One never knows what one will learn when traveling. My beloved wife Marsha and I just made a business trip to Phoenix and Tucson, so we are experts. And, we learned a great deal about water in southern Arizona.

There isn’t any.

They do get 10” of rainfall each year, but it sizzles away like a drop of water hitting the bottom of a hot wok ready for the bok choy.

Oh, sure—there is water in southern Arizona---they obtain it from somebody else’s rivers, or they pump it out of the ground until it’s gone, but in the meantime, they spray it up into the air from fountains at the entrances to gated communities, put it on golf courses, and make ponds that they call lakes and sell very expensive houses around them.

Every few decades, they get a whizbanger of a storm that dumps rain and more rain and more rain and then these dry rivers that go under these gigantic big bridges that normally serve no earthly purpose because there is no water at all go raging along, gouging out great hunks of southern Arizona, often taking said bridges with them.

In other places, they don’t bother building bridges at all, and instead just build the roads down across the dry riverbeds and then put a sign there saying, “Don’t drive through the river if there is water in it, dummy.”  They call these dips in the road “washes” which is quaint, but these things are killers when it rains, but it never rains, so mostly they are just quaint.

The absence of water does make for some interesting phenomena.

Who, for example, would expect to find people living in a houseboat in the middle of the Sonoran desert?  I was surprised on this trip to see a fair-sized houseboat in a small town, up on blocks, and obviously occupied.  I was past it before I could see if the mailbox had a name on it---and you know what I’m thinking.  There were two dogs and two cats sleeping on the deck.

Another strange thing I encountered was an entire school of mackerel, and absolutely no water anywhere nearby.

I spent a few hours bicycling with my dear friend Dr. Megahertz.  It was 150—no, make that160 degrees outside, in the shade. (As a rancher in Wyoming once said to me, “It’s 101 in the shade, but this here’s Wyoming so there ain’t no shade.”  Same deal in southern Arizona.)

Dr. Megahertz once got too close to a radioactive substance when he happened to be holding an iguana in his hand, so he is part reptile and the heat doesn’t faze him. We pedaled along and the temperature climbed to 165—no, make that 175 degrees, and I drank much more than my fair share of Arizona’s water and Megahertz just pumped along singing “Zippidy Do Da.”

In time, we came to our ultimate destination, which was the famed aviation bone yard at Davis-Monthan AFB southeast of Tucson, where the military stores thousands of old airplanes until they can either use them for parts for our own planes still in use, sell them to some country that will later become our enemy and use them to try to kill us, or melt them down and beat them into plowshares so we can grow corn to make ethanol.

What an amazing sight!  There are thousands of acres of pavement covered with rows and rows of fighter planes, cargo planes, bombers, helicopters, jet engines, piston engines, old planes, new planes, troop carriers, big planes, little planes, Coast Guard planes, Navy planes…..and there is only one thing that anyone can say when they see it.

Holy mackerel.
                                               by Jim Whitehouse

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