So, here’s how the story goes. I’m on my way to Theory on a Thursday morning and I notice the concrete arroyo on the side of the road. That used to be a free flowing creek, atleast in the rainy season. I say to myself. Now it’s a concrete culvert.
After the ritual of the credit card and the kidding around with the baristas and the cupa cappuccino, I’m done. I’m ready to ride home, down Nacogdoches but first I feel compelled to go look at the concrete arroyo up close. I consider exploring it. The channel bed is wide and flat. Why not?
But I can’t get down there, the sides are steep and about 10 feet high. Probably for a good reason. They have tamed the arroyo so it can’t escape. No flooding allowed.
I see a dead vulture lying by a pool of water on the floor of the concrete arroyo and another live one standing nearby. Note this for later, dear reader.
The concrete arroyo roughly follows Loop 410 and its access road as it slowly loops around the city. Although I can’t get down into the channel at this point I can track it on the surface streets and from the access road.
I can see signs of human habitation down there - paintings on the canyon walls, but so far there’s no way I can get to it.
Finally I spot a park, Camille Price Park, to give away its secret location, with access to a gentle ramp leading down to the concrete arroyo as if you were going to launch your boat in there. Go water skiing on Shono Tiko Arroyo. Oh, wait, I haven’t come to that part yet.
I roll down the ramp, turn right and head upstream. The floor is smooth as a highway (probably made by the same people), with occasional inclines and ramps. Once I’m down in there, in the ditch so to say, I’m able to examine the exquisite canvases up close.
I explore the spooky side tunnels with my bike light. They hold some of the best paintings of all.
Galleries full of tightly spaced figures and symbols, mostly clustered within fifty feet of the cave opening.
I’m riding thru the lands where the skaters and the street people reside. It’s a strange geography. I meet three of them at the entrance to a tunnel. They pretend like they’re not doing anything. Haha. You can still smell the paint from their spray cans. Haha. My kind of people.
The exhibition goes on for a mile and a half with tunnels and side streams and . . . kind of like an urban park but it was designed for rushing waters, just get it out of the way, not people.
Then I found the Shono Tiko sign. It was a power symbol for sure. Compact and self-reflecting. It seemed to hold wisdom and I assumed it to be the name of this place. In some kind of native language. Don’t know what. In any case I adopted it. Shono Tiko Arroyo.
Occasionally nature would make its presence known by painting the walls of the levee with green leaves.
In some places the trees were trying to take back the arroyo.
Side channels came in. Little arroyocitos.
The walls have been painted and repainted by the City. Department of Parks and Recreation vs the street people, the skaters and the taggers.
Stalactites formed on the roof of a tunnel as if it had been in an underground cave for hundreds of years. Weird.
This tunnel goes under a giant building up top and its parking garage. Yes they built a parking garage over the arroyo. Amazing.
Evening Primrose growing in the crack at the edge of the concrete arroyo.
Pretty clean down here. I guess the underground people clean up after themselves or maybe the rain washes it away. The only rubbish is runoff rubbish that courses into the stream - plastic bottles and plastic cans and plastic bags.
This is the urban subculture that we don’t see because they are under the bridge in the arroyo.
Dead raccoon equals vulture feast. More were sitting on the fence nearby. A few hundred feet further down - another dead raccoon with more vultures. Strange.
Into the catacombs.
And on the other end of the Gilgamesh tunnel - the garden of delights. In case you read that story.
It smells like the edge of the sea down here, like a marine environment which it is I suppose. Shono Tiko Arroyo.
And the end of the concrete arroyo, Shono Tiko, downstream. Or is it the beginning?
A long, long time ago people lived here among the springs and the rivers and the arroyos. This place was an oasis - water, water flowing everywhere. A Garden of Eden, if you’d like to look at it that way, because the people lived on the bounty of Mother Nature. And she was bountiful.
And she was a real person too, or atleast a real presence, That she loved them was evident and they felt it in every gift she gave them.
The very first religion was nature spirits. Father Sky and Mother Earth. The sound of the wind in the trees and the song of the birds singing were divine revelations.
And then, of course, it evolved into something a little different, a little more sophisticated: gods with bodies that looked just like humans and had super powers. Poseidon and Saturn and Atlas and Jupiter. And then it became this one guy, I mean one god and he lives in heaven and we are down here below. Figures.
And now the city is covered in concrete. It’s a concrete jungle. Only remnants of the original jungle remain.
Remember the two dead raccoons and the dead vulture by the pool of water? Actually they were all by pools of water. Curious isn’t it that two raccoons died within 400 feet of each other and fairly recently. And the vulture, that makes three. Too much of a coincidence, more likely some homeowner, whose backyard abuts the concrete arroyo poisoned the raccoons and the raccoons poisoned the vulture. That’s what I think. Could be wrong. But probly not.
If anything bothers you, kill it. That’s the way we do it these days . . . some people. Wildflowers are weeds, raccoons are pests. That’s how far we’ve come in just a few hundred years. Didn’t used to be like that around here.
The arroyos in their natural state were beautiful living streams of water but they’re gone, mostly, a few remain wandering thru the city looking for something to merge into. Water still flows when it rains, of course. It runs down the streets and into the storm sewer. Or it flows into the concrete arroyo and off to the river and to the sea, the distant thundering sea.
We lose so much when we lose our connection with the natural world. We lose ourselves. We become mad. Not angry mad but insane mad. We forget who we are and why we came here. We are the humans and we came here to feel the love of Mother Nature. That’s what I think. I could be wrong. Probly not though.
I made my way back home after a couple of hours exploring and started writing up this account. Tried to remember the route back incase one day I want to revisit the place. The scene of the crime. The underground gallery. The spooky tunnels going deep into the earth. The fossilized concrete shell of what used to be a living stream. A living biosphere full of life. Maybe it could be again somehow.
Share this post