing theft of the giant Saguaro cacti from the deserts of Arizona. What this former resident of the Valley of Hell had to say explains why this criminal enterprise is so lucrative. According to Michael:

Illegal saguaro's sell for up to $50 a foot plus an additional $100 per arm. The prized crested plants can go for $15,000 or more.

Stealing these plants violate both Arizona and Federal law. The Arizona law appears to be regulatory in nature. The Federal Lacey Act is not. There you get felony convictions and big fines.

The saguaro can live 150 to 175 years, weigh up to 7 tons, and be taken in as little as 15 minutes.

So, let's do the math: gas for two trucks (-$20), wages for four undocumented workers for a couple of hours each (-$100), and a quick sale of four of these desert guardians (+$20,000 or more) - yep, that beats holding down a real job!

Michael did include this note of caution:

Only a fool will wander into the Sonoran Desert at night when the rattlers rule. But the risk of a fatal snake bite is out-weighed by the lure of profit.

This is one instance when I'm rooting for the snakes!

Selling Earth's Treasures

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

There are many ways to make a living, the art of collecting enough wealth to live on. Most of us have jobs, and most of those jobs center on manufacturing products for sale, or providing a service for sale. Another approach to making a living is crime, the act of taking something that doesn't belong to you for purposes of making money. The criminal activity might focus on stealing an object, an idea, or wealth itself. One additional way of generating wealth, often in much greater excess than what it takes for a comfortable existence, is to commandeer the Earth's treasures and natural resources and market them to the public.

I'm not saying that taking the world's oil, for instance, is necessarily a criminal activity, though it is becoming easier and easier to make that argument! There is work that goes into that activity that justifies some of the price - drilling, refining, distributing, etc. But an activity that generates that much profit (billions of dollars each quarter) is necessarily fraught with shady practices - oil lobbyists buying politicians or remodeling the home of a certain powerful Alaskan Senator, for example - or spending tons of money to make sure that alternative energy strategies don't make it to market in a meaningful way - or encouraging immoral wars to enable better pipeline routes across the middle east.

There are other groups equally concerned with selling off the planet's resources. Enterprises such as lumber companies and the fishing industry profit greatly by cutting and netting as much of their "product" as quickly as possible without any sensible plan for meeting the needs of future generations.

Today I heard of an outrageous case of the systematic theft of our natural heritage. The giant saguaro cacti of Arizona, often twenty feet or more in height, are being uprooted in the desert and wholesaled to landscapers. The expense of this operation is almost nil because it is based on theft, but the rewards are significant. Giant saguaros aren't like pretty desert bushes that can be grown en masse in greenhouses. They take many decades to grow to a decent size, and the most practical way to acquire one is to drive into the desert as night and steal it.

Recently seventeen giant saguaros were uprooted one night near Phoenix. At that rate, it won't take many years before these kings of the Arizona desert are all concealed behind the fences of suburban home owners.

The state of Arizona has come up with a plan to at least slow this criminal activity, and hopefully stop it. The idea is to insert computer chips in the cacti that are still in the desert. Then when a cactus disappears, they will be able to track its movement through the thieves, landscapers, and receiving homes.

Maybe when this system goes into operation, landscapers and homeowners will begin to ask questions about where their giant saguaros originated, and a lucrative market will dry up. The threat of jail, after all, can be a powerful motivator to behave in an honorable manner!

Man needs to move decisively to protect the planet from his evil twin. Earth's bounty belongs to us all.