The Turquoise Ledge (23 page)

A
nother gardening error—fatal for my double white daturas. I misidentified some voracious speckled red bugs as ladybugs. These flying red bugs are the same size and shape as ladybugs and mimic the ladybugs' red color. They lack the precise black spots of the ladybugs and have instead asymmetrical black splotches. I thought they were a variation of the ladybug.

I didn't want to kill a species of ladybug so I took awhile to observe their numbers and behavior. After they attacked the double white daturas I realized they were not ladybugs. They denuded the young white daturas and devastated the purple datura so I made a concoction of dish detergent, garlic olive oil and red pepper from Viet Nam to spray on the ladybug imposters.

While I was observing the initial effects of my spray repellant from my chair on the porch, I heard a rustle in the dry leaves and stalks around the clay pots. I turned and caught a glimpse of the head of the garnet and ruby red racer snake who's lived in my front yard more than fifteen years. She stopped but didn't seem to mind me looking because she knows I won't harm her.

I turned away from her to reassure her so she could proceed by me, and as she passed I looked down at her (she's four and a half feet long so it takes a moment for her to go by me). I was shocked to see a slash wound in her side that was draining infection, and then came her tail—the very tip of her tail was gone and had traces of dried blood on it.

My long-time racer snake neighbor had been in mortal battle last night or early today. But with whom? Roadrunner? Owl or hawk? Any one of them might slash and eat a red racer snake.

I knocked the ladybug imposters from the tattered remnants of the datura leaves; the red bugs lay on the ground as if dead. I thought probably the dish detergent and red chili sauce suffocated them. But about twenty minutes later the red bugs regained consciousness and flew away.

I was about to go indoors to escape the flies when I heard the rapid beak clatter of a roadrunner. One suddenly flew up from the bird water dish to the fence and was gone as fast as a thief. Right then I knew who the likely attacker of the red racer snake was. Would a roadrunner eat a hummingbird? I suspect it would; Lord Roadrunner eats anything alive, and is very quick.

I went to fill the water trough down at the old corrals. The small water pans were dry and the level of the trough was low. As I waited for the trough to fill, I saw a small covey of half-grown Gambel's quail coming to water. When they saw me they skittered across the old corral and retreated to the bushes—survivors of the heat and rain and my carelessness that drowned six chicks earlier in the spring.

 

All the desert is bright new green and the cactus wrens and thrashers excitedly chirp and sing for all these lovely afternoon and evening rainstorms.

Today the clouds form heavy layers on all the mountaintops. I feel I can't communicate with so many clouds. Across the west and northwest sky the clouds unreel themselves. Suddenly bird songs and bird-calls create a cacophony of joy; for the desert is bright green and the rains come.

 

Masses of tall silver blue rain clouds stream down from the Sierra Madre Mountains into Arizona and New Mexico. I make sketches of the clouds with light gray and white chalk on a page of light blue paper. I found the cloud photographs Stieglitz called “Equivalents” among some post cards years ago. Whenever I look at them, I want to make cloud prints from contact negatives on blueprint paper.

 

The second time I wrote the same Nahuatl words in my notebook the blue rain clouds gathered and the rainwater overflowed the barrels. Apparently, certain Nahuatl words written in ink on paper can bring rain clouds at certain times.

Then I remembered where I had gotten the notion that words in ink on paper could bring rain. My friend Linda Niemann found the rain book in Mexico City in 1993 and had given it to me. The book was made of traditional amate, paper from the bark of the fig tree, by Sr. Alfonso Garcia Tellez in 1978 in the town of San Pablito, Pahuatlan, Puebla.

In times of drought the people of San Pablito made a pilgrimage to a cave in the mountains three days' distance from their town, bringing a small handmade foldout book of amate paper to ask for rain. Sr. Garcia Tellez wrote the words in the rain book by hand, in Spanish; facing each page of text were paper cutout figures also made of ochre and brown amate paper. The figures represent “dioses” or spirit beings, mostly cultivated plants, who also plead for rain.

