The Turquoise Ledge (10 page)

I
tried to keep working on the novel
Blue Sevens
in August, but it was difficult. On the eleventh of the month I thought of my mother.

I thought of her on the morning of September 11, 2001 as I was getting up; a few minutes later the planes hit the World Trade Center.

I lost my mother on July 11, and two months later, I lost my country.

I was not able to write about this period of my life for a long time, and then when I did, I chose to write fiction.

 

The Tucson TV weatherman said 2002 is the driest year since European record keeping began here. It is now early July and the ground is so dry that it shrinks, and the plastic pipe of the water line is cast up and out of the baked earth. Even the indigenous plants and trees begin to die off—the smallest, the oldest and the sickest die first.

The big rattlesnakes don't even bother to come out—no point in wasting energy when there's nothing there to eat—the rodents and birds are scarce. The smaller rattlers have to come out and take a chance; they don't have the reserves so they can't sit out the drought like the big snakes can.

I've had to perform two rattlesnake rescues this season. One of the three small snakes that live on the west side of the house managed to fall into the old ranch cistern which is half filled with dirt. He'd been trapped in there long enough to shed a skin. The rainwater kept him alive. On the cold nights of early spring the snake took shelter under a tin garbage can lid that was covered by a sheet of old plywood. I felt I had to free the snake but I wasn't sure how to do it yet. The snake appeared to be o.k. but hungry, so after sundown I carefully dropped the snake two live white mice intended for the indoor rattlesnake. The rattler in the cistern ate both mice at once.

Because the cistern belonged to me, I felt obligated to free the snake. I saw it try to climb the concrete walls so I gave it some 2×4s to climb out, but rattlers aren't agile climbers. I thought about putting the ladder down in the old cistern and going in after the snake with my parrot net. But I realized the ladder bumping around would only upset the snake. Instead I duct taped the handle of a dust mop to the handle of my parrot net to give me the length I needed so I could reach down into the cistern and gently scoop the rattler out.

At first the snake didn't want to go into the parrot net and tried to hide under the plywood. He didn't like the disturbance and coiled but didn't rattle—maybe because he recognized me from the west doorstep where we meet from time to time. I moved very slowly and gently with the parrot net made of soft fabric; I tried to carefully scoop the snake into the net but it was fearful and shrank away.

On my second attempt the snake made a half-hearted strike at the net but then he seemed to decide it wasn't going to kill him if it hadn't already; or he understood I meant no harm. He might have recognized my scent from the white mice I fed him earlier. The snake remained in his coil, but he was calm now and did not strike or move away from the net, and then he went into the net and I made a twist in the top so he couldn't escape. I lifted the snake in the net out of the cistern and left the net on the ground with the top open near the entrance to the snake den under my house. He stayed in the net for a while and later when I checked on him he was cautiously crawling out, headed for the snake pipe entrance under the house.

I had a pipe installed under the kitchen floor out the west wall of the house to allow the snakes to get in and out from under the house. One time during a remodeling project, the workmen accidentally buried the pipe entrance with construction dirt and debris. Later I noticed the blocked entrance but I forgot to get a shovel and fix it because it is on the west side of the house where I seldom go.

There was an alternate entry place for the snakes on the east side but during the summer I covered this entryway with a piece of window screen to keep the squirrels out from under my house. As the first cool weather arrived in October, right after dark I heard an eerie buzzing and rattling sound outside that I'd never heard before.

I went to the window and listened; I could make out the sound of seven or eight rattlesnakes all buzzing and rattling in unison on the west side of the house in front of the blocked snake pipe.

The next morning I got a phone call from my poet-astrologer friend, Joy Harjo. She said, “I don't know if you'll be able to make anything out of this—but I have a message for you. Last night I had a dream and in it, this giant rattlesnake kept following me; I recognized him as Grandfather Rattler. When I asked him what he wanted, he said he had a message for Leslie. Tell her she owes me a plug of tobacco and a screen.” Joy asked if any of it made any sense. Yes, I told her, the message did make sense.

I owed the plug of tobacco to the snakes because I allowed the snake pipe entrance under the house to be blocked. The “screen” referred to the piece of window screen that blocked the east entrance under the house; but the word “screen” also referred to the large canvas painting I'd been working on.

Usually in the fall, I painted a snake image of some kind as I did in 1986 with the Stone Avenue mural which featured a giant messenger rattlesnake with human skulls in its belly. But I decided I should do something different, and I sketched a regal horned lizard on a piece of unstretched canvas eight feet long and four feet high. But the painting was a failure; I just couldn't seem to get into the right rhythm with the lizard.

