ESSAYS

• Wildcat Articles
• Poem: With Love
• Canalscape: Water Defines Us
• Technology and Stimulus Funding at the City of Phoenix
• Hydrascape
• From Student to City Manager

Samuel Feldman

Canalscape: Water Defines Us

Phoenix Canal

The story of this place we call home is told by the canals. More than the brown, sandy soil we so often associate with the desert, water is what defines us as a people. It tells the story best of our rapid growth. It brought my parents here, both coming at the height of population booms. It also brought our earliest settlers, the Hohokam, and our modern pioneers, such as Jack Swilling and Charles Hayden.

I grew up swimming in local pools, mostly Phoenix’s Cielito pool. Like it’s Spanish-origin name suggests, in my childhood it was my small piece of heaven. My earliest memories are of playing and swimming at Cielito with my loving father. I can still see him at swim competitions, running along the side of the pool with me, shouting my name and encouraging me to swim harder.

The same water that fills our pools also comes out of our faucets, after traveling through parts of the Valley’s over 180 miles of canals. These canals bring water from all over the state and the Colorado River, a river so fierce it tore open the earth to form the Grand Canyon. We ignore that travel, however.

It is the deliberate seclusion of our canals that has divorced us so much from the origin of our place, and truly, the origin of who we are. We may buy and sell water to pay for its storage, filtration, and delivery, but we all own the water, together. We forget that arrangement too often. We forget it because we have abandoned our canals to our alleys, hidden behind our block fences. We possess a rare work of art, and all we can do is store it in our basement.

Grady Gammage Jr. said it best at the canal symposium in February. He said that we do not need to wear droughts like a hairshirt. We can celebrate water, and we can bring our canals back to our collective consciousness. If we could see our canals, through our bedroom or office windows, or from a table at a local coffee shop, we would remember our connection to our water. We will see that despite our scarcity, we have abundance.

Near the end stages of his life, my father’s favorite place to be was near the water fountain in our backyard. It was simple – a frog shooting water onto it’s lake below – but the sound of running water did as much to sooth his pain as the narcotics he was taking in regular intervals. He lost consciousness for the final time right there, in his favorite chair just a foot from the fountain, and died twenty hours later.

I rejoice in knowing that water is involved in our entire individual life cycle – from birth, to life, to our eventual death. As it is true for us each, it is true for us as a whole; water is what brings us here, and it is what will drive us from this place if we do not respect it.

I hope that we can re-imagine the way we develop our cities in relation to our canals, not just for economic profit, but so that we can reconnect our daily lives to the source of our lives. We must see water for it is – sometimes scarce, sometimes abundant, and despite poor stewardship, enduring.