In 1981 Grundman was released from prison. Grundman pled guilty to second-degree robbery and was sentenced to up 4 1/2 years in prison. It turns out, that’s exactly what Rabert said to the police. After all, what would he say to the police? “I tried to buy some drugs from some guys and they robbed me instead?” Grundman, Corey and Barrows apparently thought that there was no way Rabert would report the crime. An angry Rabert tried to wrestle the gun away from Grundman only to be beaten down by Corey and Barrows, revealing them to be Grundman’s accomplices in the robbery. During the deal, Grundman whipped out a shotgun and told the others to hand over all their money. In January 1979, Grundman and his friends John Corey and Stephen Barrows made an agreement to sell three pounds of marijuana to 16-year-old Robert Rabert. After graduating from high school, he worked as a cook… and as a small-time drug dealer. Grundman was born in 1957 in Johnson City, NY. The ManĪnd that brings us to the the subject of our story: David Grundman.
Or people who went “plugging,” using the mighty cacti for target practice.
But what utterly mystified him were garden-variety vandals, idiots who’d go out in the desert andtry to uproot ancient saguaro with their trucks for fun. And still he went to work every day to protect the environment.Ĭountryman could at least understand the motives of the black marketeers.
#A TALE IN THE DESERT YOUTUBE WINDOWS#
When he was on the job, Countryman received death threats, had rocks thrown through the windows of his house, had the brake lines of his car cut, and even been shot at. Every year you have to go farther and farther out from the city to find the desert. But we get a lot of people moving here, and they don’t see the beauty or the fragility of the land. It takes nearly a hundred years to grow these big saguaros. Countryman, who was Arizona’s top “cactus cop” throughout the ’70s and ’80s, made a passionate defense of its necessity: There are people who hate these laws, but Richard A. So cactus rustlers go out in to the desert and uproot plants by the thousands to sell for inflated prices on the black market.Īrizona has combated this through vigorous enforcement, including a tagging and permitting system, backed up by steep fines and prison time for offenders. Of course, it’s illegal to take saguaro from the desert and there’s a very constrained supply of legal saguaro. Which means having a big ol’ saguaro or two in the front yard as a status symbol. When some doofus transplant builds a McMansion in Arizona in and realizes they can’t have a great big green lawn, they decide the next best thing to do is to go all in on the desert look. These days the biggest threat to the saguaro comes from landscapers.
#A TALE IN THE DESERT YOUTUBE SERIES#
That’s thanks to the forward-thinking people of Arizona, who realized that the desert was an important part of the character of their state, and enacted a series of laws protecting desert plans and their environment. Saguaros have a very limited distribution, and grow only in the northern part of the Sonoran Desert, which means that in the United States they never occur naturally outside of southwestern Arizona.ĭespite their limited range, the saguaro is not endangered or threatened. And why not? It’s an enduring symbol of the American west.īut it probably doesn’t belong in your mental picture. You know the type: great tall trunk, mighty arms branching out of it and reaching up to the sky. I bet you, somewhere in your mental picture, you had a saguaro cactus.
Or maybe just a flat expanse of desert, empty save for a handful of tumbling tumbleweeds. Now, undoubtedly you pictured some majestic vista. I want you to picture the landscape of American Southwest in your mind’s eye. A Menace to the West David Grundman goes shooting at a stationary target - and breaks off more than he can handle We are a proud member of That's Not Canon Productions, a podcast network for independent podcasters of all stripes.ĭesigned and maintained by #13 at Lodge #777. All rights reserved, all wrongs reversed. They are licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 License. Powers of light and darkness.These articles and episodes are ©2019-2022 by their respective authors, and published by the Ancient and Esoteric Order of the Jackalope.
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