After Joy's phone call, I went back to the canvas and painted out the horned lizard with white paint. I worked all November and December to paint a giant snake with blue macaw rain clouds above it and these words:

When I was a child, the old-time people used to sprinkle corn meal and pollen in the circles the snakes made just as they used to sprinkle corn meal and pollen in the tracks of mountain lions.

The Western diamondbacks here are light colored to blend in with the pale volcanic ash that forms the thin topsoil in the Tucson Mountains. Herpetologists call the white snakes “albinistic” because they are white but are not true albinos. The albinistic rattlers have dark eyes and black and white stripes on their tails.

The big white rattler that lives in the back yard found an empty clay pot that was sitting upright next to the water tub where the wild creatures come to drink. Somehow the big white snake managed to crawl into the empty clay pot and arranged his bulk so that he could hide down with just his head peeping over the rim of the pot, where he could strike a dove drinking water from the tub. The dogs noticed him first. And a good thing they did. I probably would have stood right next to the snake in the pottery bowl and not even have seen it and then had a good scare when I did finally notice it.

I told the dogs to leave the snake alone, and they did; the snake stopped rattling as soon as the dogs backed off. The snake didn't rattle at me, most snakes here don't rattle at me, only at the dogs.

The snake hunkered back down in his bowl and went back to his hunt for small creatures that might yet come to the water tub; he didn't have a lot of time left before he lost the shade and had to retreat from the sun. Later I saw some dove feathers scattered near the pottery bowl so I think he got a meal out of his strategy.

The following morning I had a close encounter at six a.m. before the sun was quite over the mountain. I hadn't had my morning coffee when I went out to water my pots of ruellia and fig and lemon trees. I leaned down face first to turn the water valve to the hose, and it was only as I raised back up that I noticed the small snake sitting under the big night-blooming cactus. He was calm despite my being only twelve inches away from him.

Yesterday morning I saw the rust brown rattlesnake from a distance across the yard. The big snake had compacted itself against the rain-spout to be less visible to the doves that come for water, and to avoid confrontations with dogs.

Once my pit bull tried to bite the brown rattler but the snake bit her first and got the dog by the nose and hung on; the dog shook her head and the snake let go and landed about ten feet away. Snakes are relatively delicate creatures but fortunately this was a big snake that was able to survive being thrown.

There are two nearly identical brown rattlers in back so I can't tell if this is the big brown snake from under the tool shed or the big snake that lives under the old timbers by the pool. Yes, this is why scientists torment snakes with tiny implanted radio transmitters—to identify them. Me? I prefer to muddle along with uncertainty and leave the creatures in peace. The transmitter microwaves interfere with the normal life of the snakes so the information gathered is flawed anyway.

The rattlesnakes that live under the house by the fireplace keep warm all winter so they don't hibernate. They smell the mild winter rain as it falls and have enough body warmth to come out and sit by the west door. The three of them sit in loose coils side by side, nearly touching; as the rain falls on their backs they gracefully sip the raindrops from their scales. One of them tipped its head delicately to one side so the raindrops rolled into its mouth.

I thought I was the only one with rattlesnakes in and under her house, but I was mistaken. My friends Vernon and Becky from Hopi came to a Water Blessing gathering in Tucson. Before the meeting I was talking with them in the hotel lobby and the subject of rattlesnakes in the house came up.

Becky said a rattlesnake lived in their house; it would hide in a pipe in the kitchen wall when it saw her. Vernon was surprised to hear this, and Becky said she didn't tell him because she only saw it twice. Most older houses have ways for the snakes to get in, usually holes made by small rodents and pack rats. I didn't get to hear how it got out but probably it used the same hole as it entered. Snakes don't get lost because they can follow their own scent trail and backtrack. The snake probably left after it had consumed all the small rodents in the house.

Vernon said the Hopi farmers copied the tight coil of the rattlers to make their garden plots. The farmers made deep circular depressions in the garden soil that were designed to catch and hold rainwater for the seeds planted in the center just the way the rattlers caught rain in their coils.

The followers of José Díaz Bolio and the cult of Ahau Kan in the Yucatán believe we live in a “Crotalus-centric” Universe in which Rattlesnake taught the Mayans architecture and how to build the great pyramids based upon the rattlesnake's coil.

O
n the night before the seventeenth of September 2002 a cold wind blew out of the northwest. The next morning the dogs in back, Banana and Dolly, were barking madly because their yard had a rattler in it but it was a snake that came to hibernate, not one of the regular snakes from around the house. The snake was unfamiliar with the yard as it searched for the opening to the snake den under the house.

