Where is all of this going?
Mile after mile after mile it goes:
Spanking new businesses, huge multi-block-long strip malls,
huge malls built like palaces,
monumental façade furniture stores, plush plazas with their endlessly gushing
water fountains,
swimming pool resorts, lushly green flowing golf courses, spas, medical centers,
classy restaurants & upscale fast food, big dark glass shiny office buildings,
the flaunt of higher-end auto dealerships, fortressed condominiums,
& amazingly there’re people aplenty
to sustain them all—
Narrow
& new, wealth-exuding, exclusive, gated communities are laid out like patchwork
all over the desert—
Saguaro cacti pose au naturel beside the local bank.
The further out (where sister lives),
it’s true, the more environmentally tasteful & respectful
they’ve built,
nonetheless, the overall impression, it’s the furious, unrestrained pace
of development
that apparently knows no bounds—
Everywhere it’s the big signature of money.
My sister said,
Hardly any of this was here five years ago.
It’s all the metropolitan extension
of
this explosion of
manic, nonstop, insatiable development,
they say the fastest in the country,
the enormous Valley of the Sun undergoing Los Angelization—
It’s easy to envision the future of this place,
but, perhaps, one prefers not to envision too vividly
the future of this place.
My brother took me
to the top
nearly of
and there we saw the great Valley of the Sun spread before us,
distant
downtown
spread before us—
Must have been 30 miles & more looking either east or west,
from where we were.
One can imagine when the air cooks at 110-plus degrees
& the
smog, they say, obscures even the nearest mountains,
what kind of brownish soup people here must live in.
My brother said, People stay in.
You drive down
just the other side of big boulder-faced Troon
where sister & husband live the good life on the far edge of town,
and as far as the eye can see, there’re slices & scoops & peaks
of stark mountain,
further & further lost in the haze of the great Valley of the Sun,
& it’s an otherworldly impression,
it is this desert world’s own primordial beauty—
To think, someday, this is all going to be one mass of humanity.
Only the mountains will stand to confront it—
The silent, persistent, timelessly patient mountains
will always be there,
to stand to confront it,
to be a reminder, years from now,
of what this land’s mystique will always be.
Are there no limits to growth?
Is there any hope in the years to come
that we can survive this?
Can anything be done to sensibly caution
against
such insidious expansion?
Does anyone, can anyone, throw up their arms
& say,
Enough is enough?
Apparently there is no desire to stop it,
I see no sign anywhere of stopping it—
It’ll be
mile after mile after mile
of homogenous development to the bitter end,
until perhaps the spirits in the mountains can take
no more,
or humanity settles into a breathless death.
They do call it here the retirement
capital of the
March
2001