From the Archive – Southwest Center Researchers / Gary Nabhan
We’re beyond the end of a long runway, at the bottom irrigation ditch. Just a few hundred meters away, a jet lifts ground and thunders over our heads. My three-year-old hands fly up to cover her ears, and she hunches over in feat. Horrified by the deafening noise of the aircraft above her, around for shelter. But the ditch bottom is largely barren and cracked. The few saltbushes nearby are whipped violently the tailwinds of the jet. Failing to find any cover that will roar, she cries out to be held and runs toward me down the Fish as large as my daughter once swam down this prehistoric We’re beyond the end of a long runway, at the bottom of a dry irrigation ditch. Just a few hundred meters away, a jet lifts up off the ground and thunders over our heads. My three-year-old daughter’s hands fly up to cover her ears, and she hunches over in fear. Horrified by the deafening noise of the aircraft above her, she looks around for shelter. But the ditch bottom is largely barren clay, dried and cracked. The few saltbushes nearby are whipped violently by the tailwinds of the jet. Failing to find any cover that will muffle the roar, she cries out to be held and runs toward me down the ditch.
Fish as large as my daughter once swam down this prehistoric Hohokam canal. The canal itself is among the largest built in preColumbian North America. Among the fish it formerly carried was Xyrauchen texanus, the humpback sucker, reaching up to a yard in length and weighing thirteen pounds. Humpbacks were once common throughout the Salt and Gila watersheds in central Arizona; they frequented the main ditches of the River Pima Indians, who came after the Hohokam. Today, elderly Pima men can still describe with some flair this fish, which they call o’omuni: “It has a yellow belly [and] looks like trout, more or less, but the back is high, the tail thin, and it comes down like this;’ they say, shaping with their hands the low spot between the hump and the tail. For Sylvester Matthias, its actions are also well remembered: “O’omuni behave like carp, not [like fish that move] in schools. They are fast and stay on the side where the river is cutting under the bank, so they can go under it and hide. And they are slippery.” […]
