Water for Bears, Bees, and Coyotes
Spreading the joy
Life is full of unintended consequences. How could it be otherwise? In pursuing a goal, we look more or less straight ahead, so we miss a lot of "collateral effects." Of course we may not care much about these, and in any case, the unintended consequences can be either good or bad, or both. In fact, sometimes they offer their own charm, like when I decided to build a water catchment and cistern on "The Propiddy" in Arizona. During a flaccid sort of midlife phase, I had bought this beautiful 40-acre piece of land at the mouth of a canyon in the Chiracahua Mountains. Here, the sheltering live oak woodland of the canyon gives way to an expansive grassland with agave, manzanita, yucca and other desert shrubs, and a panoramic view of the Piloncillo Mountains 20 miles across the valley. In pursuit of making "The Propiddy", a good place to camp, I needed a water supply, and this being desert, if there was one thing missing, it was water (now there's a surprise!).
However, it sometimes rains even in the desert, so all I had to do was capture that rain and store it somehow, problem solved. Just inside the canyon mouth, I spotted just the right place--- a cliff draining a large expanse of bare rock above, so that (when it rained) water cascaded onto the next lower shelf and then poured onto the ground between a very vigorous manzanita bush loaded with tiny little applelets and a madrone tree with its smooth red bark. Both clearly benefited from the runoff. All I had to do was build a cistern on the shelf to capture the water on its way down. Couldn’t be that hard, could it?
So, I lugged a couple of 96 lb. sacks of Portland cement and 50 lbs. of hydrated lime 200 meters up the hill, puffing like a steam locomotive, and dropped them under the overhanging cliff. Scouring the hillside and the dry stream bed up and down the canyon, I gradually amassed a large pile of rocks, and from the stream bed, I sifted buckets and buckets of coarse sand. But making cement also takes water, so, more lugging 5-gallon containers up the same 200 meters of hillside.
On the nearly horizontal shelf just below the waterfall, I laid a semicircular foundation of rocks cemented down and tied into the cliff at both ends, then row after row, I built up a wall to form a tank that held about 2000 gallons of water (or would hold, as it had not yet rained). At the bottom was a pipe with a valve and a shower-head so I could stand on the ground below for a brisk shower. A year or two later, to keep the future water clean, I built a sand-filled filter system drained by perforated pipe on the cliff shelf above the cistern. This greatly reduced the entry of silt and sand from the cliff.
I added a roof of sheet metal with a cut-out for water entry to the cistern to reduce the number of drowned honeybees and leaf litter. Upon my return a year later, the tank was filled with clear water, and on hot days, the showers were heavenly, but the next year, the sheet metal roof had been bent in so that it poked below the water level. I guessed a black bear had sat on it, fixing it so he/she could now get water ad lib, but the exposed water also attracted hundreds of honeybees, who can only live within flight range of free water. Jesus bugs skated on the surface, and diving beetles plumbed its depths.
So, my cistern, which I had built for my own selfish needs, was now making life a little easier for a wider clientele. On the other hand, it was stopping the water that had nurtured the manzanita bush and the madrone, and they didn't look so good. In fact, the madrone died a few years later, but the manzanita is still there, waiting, I suppose.
In the early 2000s, the clientele widened still more as the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico turned into a flood, and coyotes (not the four-legged kind with bushy tails, but the people who smuggle people for money) discovered my hidden cistern, making their lives and the lives of their "clients" a bit easier and safer. The 50-mile walk from Mexico is a stretch of desert in which it isn't too hard to die of thirst. I suppose it is exaggerating to say I was an accomplice to smuggling people, but if my cistern might have saved someone's life, color me I-don't-care. However, I do wish the emigrants wouldn’t repay me by leaving so much trash. But I suppose even the trash is an unanticipated side effect of my narrow goal of providing myself with water in the desert.
But as time slid by and my visits became occasional and short, my plans gradually dimmed under the cold eye of reality and practicality. Moreover, nothing man-made survives without maintenance, and on my last visit in 2015, someone had broken off the lower pipe, draining the tank and ending the life-giving service my cistern had offered to bears, bees, and coyotes. Fallen leaves formed a mulch in the empty tank bottom, the metal lid was rusty, and my ladders were missing several rungs. Gone was the dream of building a simple shelter to make occasional visits to The Propiddy with my wife and daughter more comfortable. This weighs on my spirit. What now? Can I hand over the land to someone who appreciates it in the spirit in which I first acquired it? Perhaps. I am negotiating with my neighbor, a herpetologist who runs a local natural history museum and who owns the 40-acre parcel to the north and wants my parcel. I would keep visitation rights. I think that’s probably the best I can do, and my spirit will be relieved of its weight and The Propiddy will work its magic on others.
People say, “you can’t take it with you,” and as far as I can tell, that seems to be true, but if I could, The Propiddy would be one of the first things I would tuck into my bag.
Another of your "small" projects involving creativity, then intensive time and labor, plus additions and corrections. You imagine it and then make it happen!
It’s quite a story, all the effort you put into creating a cistern in the desert with the mountain view and the travails over the years that made it so hard to maintain. You are philosophical about the animals that raided it, and forgiving about the migrants and “coyotes” who took their sips but left trash. It seems like a memory that will stay close to your heart. My son Tyler whom you mentored loves those mountains, and going camping there.