Haibun: Arizona Cannibles
The Arizona desert is in decay. The imperialism of the American East, spread across the continent metastasizes across the Sonoran Desert. Our aquifers drained faster than they are recharged. Canal ditches sent to flood desert plots where alfalfa will be grown and shipped around the world. All to conquer the land with fields that are conquered with homes and conquered by condos and apartments and industrial micro-chip manufactures that demand even more water than the cotton fields it sits on.
The landscaped, full of empty coolers turned into target practice, broken beer bottles making the dried wash sparkle, and a shredded mattress half way up a thorn laced hill. Trail crisscrossing trail were trucks and off-road vehicles push their limits, each driver celebrating the dominances of the landscape. Nothing witnessed outside oneself, nothing observed, nothing of this big desert there to swallow up a person and leave them healed through being lost in something outside the automated machined and oiled world. Here, the natural world is something some does something against, not something we are one with.
This land, once O’otham land, then turned into the destination for Easteners looking to try their hand at the riches of the American West, the land went from sustainable to “discovered,” extracted, conquered, and reengineered to look as much like the lush eastern landscapes as possible. As countless real estate developers said in this Valley, “nobody wants to live in the desert.”
So no one has to think when they set out against the desert to conquer it, dominate it, and do what the marketing machinery tells them to do. No one has to think and we are left with just the trash of this cultural imperialism cannibalizing this land and the people of it.