The rain book is an offering the people bring to the cave but it also tells the people how the pilgrimage should be conducted. At one time of course the text was written in Nahuatl or some related dialect, not Spanish. The amate paper itself was held in great esteem, so the paper cutouts themselves are powerful. My theory is the paper cutout figures compensate for the use of Spanish. The Nahuatl words are much more powerful for rainmaking than the Spanish; it is enough to write the Nahuatl words on paper, no amate paper cutouts are needed.

After I added two more words to my original Nahuatl rain prayer in ink on paper, rain clouds came and stayed for three days:

“Atlatlacamahmanilizti” is made of the sounds of a thunderstorm: “atla atla camahma” is rolling thunder and “nilizti” is the crackle of lightning.

 

My niece Halley told me this: Two of her friends moved to Tampico, on the Bay of Campeche in Mexico, to teach school. The mayor of the city was showing the new teachers around the town when one of them asked if hurricanes ever struck. The mayor quickly assured the teachers Tampico would never be threatened by hurricanes—“it was a certainty,” he said. “But how could this be so?” the new teacher asked. The Bay of Campeche was a “calving ground” for tropical storms so it was odd that Tampico would be spared. The mayor took a deep breath. “I might as well tell you,” he said. “We people here in Tampico believe the UFOs protect us and keep the hurricanes away.”

The mayor told them at one time a rumor had raced through Tampico that the UFOs were going to leave. All the townspeople hurried down to the beach to watch them depart. Of course the townspeople were very concerned about what might happen to their town without the UFOs to protect them from hurricanes.

The townspeople waited for two or three hours but they didn't see any UFOs departing, so they went home, and Tampico remains protected from hurricanes by the UFOs.

In the middle of the night a gentle steady rain fell—no lightning, and only a little distant thunder. My son Robert said last night when he got home the giant toad was guarding our front door.

I wonder if it's the same giant toad I rescued a few years ago? That one had lived under the bricks of the front porch but rodents had removed the soil beneath the bricks. The big toad may have burrowed beneath the bricks of the porch floor too, when the bricks suddenly shifted and caused a cave-in that partially pinned him.

He was there a good while before I found him and looked the worse for it from dehydration. I got a bucket of water and poured a little water on the toad and on the bricks around him. I was alone the afternoon I found the trapped toad, but I had a short steel bar called a “wrecking bar” and I was able to pry up the bricks and free him.

I moistened the toad again in the sand of the tree well by the porch. I poured more water on the ground and the toad dug into the moist sandy soil. After a time I checked the damp sand of the tree well and the toad had vanished.

The five hundred year drought cycle is well under way here; as a result the desert toads in the Tucson Mountains have scarcely spawned pollywogs since 1983, when a hurricane came into the Gulf of California and headed straight to Tucson with flooding rain.

The pollywogs need clean water that is still or slow-moving, with enough volume to last until they become little toads. If the rainwater pools are too shallow or scarce, the big toads won't lay eggs; they sense that off spring will not survive. Instead they conserve fat reserves, feed on insects all night and bury themselves in sand during the heat of the day while they ride out the drought, and wait for the hurricane rain to return.

The rain clouds assemble in their colorful dance costumes of white and pink mother of pearl, coral, lapis and turquoise, lined up in rows across the sky as the ka'tsina dancers do.

 

The light this afternoon is a soft green from the hills where the rain clouds are gathering. The leaves, grass and green bark of the palo verdes give off an incandescent glow that turns the bellies of the clouds pale green.

I
got up early to walk the next day because it had rained during the night and I wanted to feel the coolness and freshness of the breeze before the heat of the day descended. The ground felt softer and fuller from the rain. All the shades of green from the grass and leaves gave off a soft glow in the early morning sun.

In the big arroyo I saw fresh V-shaped tracks of three or four javelinas that passed through ahead of me, but no sign of humans. The rain had been heavy enough to send the runoff down the arroyo; its appearance had been transformed overnight. Stretches of rocks that jutted out fully exposed before the rain now were partially buried in the sand and pebbles. Small rocks I'd not seen before were brought to the surface and others buried; small branches and other debris washed up on the sandbars on either side of the arroyo.

