It Begins With Phoenix

Thoughts from J. Bockman

There's a distinct advantage to being a girl in Phoenix. Not only do girls, even back then, have more opportunities in dressing for the season--girl's short shorts and mini skirts are an absolute advantage over boy's shorts in summer heat beating--but skirts form great pockets, the longer the skirt, the deeper the pocket, and the greater advantage I had in olive fights. Never mind I was bigger and stronger, being several years older, my skirt held three times the amount of green olives contained in my brother's and his friends' seven-year-old pockets.

In moments of nostalgia, I'm sorry for the kids now in Phoenix who will never have olive fights. Green olives, properly spiked, hurt. A lot. They leave welts. They drive combatants to dodge and weave around the trees seeking protection, or just a way to sneak up on the enemy, um, sibling. It's a fun way for siblings with nothing in common to bond. One that doesn't require the preparation, money, equipment, or clean up of a paintball fight. But today, though olive trees are ubiquitous in Phoenix, dotting the lawns like yard ornaments, like the pink flamingos and carefully tended rose beds, they have been rendered ornaments. They don't flower, they don't fruit.

There's an irrefutable argument for the ban on flowering olive trees. A great portion of the populace are allergic to them. Yet I can't help feeling that a season of sneezes is a terrible reason to deprive Phoenix, and Phoenix children, of its heritage. Maybe I should feel bad for those who grew up in Phoenix, sniffly, achy, and swollen while my brother & I pelted freshly plucked missiles at each other. Those kids never viewed olive trees as a playground even when there was more reason than the ordinary draw to climb a tree because its there.

Olives & olive trees are inextricably interwoven into the landscape, both the physical, geographical one and the historical, personal one. Not many people remember that Phoenix began as an agricultural community. Three types of orchards have left their mark, ready to show themselves to the person paying attention. Palm trees stand sentinel over certain parts of Scottsdale Road. Citrus trees, round topped and white trunked, dominate yards by Camelback and 48th Street. Olive trees offer gnarled shade down the neighborhood sidewalks around Indian School and 40th Street. Except for certain pockets, old family hold outs and historical sites, I think Phoenix, the city itself, has forgotten. I wouldn't know it except that my family's history is part of Phoenix's history. When I came to Phoenix, it was to move from an ocean breeze-swept modern house to a tiny 30s-era adobe house on one of the last parcels of my great-grandmother's olive orchard.

Most of the people now in that neighborhood came from somewhere else. The neighbors my grandmother knew for so many years have died or moved into care facilities, their houses sold to strangers from Nevada or Michigan or Washington, and certainly from California. All of which have their own histories, their own heritages but, being transplants and interested primarily in the lack of snow and the comparatively low prices, buries Phoenix's memories of different times. Of poorer times. Almost as if Phoenix, by reaching out to these new people and providing them with green grass, familiar shops and restaurants, and business opportunities, becomes the heroine in a rags to riches story, a city who has changed her clothing and acquaintances and, while not denying her past, hopes no one brings it up.

This phenomenon isn't Phoenix alone. To say Phoenix is to include not just the city of that name but also the cluster of smaller cities surrounding it, each passing into the other uninterrupted and unacknowledged beyond a street name change, if even that. Phoenix's boundaries are barely visible. It reaches out into the desert and seems to deny with its green lawns and white trunked citrus trees the very existence of the desert. With its plethora of brand name restaurants, chain clothing stores, and tracts of houses with a small patch of yard, it seems to deny its agriculture-in-desert roots.

This must seem like a strange beginning for a blog about living in a desert. Why pick a city that grows grass and white washes its citrus tree trunks? Well, this is where it begins for me. With olives, oranges, and grass all courtesy of the irrigation system the Hohokum left behind, which brought people like my great-grandparents from Kansas, who had to learn that olives paid better than the citrus they'd been replacing the olive trees with, and that people would pay for olive-fed turkeys even during the Great Depression. Olives gave Phoenix one of its booms, during World War II when suddenly olive oil couldn't be imported from Spain. The irrigation system also brought people like a woman I am forever fond of but will never understand, a woman who grew up in Phoenix yet enthused over her new Scottsdale home because "it looks just like California."

I don't particularly like Phoenix, even though it is the biggest city in my state. But it is where I first learned what it meant to live in arid country. I didn't learn to love it there, but I learned my link to it, and through that I learned that there are many ways to live here, ways that are constantly changing, affected irreversibly by choices of residents, established and new. It's where I started thinking about what effects our choices have. How much is too much when it comes to population growth and water? To building and loss of native habitat? If we chose a house because of its proximity to natural wilderness, how does it change our relationship to that wilderness?

I think every place should have its own sense about it, its own microculture or personality. And as Phoenix grows, it adds more yards, more non-desert trees and bushes, more generic restaurants that look and smell just like the one in California, it represents to me not only the beginning, but the ending. It's what we lose when we go too fast; we forget that we live in arid country.