![]() Some 250 miles of canals fanned like tufts of hair from the Salt River, irrigating several thousand acres of corn, squash, beans, pumpkins and cotton. 200, Hohokam Indians, using handheld digging tools, moved tons of earth and engineered the largest pre-Columbian irrigation system in the Western Hemisphere. Part of the canals’ mystique is that some of their routes predate Phoenix by nearly two millennia. Because they so prominently display what makes a desert city possible, it would seem that to get to the bottom of the canals would be to get to the bottom of Phoenix. For all their sterility, the canals command moving water and thus retain more mystery than anything else in the valley. ![]() Glimpses of joggers and cyclists along the banks indicate that there is still human life without combustion. Receding parallels of packed desert sand, twenty feet wide, clean of vegetation, frame an even, sky-reflecting flow. As you jockey through traffic dizzied by small businesses and their signs, numbed by miles of ranch homes and convenience stores, your eyes will flicker coolly down what seems an open tunnel of water. Varying little, pooling a personality, they make soft incisions through what surrounds them. Except for what remains of its desert setting, canals may be Phoenix’s most distinguishing feature. ![]() Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.īruce Berger | A Desert Harvest | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | March 2019 | 25 minutes (4,980 words)Īs Mars was once thought to be, Phoenix is crisscrossed by canals. ![]()
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