After great downpours and floods, the bed of the big arroyo changes greatly and only a few features in the bottom of the wash remain identifiable. The banks and ridges along the big arroyo were not affected, although an epic flood or earthquake could reshape them. Even this small flow of runoff had moved a great deal of fine sand; it was exciting to see the arroyo's new contours.

The sunlight was only beginning to illuminate the arroyo directly so I didn't expect to spot any turquoise stones. As I approached the small boulders surrounded in fine white sand I saw the most amazing object lying on top of the freshly washed sand. Amethyst light shone through it as if it were a gemstone. The runoff down the arroyo from the rain had uncovered a large shard of purple glass.

When I was a child there was a collector of purple glass who made me aware of its value. Of course collectors only want whole objects, not shards, but I still picked up the piece of purple glass at once as I had when I was a child. It was part of the thick bottom of a mug—the glass shard was almost solid and molded in a fluted form.

Before 1960, clear glass for molded beer mugs and vases was manufactured with an ingredient which caused the glass to gradually turn purple after years of exposure to sunlight. There was only one possible source for this piece of glass—the old ranch trash dumps from eighty years ago. The nearest of the old ranch dumps was two miles away.

The shard of purple glass had traveled a great distance downhill from the old ranch trash dumps, where it lay in the sun for at least twenty years before it began to turn purple.

I felt lucky to find it. If another human had passed by before I did or if a pack rat or a large raven had noticed the amethyst shine, the purple glass might have been gone before I walked by.

In thirty years here I've learned to marvel at the survival of anything alien or man-made in the desert heat and terrain. At some point after the glass shard began to purple, it had been hit by rocks as it tumbled in floodwater, and a hairline fracture occurred. The fracture line is a pale pale violet; it seems to have slowed and clouded the process of purpling in the glass fragment.

When I first came to live here in 1978 I rode horseback in the area frequently where I discovered a number of house sites that were only rock chimneys. No other traces of the houses remained; the palo verdes and burr sage had obliterated any evidence of a foundation.

After Arizona got statehood in 1912, eager gringos flocked to seek their fortunes here. They moved their small herds of cattle and built their houses up here in these hills before the summer heat arrived. They probably lasted only a few years or until the cattle drank the well dry. Then they moved on and left the houses to the pack rats and vandals from town.

 

Whenever I am near the ocean at El Golfo on the shore of Sonora, I follow this practice after high tide: I get into my clothes slowly as a sleepwalker might. Out the door, I shiver in the damp air and cold that settle over the desert coast ahead of dawn. The ocean leaves wonderful gifts to find—pink fluted seashells, a seal's skull with a bullet hole, a sunbleached whale vertebra the size of a steering wheel and a topaz egg of sea glass polished like a jewel.

 

The hurricane remnants fly overhead bright silver and wind-fluffed. This summer was the coolest, rainiest summer since I moved to Tucson. The afternoon thunderstorms every day reminded me of the five or six year period from 1957 to 1962 or 1963 when I was a child, and the Laguna-Acoma area was blessed with rain showers every afternoon around 5:30. In those years the old-time people used to pray at dawn for the Sun's children, the rain clouds, to come.

The Tohono O'Odom people west of Tucson get rainstorms every afternoon during June and July. Few other places are so blessed because the O'Odom people know how to ask the ocean to send rain.

Usually the foggy mists of the rain beings move slowly and dance slowly and gracefully. Today the first rain beings came swirling rapidly in a heavy white rain off the mountain peak that was invisible in the clouds. The fogs and mists took on forms of wraiths in the white rain; they crowded themselves together pushing one another much as men will to show affection to their comrades. I watched them hurry along in their formations, long lines of beings extending down from clouds of the white rain, and suddenly the word “legions” came to mind: legions of revenant warriors, ghost warriors, marched out of the clouds and across the slopes of the black mountain peak.