At hibernation time I see rattlesnakes I've never seen before: the reddish diamondback, the light masked snake, the dark masked snake, the albinistic snake, one by one they come to the entrance to the big snake den under my front yard. These are the snakes that spend the summer farther away from the house and aviaries, away from people, and return only in the late fall. The big reddish diamondback was pinned down by the dogs in the yard, so I brought the dogs indoors for ten minutes or so to allow the snake to get away.

The change in weather brought another snake after that one. The dogs barked with great agitation. I called them off and heard rattling from the direction of their dog house, and when I looked I saw a small light masked snake in the door of the dog house. The snake seemed to be exiting, and the odd thing was that just as I made eye contact with the snake, it immediately rushed toward me as if I reminded it of the garden area it intended to reach for safety. But no sooner than one snake was safe, I heard the dogs bark and another snake was trying to cross their area to reach the entrance to the snake den.

It's three days later and the red diamondback is caught between the parrot wire and the hardware cloth because it has a meal in a lump in its belly it needs to digest. The sun is on the snake so I hurried the dogs out of the way and went for the wire cutters. When I returned the snake had already escaped and its tail end was disappearing into its hole under the macaw aviary. The snake never rattled at me once the whole time it was trapped.

Mid-October now, and at night the temperature drops below seventy-five degrees. In the morning I find deep imprints of circles in the soft dirt, circles as precise as any circle drawn with a compass. The circles are so perfect one cannot help but notice them. Perfect circles in the dirt are usually man-made—the imprints of big round man-made objects—garden pots or spare tires.

I looked more closely and realized the deep imprint was left by a rattlesnake that nestled itself down a half inch in the dirt for warmth last night while it waited for a rodent to pass. I didn't see deep imprints earlier in the year while nights were in the nineties. The snakes left only faint imprints of themselves in the dust.

The circles are identical and I imagine the same snake made them each time he moved; he made another circle imprint when he coiled. Three of the five imprints were directly over small holes as if the snake blocked off one rodent hole to force the rodents to use the hole most convenient for the snake to strike.

It was my friend the writer Linda Niemann who discovered the cult of Ahau Kan inherited by the poet José Díaz Bolio. He wrote a book titled
The Geometry of the Maya and Their Rattlesnake Art,
in which he laid out evidence for an ancient belief system in which the rattlesnake Ahau Kan was the central figure. The Costa Rican rattlesnake
Crotalus durissus durissus
was the key figure. The poet claimed that the rattlesnakes taught human beings what Díaz Bolio termed “a Crotalus-centric” geometry and architecture in which the perfect circle was seen in the Moon and the Sun, and in the imprint of the rattlesnake in sand.

The Maya design of pyramids, each level resting on the previous in a concentric stacked pyramid form, was nearly identical to the morphology of the rattlesnake in its coil. That concentric pyramid form in stone, while very massive, also meant the pyramid did not easily fall down in an earthquake.

Díaz Bolio also pointed out that the number of dorsal scales of the Yucatán rattler is thirteen, which is one quarter of the solar cycle of fifty-two weeks. Maya glyphs for the Sun included images of the rattlesnake, represented by a coiled rattler with the “face of the Sun” just below the rattles on his tail.

Linda said the Maya experts, including Maya people themselves, accused Díaz Bolio of using poetic license to construct the geometry and architecture of the Maya around the rattlesnake. But I found his book very appealing because I have been a “Crotalus-centric” believer for years without realizing I belonged to the cult of Ahau Kan.

 

Evo, the indoor rattlesnake, was cranky and edgy this year, 2002; was it some negative energy I carried back with me from Mexico, from the town of Puerto Penasco, full of witchcraft? Or was it all the earth-smashing the neighbors did to remodel their house? When I fed him, Evo ignored the white mouse I offered him and half-heartedly sprang at me to show his irritation. I am always careful, but it was a good reminder.

I bought long tongs so I can reach in and get his water dish safely. When he was slow and docile, a few times I dared to reach in with my bare hands to remove the water dish, but no more, not after the mood he's been in.

I watched Evo's skin. It appeared lighter in color first, still beautiful, but then it looked faded, and the designs of his diamonds lost their clarity. The scales on the surface of his eyes became cloudy—a pale blue—as if he were blind.

