1.
Are we still here?Are we there yet?
It is martes hoy es Tuesday capitalize and don't capitalize, put apostrophes and do not put apostrophes hoy es martes y es día del sobreruedas sí me voy por supuesto of course I go yes feeling wonderfully happy to be back on the coast after having such a splendid chance to see Mexicali and experience it there are more readings coming up in the next few weeks but I have not been invited to participate there are so many poets that never more can all of us in the project get together and read all at once it would take all day and all night just to give each of us five minutes
you should know something has changed in me now that I have had these chances to read. Now that I have been up on that stage and offered my work, it is even more delicious just to sit back and watch. The desire to show off has mellowed, and the desire to hear Spanish spoken by Mexicans on the frontier – the number one reason why I moved here from next door – has re-emerged as the ruling passion of my heart. Lit err a turd yep.
Ah, that was a good one. Relief.
2. then we are back inside it's really today at the computer
I remember how we used to drive over the mountains to get to the desert when I was a child. There was, and still is, an American version of La Rumorosa grade only a few miles north of it. It is funny how both nations have built parallel highways up the most outrageous mountain cliffs. No, it's not funny, not at all. We are talking empires, here, and the rush is on to defend one California against the other, and vice-versa. Please.
Notice.
The rush has been on ever since the birth of the twentieth century.
Before then, the ancient wagon roads would cross back and forth without paying much attention. Then came the development of the desert as an agricultural treasure house, and suddenly it was much, much more important to divide the fields and the highways, and most of all, The RIVER.
"The" river, as we always say out here. There is only one.
The Colorado.
I wrote last week and the week before how I was worried that something has changed, and now I am sure of it. Something has changed
always told me I need to think of myself first.
I am less critical than him,
OR . . . in a metaphor nutshell . . .
He sees Charles Bukowski writing for the American audience.
I see Charles Bukowski printed in the Mexican magazine.
3.
I think I'm gonna go see him (David, I mean) tomorrow afternoon in the Dandy del sur cantina.
After I visit Aida in IMAC up on the hill, and Carlos down by the park.
I suspect – although I cannot be sure – that this picture above is a portrayal of the Mexican village of San Luis Rio Colorado, where Fidelia Caballero Cervantes hails from. It's a slightly larger town, now, and is a border gate. The highway between Baja California and Sonora still crosses the river right there. So that's another border, yes, just like the lable says.
Except the river is now just a big dry ditch full of sand and dust.
But above is how it looked a little over a hundred years ago, before the first Imperial valley canal was dug to water the desert. That canal actually traveled south of the border before crossing north again toward El Centro. Supreme Generalisimo President Porfirio Diaz (ordem et progresso) had given another concession to another foreign company to "help" develop Mexico. Eventually the savage wasteland would be full of checkerboard fields of cotton, alfalfa, vegetables you can see from space if you look real close.
But back then, in the beginning, after a couple years of the first splendid harvests and crops shipped in railroad refrigeration freight cars all over the continent, the Colorado river experienced one of its great floods, and in a fit of anthropomorphic pique, broke down the canal gates, turned its entire force into the canal route, and began to flood the vast Coachella Valley.
It only took nonstop railroad trains night and day dumping load after load of stones into the breach to shut off the flood and turn the river back toward the gulf of California.
Nowadays, a hundred years later, twenty dams measure and control the monster... and...
...and the river is just a big dry ditch full of dust and sand by the time it reaches Mexico. All the life has been sucked out of it by those twenty dams in the U.S. upstream feeding water into seven states and the two nations divided by treaty and language. We drink it right now in our evening coffee on both sides of the border. Goterdamerung twilight of the gods. Demons, rather. Monkey humans (with dogs running beside us on the road to sieg heil).
BUT a hundred years ago, different. The mighty Colorado, in full roaring flood, carved a new river – el río nuevo, pues – that followed the convenient gravity-driven canal downhill into below-sealevel Coachella and Imperial valley.
That was how
You know, that little blue blob down there in the desert. All that land around there is below sea level.
Once upon a time, several million years ago into the ice ages, it used to be full of water, surounded by grassland veldts and swamps back when mammoths ruled the earth. But the river dumped so much sand it built up a huge barrier just high enough to shut itself out and cut off the sea and then the climate changed into desert and the Coachella sea dried up. You can still see its bathtub rings on the cliffs near Coolidge Springs and Travertine Rock.
We probably have the geology ALL wrong but at last the desert lay dry until our busy monster manunkind built the first canals on the day before yesterday, or maybe it was only at ten o'clock this morning. Whatever for one brief shining moment the river flicked its mother-nature ain't-nice-to-fool-me fingers and flooded it and the "new" river flowed back up to the left and filled up that little kidney bean sea down there, see, just on the left, below...
Yep. And that's the truth. No, I ain't lying.
Not right now, at least.
6.mar.2007
:
76.winter/invierno
18.moon/luna
50.spaceage/edad.espacial
sectores
gringoticos:
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