The Turquoise Ledge (12 page)

C
irrus: a curl or spiral. Over mountains and pushed by high altitude winds, cirrus clouds form at twenty thousand feet; gauzy wisps of ice crystals form streamers and streaks composed of delicate white filaments or tenuous white patches and narrow bands that feather and swirl. I see them in the ancient black and white Pueblo pottery designs—the long parallel lines with hooks and convergences.

Gradually more cirrus clouds arrive and fill the sky so the Sun is visible as a shield of orange red with a rainbow around it.

Stratus: to spread out as with a blanket. Stratus clouds are low horizontal layers of light to dark gray water droplets that look like fog with little structure. Stratus clouds indicate saturation near the ground.

Cirrostratus are high thin hazy clouds that give a halo to the Sun and the Moon.

Stratocumulus clouds form white to gray layers with bands or rolls that hang low across the sky like strands of cotton. Light rain or snow may fall from them.

Cumulus: a heap or mass; a pile. Rising air that flows over mountains creates cumulus clouds. Small cumulus clouds are fair weather water-droplet clouds that are detached from each other, with sharp outlines, flat bottoms, and no taller than they are wide. The base is dark but the sunlit part is brilliant white. If there is lightning or thunder the cloud becomes a cumulonimbus. They can develop into rising forms of mounds or domes, rounded masses piled on each other swelling to become towering cumulus, from eight thousand to fifteen thousand feet high in the Southwest. In one of the ancient Pueblo stories, a wicked ka'tsina imprisoned the rain clouds in his house on a mountain-top and caused a terrible drought.

Nimbus means rain or mist.

Nimbostratus are dark gray to deep blue clouds formed from water droplets. They are rain and snow clouds that are deep and foggy with the falling precipitation; a dim light glows from within.

Cumulonimbus clouds have flat tops like anvils and voluptuous bottoms with edges that appear fuzzy from ice particles. They can roll into rows of swollen pouches that move in waves ahead of thunderstorm wind gusts.

 

The great heat of 2005 arrived in late June: thirty-nine consecutive days of temperatures above 100 degrees—mostly above 103 degrees.

Signs of a hot summer were written all over that earlier day on the fourteenth of March when it was already 103, and no one in Tucson had prepared their evaporative coolers yet. The heat never wavered—not even after late spring storms cooled the mountains of northern Arizona—the heat parked right over southern Arizona.

During those thirty-nine days, I spent my time caring for my eight dogs and fourteen parrots, to make sure they were kept cool and comfortable during the hottest part of the day—around four p.m.

I'd get up at dawn while the air was cooler to feed the parrots and dogs and give all of them fresh water. As soon as the heat would begin to descend, I'd bring all the dogs indoors with me; the six mastiffs fill two large rooms. They lie low in the air conditioned coolness, perfectly quiet and well-mannered lest they get evicted into the heat.

By one p.m. the temperature would be over 101 and it would be time to begin spraying the parrots so they'd be cooled as the water evaporated. By the time I finished these chores, I'd need a break.

When the break was over, it was time to wet down the parrots again. Now the big heat would descend as a blinding white hot curtain that cuts off the oxygen; I'd feel my stamina wane.

The water out of the hose was too hot to use at first, so I saved it by filling buckets and water bowls and after a while the water from the hose cooled enough for me to turn the hose on myself. I'd wet down my hat and all my clothes for evaporative cooling while I worked outside in temperatures above 101. In such intense heat, my soaking wet hat and clothes protected me.

Afterwards I would be too worn out to do much of anything but sit in the dim cool living room with the gray parrot and watch old movies on TV. My overheated brain wasn't much good for writing or anything else.

In the early days of the heat wave I didn't leave the property because of my concern for the parrots outdoors, and the dogs that stayed indoors with me. But finally I needed bread or dog food or parrot food and I'd venture out in the car after sundown.

The desert evenings are lovely even in the high nineties because the breeze moves across the hills and the air is dry. Rodents, reptiles, all refugees of the heat come out after sundown. After dark I managed to get my groceries to the car without them melting.

The desert hums with activity and the night calls of birds and owls; sometimes the coyotes sing out exaltations because they've caught something for dinner. Breezes stirred after dark and cooled everything.

