Endgame /
Last year, a couple of beers into a dinner of green corn tamales with a friend in Lerua’s, one of Tucson’s oldest Mexican restaurants, I committed a regrettable faux pas. Recently, I’d moved to New England after living most of my life in Arizona, and now returned here only once a year to teach. When my friend asked why I’d left, without thinking I answered him truthfully.
“I decided I had to get out before the water’s gone.”
My friend, a college dean, gagged on his Dos Equis.
“Alan,” he coughed, as he fumbled for a napkin. Clearing his windpipe, he repeated my name as though I were a student who had misbehaved. “Alan, please. The water’s not going to run out.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” He searched for a simple phrase to penetrate my surprisingly thick skull. “Because it can’t. They won’t let it.”
“Who, exactly, is ‘they’?”
He gestured out the restaurant window, where summer traffic poured along a hot boulevard sizzling with commerce. “You know. Everyone.” In effect, he was arguing that places like this were too substantial to fail. “They’ll figure something out.”
He had once served, I recalled, as interim director of the Arizona History Museum. “You’ve heard of the Hohokam, yes?” I asked. The pre-Columbian Hohokam lived and farmed throughout much of what is now southern and central Arizona. In the Phoenix basin, they diverted waters of the Salt and Gila rivers into irrigation canals so artfully engineered that they are still used today. But around the year 1350, the climate apparently began to change faster than their engineering could keep up. By the time Europeans arrived, the Hohokam, who’d numbered at least a hundred thousand, had vanished.
“Oh,” my dinner companion said, frowning. Then he brightened. “But they didn’t have today’s technology.”
Not wanting to spoil our dinner or our friendship, I refilled and clinked our glasses and replied that I hoped he was right. I knew that with substantial careers and a lovely home they’d expanded at considerable expense over the years, he and his wife could never fathom leaving here. So I steered the conversation away from where it was heading: to the fact that, with around 40 times the population of Hohokam civilization now living in metropolitan Phoenix alone, modern Arizona has stretched those old canals about as far as engineers can go. That included digging a new one 330 miles across the state to the California border, to siphon the Colorado River.
Completed in 1993, the Central Arizona Project canal – the biggest, costliest waterwork in the United States – required boring through several mountain ranges and took 20 years to build. But already it’s not enough, and now we know it never will be. Because, although the Hohokam would be impressed that, unlike their ancient gravity systems, the CAP canal actually pushes water uphill – via nuclear- and coal-fired electrical pumps, 450 billion gallons of Colorado River water are annually lifted 1,200 feet to Phoenix, then another 1,200 feet higher to reach Tucson – the original Arizonans would also notice that modern engineers still haven’t figured out how to make more water than nature delivers.
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