Nineteen years ago I moved into the lower-rent end of a pricey Phoenix subdivision, courtesy of dual incomes and the dot-com bubble bursting at just the right time.
The backyard went from Bermuda grass and gum trees to a minimalist sweep of gravel, Indonesian statues, and oleander. It’s always been the stepping stone to something better in that backyard (and the gum trees went because they would have fallen on the house). But the view out back…oh yeah, that view.
It gave me some great art inspirations over the years, in both acrylic painting:
And glass micro-mosaic:
A sixty-five mile visual poem across the flat sweep of the Gila River floodplain, from the SanTan peaks to the east, Lone Butte to the south, and the sheer-walled Estrella Mountains to the west. Casino fireworks on July 4th and whenever someone beat the house in a big way. Hawks spiraling from one thermal to another in the daytime. Coyotes caroling at night. Meteors darting across starfields. Glimmering lights of the big drive-until-you-qualify suburbs of Maricopa. Unbelievable cloudscapes at all hours. Quiet, two-lane Pecos Road was a haven for joggers, bicyclists, and horseback riders.
Here’s a look at the Estrellas after a rare cold snap and snowfall earlier this year.
Part of the bittersweet joy of that view was knowing it was doomed, at least from my daily vantage point. The house was a foreclosure, and directly (then) in the path of the Loop 202 Freeway running due south of Phoenix, joining two legs of the unwieldy Interstate 10. Early stages of the planning showed the house lost to an eight-lane road.
My neighbors have fought the freeway for thirty years. There were better alternatives further south, but those would have entailed Arizona Department of Transportation dealing with the Gila River Indian Community.
Other communities like Gilbert, Mesa, and Chandler knew the freeway was coming, and zoned their adjacent land as commercial. They’re reaping the benefits of that, now. The shortsighted and greedy City of Phoenix opted to zone its land as residential, to gain immediate property taxes in the mid-80s from builders and homeowners.
Fast forward through ADOT’s racist brush-offs of early Gila compromises, Pecos expanding (unsafely) to a four-lane parkway, rushed and faulty environmental damage studies, faulty traffic studies, outcries over increased pollution in the path of numerous schools, a couple of bribed or threatened local judges, and my neighbors’ lawyer given only ten minutes to make his thousand-page case before the Ninth Circuit Court…and the freeway was granted the go-ahead.
Several thousand saguaro cactus and mesquite trees were dug up and boxed, to be ‘preserved’ for replanting along the margins. A mild scandal erupted a year or so later, when it was discovered that the construction company had forgotten to water many of the plants.
The footprint shrank because ADOT couldn’t afford to buy a seven mile row of houses. Instead of a sunken freeway preserving the horizon, we had a surface road and a twenty-something-foot curtain wall meant to dull the sound of traffic. Our house is safe…for now. But goodbye mountains, farewell vast view.
Over the last month, our section of freeway wall went up. It’s not as thick as it should be, and I earnestly hope the steel supports inside the concrete block will hold up against a microburst or a tornado. (I’m also a bit afraid to drive the finished freeway, because it is one of the shoddiest major roads I’ve ever seen built.)
They’re making an effort to beautify it along south-facing finished sections: a rich grey-green painted surface, with tan and rust-red sculpted designs drawn from Frank Lloyd Wright patterns. I almost expect they won’t paint or finish the back side (I can see raw mortar lumps squeezing out between the blocks on our side.)
But it’s still a bloody big wall.
The low-rent portion of my suburb will have to huddle in its shadow, while the rich folks up-mountain (who never much fought the freeway) will still have their view.
Guess it’s finally time to revamp the backyard into an inward-looking oasis!