I’ve written before about John Van Dyke’s memorable description of the line between a desert river’s ribbon of green and the arid landscape that surrounds it…
the line where the one leaves off and the other begins is drawn as with the sharp edge of a knife.
This holds true when the knife’s edge is drawn by a canal rather than a river. I took this last month in the Coachella Valley east of Mecca, Calif. The canal’s delivering water to irrigate the farmlands to the west, both metaphorically and also quite literally holding off the desert to the east:
Desert's Edge, Coachella Valley, February 2012, by John Fleck
The Rio Grande Bosque in your town and the multi-generational palimpsest geometry of ever longer and skinnier properties that emanate from it are an earlier expression of this line.
As you know, the scale and geometry your photograph relates to is of a different technological and economic order.
If you must, call me one who suffers from the complications of nostalgia.
I’ll have to find the corresponding photograph of a bosque acequia holding back the desert, to compare the scales.