After receiving contacts from Jim Duncan as well as doing a bit of research myself into people who may have connections and information about the canal system in the Phoenix valley, I made one in a series of many cold-emails. These consisted of me emailing someone out of the blue to briefly describe my project, and to ask to set up an appointment to meet with them and get as much information or contacts out of them as possible. Kinda like a telemarketer cold-calling a customer, except I could use the University as validation.
With this in hand, I blasted over a dozen people from a wide gamut of perspectives. Often these situations consisted of me emailing someone, then getting a response back about three days later to set up a meeting a week or further after that. It worked, but it was a lot of scheduling in the future, and a lot of not knowing what was going on in the now or the not so distant future.
The next meeting that happened through my cold-emails was with Shelly Dudley from the SRP Archives department. Again, we met at the Project Road building, and this time while waiting for Shelly to come out of the swipe doors I realized what the large ball of name tags were. When you go beyond the door, they take your information (name, phone, social security number, blood type, a swatch of hair... okay now I’m being ridiculous) and put it in the system, then give you a re-useable plastic clip that goes on a name-tag sticker. When you leave the SRP, they take the clip back and you give back your sticker name-tag. These tags have been collected and assembled to become a sticker ball more than two feet in diameter. That’s a lot of visitors.
With my clipped name tag on, Shelly escorted me into the SRP building and to the basement (of course) to the Archives Department. In her email, Shelly seemed to be a bit apprehensive about hiding things along the canal as well, and I didn’t want to have any strange conversations or vague and mysterious definitions about what a geocache was, so I decided to bring the cache that I had hidden near my studio to the meeting. When we started, I explained the geocache concept, bringing out my cache and showing her the log book, how the magnets worked in the Altoid case, and the items that were in the cache. I convinced her enough that there wasn’t going to be a serious problem with the caches, and our conversation went on to other things.
As with Jim, Shelly asked what she could do for me. I gave her my brief answer to the question of what I knew about the canal, and basically asked her to fill in some gaps with the information that she knew. I knew that the SRP had done a project with some local artists (Marie Navarre, Sharon Sutherland, Mark Klett and Bill Jenkins) who were doing rephotographing of old SRP photographs from the 1950’s and earlier, sometimes much earlier. She gave me a bit of information about that project, telling me that those images and documentation were all at the Architecture Library at ASU (right next to my studio!).
She gave me some suggestions for information about the canals, including giving me a book called Two sides of the River about the canals until the Roosevelt damn was built, as well as a dissertation by Alf Simon called Mixing Water and Cultures: Making the Canal Landscape in Phoenix. She told me about other places that I could look into in relation to histories of the canals, but didn’t really offer to let me into their archives to see their history. Kinda strange.
All in all, I left with a free book, information about a dissertation (which, in hindsight, is a really insightful and helpful book) and some SRP handouts or fliers. On the way out, I asked about the 100 year anniversary, and it seems like she was super busy trying to put on a centennial celebration.
In the end, I didn’t really get a whole lot out of this encounter, or at least not any sort of carte blanche invitation to their files, or any real open arms. Maybe I was too vague in what I wanted, maybe they were playing their history close to the chest, maybe they were busy trying to put on a centennial. Anyway, I knew I didn’t want to become too one sided with my information about a complex and delicate quasi-entity. I didn’t want to drink the SRP kool aid and only have them as a source of my historical or ecological information, for the very fact that I didn’t want to have a conflict of interest in any way as well as I didn’t want to have all of my information come from the SRP itself. I was just hoping to have a little more help from a group that has their own historical archive department. Just sayin’.