The following day his eyes cleared, those scales molt first; his skin was dull and dusty looking, the outlines of his diamonds blurred. Evo went in the dark corner of his cage and sat in a loose coil. Even when I filled his water bowl he didn't move to investigate. Only a day before he'd been animated and alert. Three days passed and Evo didn't move. He was waiting to molt. I watched him more closely than usual because as soon as he molted, he would want to eat. I had to go out of town and I wanted to feed him the rest of the mice before I left.

Maybe it was the arrival of the humidity with the rain that finally triggered the molt. He began by rubbing his nose on the porcelain water dish until the scales and skin of his nose loosened. The dampness on the inner surface of the skin adhered to the porcelain; the snake's reaction was to pull his nose away from the porcelain and as he did, the skin peeled back over his face and head inside out, like a sweater coming off, and he crawled away from the water dish and the skin peeled off him to leave behind a delicate translucent tube.

At Christmas a visitor arrived. He was a friend of a friend. He knocked at the west door and when he came in we greeted one another by the snake cage, which was covered with blankets. But the visitor was anxious and exhausted by the travel. He didn't come into the living room but instead stayed in the west porch conversing with my companion while I made dinner.

Before we could warn him or stop him, the visitor sat down on the top of the snake cage which he mistook for a couch. His weight caused the screen top of the cage to collapse. Fortunately Evo was in his winter doze, so the visitor was safe. I covered the damaged cage top with a piece of plywood and forgot about it until the warm weather came and it was time to feed mice to Evo again.

I never repaired the screen on Evo's cage after the visitor fell through. The other morning I took off the plywood in preparation to feed the rattlesnake a few white mice. Evo rose up suddenly through the broken screen—he is about twenty-eight inches tall when he does that; oddly my heart didn't skip a beat because I was standing well back from Evo's cage. Simple caution or some intuition?

Still his aggressive behavior left me feeling very cautious. I know he is very hungry. I bought him mice, but how do I get him to settle down enough to safely feed him?

Evo is so beautiful—a pale beige and pale brown, a kinsman to the near albino rattlesnakes in these black mountains. His big head is potentially lethal if I am not careful. Next time feed me sooner, is what he meant by rearing up in front of me.

Evo associates the light-colored or white clothes I wear in the summer with the white mice I feed him in the summer. Bright white means food and now when Evo sees me he gets very excited and jumps up like a pet dog. I've made a decoy mouse out of cotton balls I sewed together with a length of string to dangle outside the long glass snake cage to catch Evo's attention and to lure him to the far end from me. I wait until he watches the decoy before I slide open the lid and drop in the live mouse.

He only eats in the warmest months when the nights are in the eighties and the days over one hundred because heat aids the rattler's digestion, and helps activate the enzymes in the venom which also aids the snake's digestion.

The last time I fed Evo, without thinking I spoke aloud to him and said, “Now don't scare me. I want to feed you and give you fresh water.” Speaking to him seemed to help or maybe he just wasn't as hungry as he'd been the time before but he remained calm and didn't move toward me.

 

At sundown as I walked toward the old corrals from the road, out of the corner of my eye motion caught my attention. About forty feet away, a rattlesnake three feet long was on the move through the desert—the most graceful of creatures, sinuous as flowing water, the snake gliding smoothly and silently as if it were floating a little above the ground between the jojoba bushes and palo verde by the old corral.

The biggest rattlesnake I ever saw was on a dirt road in the high grasslands east of Elgin. The grasslands are full of food and water is plentiful so a rattler can grow quite large. This snake was nearly five feet long and as big as my forearm. It crossed the road in front of the car, swift and sinuous, its head held high through the tall grass and sunflowers. As it headed west it seemed almost a golden apparition as the afternoon sunlight glittered off its scales.

Laurence Klauber the great rattlesnake expert wrote that a seven foot Eastern diamondback would be rare but possible. Any reports of rattlers over ten feet are myths, he writes. The extinct
Crotalus giganteus
reached twelve feet in length.

At the time of the coming of the Europeans to the Americas, giant rattlesnakes in excess of ten feet in length with the diameter of a man's thigh lived near springs and permanent sources of water. The indigenous people believed the springs belonged to the big snakes, and they revered the snakes as divine messengers and bringers of rain. Reports by the Spanish troops and the Catholic priests recount their diligence in hacking up these giant snakes or burning them alive in the name of Christianity.

But the Americas are vast. Great expanses of mountainous areas are virtually inaccessible even by helicopter. Many rural locations are only visited a few times a year by a handful of people. Rattlesnakes are wise beings, so it seems possible that in remote box canyons in mountains too steep and rough for humans to enter, a number of twelve foot long rattlesnakes have survived after all. Viva
Crotalus giganteus
!