Hohokam Portal
Walk with the Watermasters
In the modern-day state of Arizona, where the Salt and Gila Rivers meet, the aptly named city of Phoenix rose from the ruins of an ancient civilization. Long before Europeans gazed on this blistering desert valley ringed with mountains, people called the land home.
Here they lived, creating beautiful things, some of which linger in the painted pottery, jewelry, and rock art passed down to the valley’s present inhabitants. Here they built vast systems of irrigation canals, astronomical observatories, cities containing walled family compounds and multistory buildings, and immense platform mounds that may have served as artificial mountains, bringing them closer to sacred beings in the sky who sent life-giving rains in answer to their prayers.
Decades of research and personal experiences in the Arizona desert inspired me to create a world in which canals run like green ribbons through a quilt of adjacent fields. Villages of neat adobe compounds, punctuated with platform mounds, ballcourts, and greathouses, stand straight and tall, statements of these inventive people’s mastery of their homeland.
Desert washes shine with pink-blooming ancient ironwoods, sunshine-yellow clouds of paloverde blossoms, and the graceful pink to purple flowers of desert willows. Rivers carry water through groves of cottonwoods and willows and past bosques of mesquite trees filled with a panoply of birds, singing and calling out a warning when people intrude. Beyond lie grasslands populated by rabbits and other small animals. In the desert flats, immense saguaros tower over creosotebush, barrel cactus, flame-tipped ocotillo, and, in the spring, a multicolored carpet of flowers that pop up and as quickly fade.
This is a landscape of richness and contrast, fraught with hazards yet achingly beautiful. In this world the worst dangers come from other humans.
