Local opinion: Border wall construction threatens Arizona's San Rafael Valley

The drive from Tucson to Sonoita, then to Patagonia after good monsoonal rains, is an up-and-down affair through green rolling hills spiked with deep green ocotillo on a two-lane road, a magical step back in time. From Patagonia, continue south, taking Harshaw then Duquesne Roads, crossing a few creeks as you creep along the enchanting countryside in the San Rafael Valley. Watch out for Black Angus cattle munching grass and whitetail and pronghorn deer darting through the trees. That bumpy road is slow going, so with windows down, you can hear the birds. Finally, there’s a huge cross, a monument to Fray Marcos, and after that, the 1882 schoolhouse and more abandoned buildings come into view. That’s the ghost town of Lochiel!

I drove there last week after reading about the tree-sitters who are trying to keep one last ancient cottonwood from being bulldozed – to make room for the border road with 30 ft high steel walls on both sides – walls reinforced with steel plates.

I went back a few days later to take food and moral support to people who care deeply about saving the tree and with it, wildlife such as bear, ocelot and jaguar that depend on the vast grasslands and access to water in this ancient Cienega along the Santa Cruz River, a shortgrass prairie ecosystem that serves as a wildlife corridor for hundreds of species. I met a nurse, a photographer, artists, writers, both Navy and Army veterans- everyone stoic and polite and mostly young, all lovers of the land who would make any parent proud, with ideals and courage and conviction.

The noise from the machinery knocks you over when you arrive, and I felt the vibration of the string of trucks rumbling down the road. When the machines stopped, the cicadas started buzzing, and my bird app recorded a great horned owl, ladderback and acorn woodpeckers and the ever-present house finches. But then, the front-end loader with a claw began ripping out shrubs and the old, see-through wire border fence. The metallic screech was sickening, and the insects and birds became still.

The double border wall across Arizona is tearing pristine land, shrubs and wildlife habitat. Reports from multiple state officials in Arizona and New Mexico that monitor the pumping, and correspondence from DHS, state that the construction requires about 700,000 gallons of water per day. Where is that water coming from — the springs or wells or aquifer? How will ranchers and wildlife be impacted, and how many years will it take to replenish? In a dry, hot land after decades of drought, the answer is unclear, but wells along the construction route have already started drying up.

Construction of the border wall in Big Bend, Texas began in the National Park and State Parks, ripping up the land for two weeks before local and state officials and citizens throughout the country created a public relations nightmare big enough for the Trump Administration to suspend work. Sheriffs from five counties adjacent to the Colorado River testified to the stupidity of building roads and a wall across land now impassable and pleaded for technology to monitor the border, not roads nor walls.

San Rafael Valley lacks the tourism of Big Bend, but there are similar issues. Corruption that directed $47 billion of U.S. tax dollars to a handful of companies with no-bid contracts, the cost of the absurd walls that is causing our national debt to reach the stratosphere, not planning for appropriate alternatives and maybe the most egregious - the destruction of the water supply that gives life to historic ranches, plants and wildlife in San Rafael Valley.

Members of Congress who enable this madness should be voted out. But first, visit the construction site in Lochiel this week to see the blue gamma grass of the prairie that covers rolling hills southward to distant mountains in Mexico. Then, together, let’s save Arizona’s piece of the San Rafael paradise, with streams and aquifers and jaguars, ocelots and bears, so they can continue to roam free along the ancient corridors from Arizona southward. We start with one ancient cottonwood in Lochiel.