As I gazed across the lake, I imagined the face of Ben Franklin reflected a million times in the antifreeze-green water.
Still bouncing, I looked into the future, at the $1 billion of development the Tempe Town Lake is supposed to lure to its shores: luxury condos; a five-star hotel; a convention center; and scores of paddle-boat enthusiasts, recreating upon a manmade lake in the bed of what once was a perpetually flowing river in the midst of the Sonoran Desert.
It struck me that I was merrily hopping upon perhaps the most attractive ecoterrorism target in the Southwest, and there was nary a security measure in sight. I had scaled no fences to reach the dam, and passed no trespass signs.
I slid down the dry side of the dam and looked around. Nope, nobody around. I kicked the rubber wall a few times. Despite the massive water pressure, the surface yielded about a half-inch. I looked around again. It was just me and the dragonflies.
I chortled at the arrogance. Not the arrogance to build a $100 million lake in the Sonoran Desert. The arrogance to then leave it unprotected.
News flash: Tempe's visionaries could not have built a better objective for a strike by a roving monkey-wrench gang such as the Earth Liberation Front, or ELF, which torched a ski-lift building and a day lodge in Vail, Colorado, last October to protest Vail Corporation's plans for expansion into the habitat of a subspecies of endangered lynx. That arson caused $12 million in damage.
ELF could easily inflict similar damage in Tempe, and probably earn as much national publicity.
Also, this just in: The Tempe Town Lake is not appreciated by everyone in Tempe. I have spoken with and listened to conversations among those who see it not as a monument to progress, but as an exercise in flagrant consumption. They see the $100 million in public money spent on the Rio Salado project as the most damning evidence yet of Tempe's shift from an affordable, neobohemian college town to a place where the interests of business rule, and laws are passed that make it illegal to sit on the sidewalk.
They see their town becoming a Scottsdale franchise, led by champions of shopping-mall culture. They see the "algae pond" as a symbol for everything that's going wrong in Tempe. I can easily imagine a few beers pushing one or a group of them to execute a black op.
I've heard a lot of wild ideas on how to monkey-wrench Loch Mess, most of them in neighborhood bars, which explains the suggestion to slip a raft into the water in the dead of night and paddle around, quietly distributing a wholesale aquarium shipment of 1,000 piranha. The concept was that the minipredators would act as the Town Lake equivalent of tree spikes. You dump the fish, then post signs: "Warning: Piranha-Infested Waters."
Two problems: Although piranha thrive in warm, still water, the Town Lake is so nasty the piranha would die off straightaway. Also, one of the tenets of monkey-wrenching is to make sure nobody gets hurt. Some fool could take an illicit skinny dip the morning after and get skeletonized.
Another fanciful conversation centered on the invasive aquatic weed hydrilla. It's got a cool name, it spreads like Ebola virus, and it grows 10 inches a day. Toss in a little water hyacinth or Eurasian milfoil for variety, and within weeks the Tempe Town Lake could become the Tempe Town Marsh. The ducks would dig it.
Of course, if a real ecoterrorist were to plan a hit on the Tempe Town Lake, she would focus on the rubber dams, and primarily the rubber dam at the west end. The down-river end. The end toward which the water naturally flows.
The rubber dam on the west end of Tempe Town Lake is 16 feet high, making it the largest rubber dam in North America. I know this because a sign posted on an overlook told me so. The sign also informed me the west dam consists of five rubber segments, divided by concrete support pillars, each of which is 225 feet long. The rubber membrane is one inch thick -- thick enough to repel most gunfire.
The day I spent at the lake, there was a security guard posted at the overlook. As I approached from behind him, he seemed to be performing a hybrid of disco dancing and tai chi. Obviously, he didn't know I was coming. He heard from 30 yards out, spun, and straightened up.
I asked him if I could walk down to check out the west side rubber dam, and he said no, it wasn't allowed. Then I asked him how many guards were on the lake, and he said there are always two -- one guarding the western dam, one the eastern. I told him I'd just been to the eastern dam, and used it as a trampoline. He shrugged and said maybe the guard had gone to Circle K. I noticed he wore the white-shirted uniform of TEAM, the firm that provides security for Downtown Tempe, Inc., and whose pool of talent is, let's be honest here, not exactly Delta Force.
With a little prompting, the guard told me there are three shifts of lake duty -- two six hours and one 12-hour. He even told me precisely when the guards change shift. I told him he was a wealth of information and he said he was happy to be of service.
I looked down upon the dam, then west, toward the 202 freeway, tracing with my eyes a relatively lush avenue of waist-high brush, about 500 yards long. I guessed it would make good cover for an approach in the dark. Then I looked up, to the summit of Tempe Butte (a.k.a. "A" Mountain), the perfect vantage point for a lookout with binoculars and a two-way radio.
It would be all too easy, so long as you had the boom-boom.
I hiked back to my car and drove, less than a mile, to a survivalist store, where I purchased a pamphlet on explosives and another on detonators (both of which, incidentally, were published by a company based in Cornville, Arizona).
Three hours later, I had read them through, and felt confident that with a shopping excursion to Home Depot, Radio Shack and a hobby store, I could build a shaped, high-explosive charge that would blow a big hole through one inch of rubber. If I were so inclined, I could make a remote detonator using a cell phone and copper wiring. Set the charge, get a few hundred miles away, dial the cell phone and boom-biddy-bye-bye. Total cost would be about 60 bucks, not counting the cell phone.
God bless America.
I desired a second, professional opinion, so I contacted a friend of a friend, a guy who served as an Army Ranger, assigned to a mobile, anti-aircraft missile team.
This guy -- I'll call him Rick -- lives in one of the few remaining pockets of old-school Tempe. By this I mean his neighborhood is inexpensive and funky. Rick pays 300 bucks a month for his 1,400-square-foot house, which is next to a house decorated with a peace-sign mural. Block by block over the past decade, the city has dismantled Rick's neighborhood to make way for apartment buildings and a condo complex.
It's called urban renewal, or, as Rick puts it, "They're wiping out all the cheap, single-family dwellings to make room for fuckin' conglomo-world."
Rick has lived in his house for 12 years. He and his wife recently had a baby, and another's on the way. Rick says he had just finished an addition on his home when, about three months ago, the City of Tempe condemned it, to make a turnaround for garbage trucks. Now he's looking for a new place, probably in Gilbert.
Rick says he has no intention of blowing the Town Lake dam. If he did, it would already be in pieces. But a few years back, Rick bet a friend 500 bucks that he could make an over-the-shoulder missile launcher out of household items in less than 24 hours. He won the bet, using a Black and Decker leaf blower, model rocket fuel and a few other easily obtainable items that I'll keep to myself. Rick says he blew six-inch-deep impact craters in a limestone cliff from 100 yards out.
I asked him what he thought his rocket launcher would do to a one-inch-thick rubber dam. He said, "Probably blow the fuck out of it." Rick says he walked to the Town Lake overlook a day or so after it started filling with water, and he, too, noticed the easy access to the dam.
"Three well-placed charges would just take it out."
Yeah, but that would be such a waste of water.
Contact David Holthouse at his online address: [email protected]
