Heading north from Ajo I had to go through one more checkpoint – almost old hat by now. My plan was to head north, but as there had been a large snowstorm in the northern part of the state and the roads were supposedly messy, I figured I could follow the Colorado River and enter the north via the low ground. But since there was no direct route there, I ended up for a short while on old US-80 heading towards Phoenix. This followed the Gila River, through the fabulously Western-sounding Gila Bend.
Crossing the river heading north there was clear evidence that a dam had burst there; the rubble was still in the riverbed and concrete anchorings on the walls of the chasm. This was apparently the Gillespie Dam – a private dam. I hear that one of the reasons why the federal government got so involved in dam building was the horrible record that private businesses had building dams.
The Gila actually had water, unlike the “rivers” of Tucson, and its valley, which US-80 followed, was green and to Eastern eyes very pleasant. In fact, it immediately made clear to me why Phoenix, the primary town on the Gila, became Arizona’s capital. The Gila forms a classic valley which, to an Easterner, immediately suggests home – a fertile valley framed by low hills with farms every half-mile or so along the road. They were obviously irrigated, but they have probably been irrigated a long time – the water source is at hand. The farms reminded me a little bit of Arkansas, and closer inspection revealed why – they were almost all growing cotton.
I took a handful from a few of last year’s plants, which were growing as weeds outside the fields and had been left unharvested. It is such an astonishing crop – ready-made cottonballs, a substance which seems like it must be processed but is not. Pulling one out of a bottle of aspirin would not have shocked me, but pulling one off a dried rotted plant always does. To a northerner it is something of a mythical plant – it cannot be grown in the short seasons of the temperate zone, and requires a tropical or subtropical climate to thrive.
Cotton and clothing are beginning to receive some long-overdue attention. The immense effort involved in the production of clothing – which used to be the occupation of the vast majority of womankind – is hard for a Westerner even to conceive of now. Clothing is cheap, and it is treated as such – as something ephemeral, to change with the fashions. Disposability of this sort must be based on something unnatural and unsustainable. The Guardian ran a piece on the relationship between cotton production in impoverished countries and their accompanying food shortages, which received some corrective but proper attention in Mother Jones. I’m sure that New York fashionistas and their sorry imitators could care less about such things, but headlines like “is your clothes habit starving people?” can at least point people in the right direction. You don’t really need more than a few new pieces of clothing per year, really, and much of that can be reused-recycled. I will not deny that modern industrial society seems very attractive when it comes to the production of clothing, but to accept mechanization is not the same as accepting wanton waste.
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