FARIAS' RESACA PEAN BEGS BELIEF, RELEVANCE

By Juan Montoya
I pondered long and hard about whether to address a response to a piece (Herald, April 2) by Brownsville Public Utility Board member Arturo R. Farias where he waxes, almost, but not quite, poetically about the city's resacas.
I didn't want to come off as some haughty, presumptuous literary critic thumbing my nose at a fledgling writer trying his hand at crafting an amusing anecdote about a geological feature such as are local resacas. Who's to disagree that if not for these meandering waterways, this city would be much the poorer for it? One need only look at what happened across the river in Matamoros where they filled in their resacas and built on the depressions left behind? There was, after all, a reason why the city used to be called Nuestra Señora del Refugio de los Bellos Esteros. The "esteros" were the resacas of the past that existed in Matamoros.
These water ways were created by what used to be the raging Rio Grande before dams were built upriver. They would then become isolated, stagnant pools of water that quickly became foci of pests and pestilence. In fact, the first attempt to settle there was abandoned after the settlers were driven away by disease-bearing mosquitoes. That's why the city square in Matamoros was later built at a safe distance from the river so as not to endure the annual flooding.
Since there was no city on the north side of the river, those "esteros" were left as they were. These are our "resacas." Early on in the settling of Brownsville, some resacas were filled in by developers who thought nothing about filling them up and selling the land for homes. One can still see some of these subdivisions in the near west side of town.
Early on, those on the U.S. side decided that the resacas – apart from their aesthetic beauty – could also function for the storage of water for domestic and irrigation. They also functioned, after being connected at strategic points, for handling water runoff and flood prevention.
But why am I saying this to Farias, who as a PUB board member should be well aware of this? (That's him at extreme left in the group photo.)
This is why.
He begins by describing the press tour where the beginning of the city's effort to dredge the resacas as a "recent breathtaking morning" at the city resaca next to the old city cemetery where he suggested that instead of the city's slogan being "Brownsville: By by the border, by the sea" it should be "Brownsville, with our resacas, deep and beautiful."
Well, in the first place, the slogan is not as he states it. If I remember correctly, it's "Brownsville: On the Border, By the Sea." As an ambassador of the city, Farias should know better. Secondly, unless he knows of some resacas in the city that are more than waist-high deep, the adjective doesn't make sense. Perhaps some of the resacas out toward Los Fresnos or Bayview fit that description. He couldn't drown in the resaca where the dredging begin if he stood on his head. In some places in town, the mud and silt show us as small islands where wading birds and water turtles sun themselves.
These resaca "creations," as he calls them, also provided him with his favorite anecdote when his family gave him a kayak, an iPod, a life vest and a blue whistle and he overturned it and lost his headphones and iPod in the silt and mud of the resaca next to his home. Now, putting aside the fact that very few of the 178,000 people in Brownsville can afford to live next to a resaca and yet fewer to give a 50-something-old man a kayak and iPod to paddle around for recreation after a hard day crunching numbers and raising electric rates at the PUB, its' easily discernible just how out of touch our Mr. Farias is from the average PUB ratepayers.
In fact, if he asks the resaca dredgers, he will find out that about the only things that they will remove from the resaca bottoms will be shopping carts, tires, milk crates, the carcasses of dead animals, and a fetus or two. It will be a miracle if the iPod and earphones will have survived this corrosive stew.
How many of his fellow residents can "wake up to tackle (their) day...witnessing the glorious sunrise that majestically reflects on the serene resacas while taking notice of the ripple patterns produced by previous aquatic species and feathered friends is certainly a breathtaking sight."
Are you sure your family didn't include a Thesaurus along with the iPod, Arturo?
From then on, the article goes downhill, if that were possible.
Resacas become "the main doorway to lush vegetation that the vibrancy of beautiful plant and wildlife," the "precious ecological living systems that make us so unique," and in dredging them "we access a greater wisdom," and "restore our thriving selves and the city..."
So, Grasshopper, "as we walk together...we, "step by step begin this journey together," to attain a higher sense of self.
Gag.
And then the "humor."
It gnaws at him, he writes, that when the PUB dredging crew gets to the zoo, some of the workers may be "coerced" by the zoo's four-legged friends to remain as companions."
Farias, don't leave your day job, if you still have one the the bank.
Tell us about the Tenaska deal with the former PUB employee. Tell us about the economical whammy the PUB taxpayer will receive to pay for that scheme that PUB (you)  so far you have have refused to explain in detail. Tell us why Fitch Ratings downgraded $445 million in PUB bonds from "stable" to "negative."
More and more it seems like the commentary on resacas you published in the newspaper and that you have repeated ad nauseum to others in the city is more of a diversion from the hard reality facing your fellow Brownsville residents who must live with your actions while you diddle in maudlin abstraction.
More and more it appears as if you tried to make a stab at high prose and humor with a very dull wit.