OCR Text |
Show The pattern persists. Short-shot visitors, too many of whom own million doHar mansions that function as tax write-offs and over-night mountain playgrounds. Hardworking residents, finding they have to work harder and harder in order to afford living here. (Our college, Northern Arizona University, referred to fondly by certain tribal members as Not A University, provides thousands of part-time student residents, many _ who pay exorbitant prices for shared housing and work slightly higher than minimum wage service jobs; or are huge scary lunks in late-model daddy-financed Jeeps with No Fear stickers, who can't tell you where down-town is, unless it’s the corpo-Mexican bar.) Developers, most from out-of-town and out-of-state, have bellied up to the smorgasbord of Flagstaff land put out by decades of near-sighted local pols and businessmen. We had a faintly green City Council for a while, till 81% of our registered voters, too many of them Patagoniaed earth-lovers who give the rest of us eco-nuts a bad name, failed to vote, resulting in a pro-business council by 36 votes. The developers and their ilk were gleeful. (Apropos of the Patagonia clan, a local environmental ethics professor, Jeff Downard, positioned his “natural wood and stone” two-story house within 100 feet of our town's most beloved trail, a trail no longer blessed with an unbroken view of forest and Peaks. When we offered to help him move the beginnings of the foundation out of sight line, he shrieked “too much money”. Later we found out he financed the house by buying and selling a second parcel of the once-protected land. He crowed to friends, “You should buy land. It's such an easy way to make money.” Join the ilk, pal.) The pattern persists. Short-shot visitors, too many of whom own million dollar mansions that function as tax-write-offs and over-night mountain playgrounds. Hardworking residents, finding they have to work harder and harder in order to afford living here. “Growth is inevitable,” these bad hair-cut, ice-eyed, Polo-shirted land hustlers will tell you. Their voices are jolly, their assurances couched in wannabe green ‘n' diverse language. “Sustainable development. Environmentally-friendly golf course. Affordable housing.” Meanwhile, they shoot a few rounds on former Native American medicinal plant gathering areas, slam down a steak at one of the local breweries (those places seem to breed like wild mink) and watch their Prozaced helmet-haired wives sink slowly into their chilled white whines. And, those “who had come because they had found it prudent to leave some place else,” i.e., Los Angeles, Sata Fe, Albuquerque, the East Coast, prudence dictated by their soiling “rustic waves a huge of the of their own nests, slap down three million in cash for six thousand square feet of National Park style” and tell you they are populists because the gas meter man at them. Georgia Frontiere, owner of the St. Louis Rams, gained approval to gouge house and 16,000 square foot barn/guest quarters on the edge of Rogers Lake, one few remaining wetlands in our county. Developer Jim Mehen pesters the County Supervisors on a regular basis to jam a golf course/gated-at-the-discretion-of-thehomeowners’ second-home development into, I am not making this up, a volcano crater wetland endangered species habitat. Another guy (backed, it's rumored, by Kevin Costner money) “offers” us the opportunity to have a real honest-to-Injun Arizona Territories tourist attraction built at the A-1 Interstate-40 exit, near a cluster of long-time home-owners and the biggest north-south wildlife migration route in this part of the state. Note: to get to the AzTerror Indian theme villages, a Navajo hogan, Apache tipi (huh?) and one-room Hopi pueblo, you go through the Jesuit Church/public toilets. Good news? You want good news? I live here. I know better. But, I'll try. I work in Aradia Bookstore, a local hard-core bastion of weird sanity on the edge of down-town, whose shelves hold one of the finest collections of Southwest, Native American and Celtic books in the state. My customers educate me. And, despite the groovey ladies who encourage me to visualize the positive, and the old babe, dripping with 24 karat gold, who said, “Oh , you're one of those people who believe in Global Warming. success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.” ‘More than a few Flagstaff loyalists are doing just that. In the last decade, groups of people—politicos, greenies, profs, workers and businesspeople have agonized over documents which, if put into practice, can save what's left of our natural and human glory. The Open Space and Greenways documents, 20/20 Visioning papers and the