I watched the planets and the stars and hoped for a message like the one I got in 1998 when the name for one of my characters came to me suddenly while I was sitting outside watching the stars. But before long I would be sleepy and go off to bed without a message.

On day nineteen of the heat wave Bill fled to his house in Albuquerque. I didn't like to watch him suffer in the heat, so it was good he left town. Of course it was over a hundred in Albuquerque and Santa Fe too, but Tucson was 110.

As the thirty-seventh or thirty-eighth day of the heat wave dawned, a voice in my head said “Tell me again—why exactly do I live here?”

I
originally wanted to be a visual artist, not a writer. But at the University of New Mexico I discovered the fine arts college was blind to all but European art with its fetish for “realism” and “perspective.” I dropped the basic drawing class and majored in English but I never stopped drawing or painting with watercolor and tempera for my own pleasure. I learned to use acrylic paints in 1986 and 1987 when I painted the big mural of the giant snake on the side of the building on Stone Avenue in downtown Tucson.

In the fall of 2005 I decided it was now or never; I wanted to take a year away from writing just to paint. I wanted to improve as a painter—to be competent enough not to distract the viewer.

It was exciting to think about my illicit holiday from writing. I went to my sketchbooks full of parrot designs from old pottery and many versions of the Great Serpent I love to draw and paint.

But something from the reading I'd done earlier in 2005 suddenly came back to me. Many indigenous tribes in the Americas and Australia have ancestral stories about the stars that came to Earth. The Star Beings came to contact human beings; or perhaps we are their descendants.

I began to make sketches of old petroglyphs I recalled from my childhood and youth in Laguna when I roamed the sandstone mesas and cliffs where the petroglyphs could be seen. I searched carefully for the figures with the tell-tale white crosses that represent the planets and stars in these petroglyphs.

While I looked at a book of photographs of petroglyphs I began thinking. I decided the Star Beings must only visit Earth every seven or eight hundred years—or maybe they remain in a parallel world next to ours but cross over from time to time when the “membranes” of the parallel universes make contact.

The evidence of their presence lies in the petroglyph figures of the visitors which the human beings made afterward to record the visit and to pay homage and even to worship the Star Beings. Further evidence is painted on the frescoes of the kivas unearthed at Pottery Mound, Kauau and Awatovi.

In the early seventies I lived in Chinle near Canyon de Chelly and I had the opportunity to explore the narrow side canyons on horseback where the walls of the cliffs were covered with hundreds of petroglyphs. The Star Being figures are recorded there too. All these years I've carried their images in my memory.

As I sketched the petroglyph figures, I realized that the Star Beings wanted me to paint their portraits. They insisted I use the largest canvases possible and that their portraits must always be hung at a height that dwarfs the human viewers in order to intimidate them.

At first I painted in the kitchen under the tube skylight; I didn't wear glasses; one day I put on my drugstore reading glasses and was horrified to see how sloppy my painting was. I got new prescription eyeglasses and a good easel lamp as the days got shorter and the sunlight wasn't as bright. I left paint and brushes scattered over the kitchen table because I was alone and ate standing up at the counter between the stove and refrigerator. But when others are with me, this won't do; the kitchen is narrow and the framed canvas three feet wide and four feet tall.

Before Christmas of 2005 I moved into the room that once was a garage, now the old pit bull's room. The room was fine by day in the late fall to the early spring, but by March the days would be too hot to bear. The first painting of the Star Being was nearly finished as well as the sketch for the next one.

 

It was around ten in the morning and we were sunning ourselves in the front yard. The hummingbirds were jousting over the feeders I'd just filled. Sometimes I heard the clash of their tiny beaks. Great warriors. Huitzilopochtli, Hummingbird, the greatest of the Nahua deities.

Bill and I laughed as we watched the hummingbirds. Suddenly I heard and saw something to my left. A cloud of gray feathers and white down drifted to the ground, and a mourning dove picked herself up from the ground slightly stunned, and flew away. High in the mesquite tree above us, full of disdain for humans, the peregrine falcon shook off his loss and flew off to scout other prey. The dive into the top of the mesquite was a risky one—the peregrine might have shattered a wing.