After the legions passed, little showers followed their path from time to time all day long.

 

The rain yesterday evening filled the rain barrel almost to the brim. Earlier I transferred the rainwater to the smaller metal can to make room for more rain as the storm clouds approached late in the day.

I made sure the lids were off the rain barrels before I went to bed. When I went out this morning and looked into the barrel, I saw a beautiful hawk moth, one of the biggest I'd ever seen. It was floating motionless on the surface of the rainwater. Oh no! If I'd kept the lid on the barrel the hawk moth wouldn't have drowned. Gently I scooped up the big moth and it moved feebly. I held it in the palm of my hand close to my chest to warm it and it crawled onto the front of my shirt. Heartened by its motion, I took it to the potted jessamine bush and carefully set it down under the leaves out of the direct sun where it might recover or finish dying in peace.

The hawk moths depend on the datura blossoms and pollen for food, and they lay their eggs in the soil under the datura plant. The larvae become beautiful caterpillars of bright green with an elegant pattern of white and black stripes which the big moths retain after they emerge from the cocoons of their caterpillar phase.

About fifteen years ago on the front page of the local Tucson newspaper, an article announced the Air Force and U.S. Defense Department had a project at the base here in Tucson to experiment with hawk moths to see if there were military uses for them. The Air Force researchers glued tiny radio transmitters on the poor creatures.

Later I checked on the hawk moth under the jessamine and it was still there; but next morning it was gone. I hope it recovered and flew off after dark.

 

Today in the big arroyo I found a petroglyph I'd never noticed on a gray basalt boulder I'd passed dozens of times before. The basalt boulder sits in deep sand near the east bank of the big arroyo. The petroglyph was carved on the side of the boulder that faces west and is in shadow early in the morning.

The petroglyph is ancient and badly weathered so the light must be just right, from the west as it was today. Traces of the overnight rain were still visible on the boulder's face, and the dampness darkened the basalt but highlighted the incised outline of the petroglyph.

The incised image exposed an under layer of basalt which is lighter in color; the droplets of rainwater on the surface of the pecked stone caught the early morning light. The image of the petroglyph seemed almost to glitter when I saw it. It appeared to be an oval within a larger oval outline.

Nearly twenty-nine years ago I found another petroglyph on a boulder as I rode horseback down the arroyo. That petroglyph is no longer visible because over the years, the floods had buried it in rocks, pebbles and sand. The petroglyph I found today is only about seventy-five feet from the location of the buried petroglyph.

I'd been thinking about the manuscript and whether I should walk more to get the book written. I'm ambivalent because nothing gets written while I walk. Now this is my laziness shining through; the hotter the weather, the earlier I have to wake up to walk. But after the rain overnight I woke early in anticipation of my walk in the rain-cool morning air. The discovery of the petroglyph made the prospect of a walk even better.

 

Surprise! I didn't find a new petroglyph the other day; I merely rediscovered a “lost petroglyph.” I remembered that somewhere I had a black and white photograph from many years ago, of a petroglyph in the big arroyo. I rummaged through file folders of black and white photographs and copier prints and I found it.

I took the photograph of the petroglyph in early spring, 1980; since then considerable weathering had worn away and muted the incised outline; back then it appeared as a vertical ovoid circle within a slightly larger circle that in effect outlined it. The image appears to be that of the Sun or a head, in a close-fitting helmet or headdress.

During those years I did not regularly walk or ride horseback in the big arroyo I had lost track of the petroglyph. My memory of the location placed the boulder with the petroglyph incorrectly at the abrupt turn which the arroyo takes right below the flat outcrop of blue schist. I'd also remembered the petroglyph itself incorrectly, as a triangle on its point or as a “V.”

Now that I've relocated the petroglyph I see that both the boulder with the petroglyph and the boulder at the abrupt turn in the arroyo have similar triangular stones wedged on point against them. That must be the reason I confused the two boulders and the location of the petroglyph.