yet-to-becompleted Regional Land Use and Transportation Study give us skeletons on which we can build protection for our town and wild places. Even more of us, some of whom have sat through the endless meetings to create those hopeful documents, are fleshing out the skeletons. Flagstaff Activist Network and Sierra Club have been the force behind the Forest Service's decision to declare the San Francisco Peaks as Traditional Cultural Property, slow a ski resort expansion and call for a mining moratorium. Friend of Flagstaff Future (Fcubed) slogs through the relentless work of protecting sign codes, keeping an eye on Planning and Zoning decisions and creating alternative currency. Friends of Dry Lake has stalled developer, Jim Mehen, for two years in his Flagstaff Ranch Golf crater folly. (The Grand Canyon Trust and Paul Babbitt, now a County Supervisor, crafted a proposition that would have protected the Dry Lake crater, wetlands, aspen-oak interface and basalt slopes, but Mehen turned it down. Not enough money. Not fast enough.) Friends of A-I are gearing up to fight Arizona Territories and local bookstore fans are preparing to boycott the invading Barnes and Noble and march from the opening to all the down-town bookstores. A local merchant who asks anonymity has printed bumper stickers that read: Unchain Flagstaff. Buy local. And, in the last few weeks, two cement mixers have been stolen from local construction companies. I think of Havel’s hope, and I remember Ed Abbey telling us to “out-live the bastards and piss on their graves." In that spirit, I offer a positive visualization: The outlaws, one per truck, drive the liberated cement mixers to the huge house being built on what is now Forest Highlands property, that house, of course, having the “premier” view of the Peaks, that house big enough to house half the homeless on Flagstaff's streets. The trucks rumble up the half-finished road, past the octopoid natural gas pumping station. It is New Moon, a fine time for beginnings. These eco-fiends can see in the dark. The outlaws look into the construction site, position the cement mixer hoppers over the beginnings of the first floor of the mansion, and let ‘er rip. We can't see their faces. They've tied bandanas--one black, one red, over their mouths. We can't tell if the outlaws are women or men. We know they are not young by the wrinkles at the corners of their gleeful eyes, wrinkles deepening as the cement floods what is probably called in the real estate blurb, the “Southwest Sunroom”. Those wrinkles deepen till you think you are seeing the faces of grinning, flea-ridden coyotes. At last, the mixers are empty, the house so big it would take a fleet of mixers to bury it. The outlaws sigh, shake hands and climb back into their trucks. They start to leave and stop. The smaller out-law walks carefully to the house, tosses something into the hardening cement. Then, more quickly and quietly than you might imagine two one-ton trucks could move, they are gone. Exhaust hangs like a banshee in the wet air. In the morning, the crew boss looks down at their work. He shakes his head and almost grins. A button shines up from the gray cement... “Not here,” it reads, "not ever." Sojourner’s Epilogue... On September 1, In delight and shock, I listened to our County Board of Supervisors turn down a golf course Conditional Use Permit and requests to build on steep basalt slopes, a rejection that throughly scuttled the developer's plan to put golf course and 1/2-million dollar homesites in an ephemeral wetland volcano crater. Nearly three years of hard volunteer work by dozens of local activists paid off. You can beat the machine. Mary Sojourner lives and writes in Flagstaff, Arizona. Her essays have recently been heard on National Public Radio. Well, dear, let me tell you, I don't know any of the facts, so I just don't believe in it.”, I actually have some hope. Vaclav Havel writes, “Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for People aren't the only ones who benefit from an annual checkup. ‘In 1986 we opened with one rug. COW CANYON TRADING POST On the North End of Bluff. Utah email: cowcanyn@sanjuan.net 435.672.2208 www.trane.com So tell me... Annual service and maintenance on your Trane gas furnace can help spot those little problems before they become big ones. It saves you money and extends the life of your furnace. So not only do you and your Trane unit benefit from a checkup, your pocketbook does too. i isn't this aboutwas the most exciting ad you have EVER seen in the Zephyr? |\ i y\, tAY cecal CO. \ eS 6 d i: age ! \j ye A Itk Hard To Stop A Thane: NELSONS Heating & Refrigeration 1070 S. Bowling Alley Lane 435.259.5625 |