At just the moment the falcon missed the dove, I was thinking about our friend Bert in Placitas in the snow, and how she might enjoy the warmth of the December sun in Tucson, and the hummingbird jousts in the front yard.

 

One evening from the living room I distinctly heard music, 1950s big band music in the distance. I headed for the front bathroom where I thought I might have forgot to switch off a small transistor radio I keep there. As I walked toward the sound of the music the volume remained constant but some of the notes sounded oddly “thin” this triggered my intuition and instantly I realized it was ghost music.

As I reached the kitchen, suddenly the music merged into the electric hum of the refrigerator and the whirring sound of the ceiling fan. Ghosts love to inhabit electric fans—I don't know why unless it is something about the electromagnetic field a fan makes which draws the spirit energy entities to it or at least broadcasts their music.

I switched on the transistor radio and carried it from the bathroom; it played jazz. As I passed a table fan on the dining room table, voices of the spirits in the fan broke into the radio and I heard voices of the spirits in the jazz music from the radio. I stopped at once to listen.

I had difficulty making them out—were the voices happy, gathered for a party, or were they disgruntled and ready for a fight? Before I could get a sense of their mood, the voices stopped. I switched the radio on and off and listened but the ghost music was gone.

 

In late August I was invited to Mexico. I made an exception to my rule of no travel only painting during 2006 because I knew the Star Beings wanted me to go there to learn certain things I would need as I painted their portraits.

I received two invitations from the Arts Festival organizers in Ciudad Chihuahua. After my first visit in late August I liked the people and the town so much I returned to Ciudad Chihuahua a month later.

My first visit was to receive a writer's award from the governor of the State of Chihuahua; the second time was to participate in a celebration of the indigenous tribes of Chihuahua and Sonora and other parts of Mexico and the United States. I got to witness the main plaza of Ciudad Chihuahua, the state capital, filled with indigenous tribal people from all over Mexico. Barely one hundred years before, the Mexican Government had been at war with many of the tribes represented in the main plaza.

The first visit was the best because my gracious hosts took me away from town out into the countryside within sight of the grand Sierra Madre towering ahead of us. The altitude and terrain reminded me a great deal of New Mexico where I grew up, and immediately I felt I could live there or in another life I had lived there.

I got to meet prominent Mexican writers—a poet from Casas Grandes and a poet whose grandfather was Raramuri. The Raramuri poet said, “My grandfather rode with Pancho Villa” and the poet from Casas Grandes said, “My grandfather was killed by Pancho Villa” we all laughed when she said this, but then she added that Pancho Villa hated her grandfather so much that he ordered his men to kill all her grandfather's dogs as well.

When I returned from Chihuahua I was thinking about the statue of Tlaloc outside the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City. Tlaloc is a Nahua rain deity, one of the nine Lords of Night, associated with the Star Beings. So I made some sketches and I got out a big canvas and primed it with stucco and prepared to paint Tlaloc's portrait. He is usually portrayed in blue or turquoise but I had read about a mural at the great Mayan ruins at Bonampak where Tlaloc was painted red. So I decided to paint him red but to give him a blue background.

I worked on Tlaloc's portrait this morning and within a few hours clouds began to appear in the south and the southwest, a bit unusual for mid-September. If I complete his portrait to his satisfaction, will it rain? Of course Tlaloc might just send hail and sleet in high winds or flash floods.

 

We had wonderful rains in the summer of 2006. The rattlesnakes got really fat because all the rain meant many baby rodents and birds. I recognized one of the rattlesnakes because it is almost an albino. It got huge. Last summer it was long but not so big and fat, and it was never upset to meet me in the yard; but this year for the first time when we met, he let me know he was nearby when I was forty feet away. The snake seems to know it is too big to easily hide anymore, so it has to scare predators away. I appreciated the polite warning while I was far off; the next time I saw him the mastiffs were barking at him through the fence and the snake flexed out its ribs and puffed itself up so it was one third again its size.

I shook the red plastic dustpan in the face of the small light-colored rattler who thinks she owns the front patio. But rather than back out the way she'd just come in she drew herself up furiously into a z shape and advanced on the invader to her patio. The red plastic infuriated her. I backed off and let her stay in the patio as long as she pleased.