The Turquoise Ledge (25 page)

T
he blue silver clouds pushed in from the south and covered the sky and the eye of the Sun. A hurricane at the edge of the Baja sent us these rain clouds overnight, and now a cool breeze moves out of the southeast from the direction the hurricane took.

As I sat watching the clouds, the white-eared hummingbird came to the feeder on the mesquite tree, but after one taste he flew away—the sugar water was too stale and full of gnats. Ashamed, I immediately took the feeder indoors to wash it and refill it with fresh sugar water.

One morning when I first started my walks, I left before I refilled the hummingbird feeders, and the male white-eared hummingbird followed me on my walk, chirping and scolding me for a mile before he turned back.

The hummingbirds around my house have been here for years yet I know very little about them. All female hummingbirds are similarly colored an iridescent pale emerald green so I haven't learned to distinguish them. I keep a guidebook handy but so far I can only recognize the male white-eared hummingbird, the male Lucifer hummingbird, and the male Costas hummingbird. The Costas has black and white feathers in his tail.

Once years ago on a cool November morning I found an emerald green hummingbird, dead, I thought, outside the front porch window. I leave my windows unwashed so that birds don't break their necks or skulls against the glass, but dirty glass didn't work this time. I felt such regret.

I picked up the little green-feathered creature to give it a burial of some sort and when I held it in the palm of my hand I felt the rapid beating of its tiny heart. I held it in both hands to warm it, and the heartbeat seemed to get stronger. After a couple of minutes I felt the hummingbird move and when I looked into my hands I saw he was awake, so I offered him my finger and he perched on it. I watched him recover more and more while he sat on my finger, and when I thought he seemed ready, I took him to a flowering brittlebush and he stepped off my finger onto the bush. I stayed nearby and watched until he recovered enough to fly away.

Hummingbirds are very territorial and the ones that live around my house spend a good deal of time chasing one another from the three or four feeders I hang in the trees of my front yard. Among the old-time Pueblo people Hummingbird was considered a great warrior and hunter, in the same category as Eagle and Owl. Hummingbird can't survive in the desert on flower nectar and pollen alone, and must hunt gnats and other tiny flying insects in order to survive the months the desert has no flowers.

 

This year the abundance of the prickly pear fruit extends beyond the cornucopia spilling around the cactus plants. Coyote dung is black with prickly pear seeds; the ants retrieve the seeds, and outside the entrances to their palaces, thousands of tiny black seeds are kept temporarily until the ants make storage space down below.

As the trail nears the Thunderbird Mine I pass the small barrel cactus I replanted a few years ago. Would-be cactus rustlers dug it up and left it lying root up by the trail to remove later, but never returned. I couldn't find the spot the rustlers dug it from, so I found a place where rainwater flows past and a small jojoba grew to give the cactus some shade. I replanted it there and now this morning the small barrel cactus had five or six blossoms on it, a sign the cactus is happy with its location.

I'm always on watch for snakes as I head down the hill toward the Gila Monster Mine because there is a stretch of fine white sand that the snakes like because they can scoot themselves down into the sand and be less visible. This morning I spotted a small snake curled up there—it was only one or two shades away from being an albino, and blended perfectly with the soft sand. The snake didn't seem to be hunting—it seemed to have spread its coil flat as if to absorb moisture from the sand through his skin.

As I came down the path where the old road drops into the big arroyo I looked down and saw a small outcrop of rock salted with grains of chrysocolla. I walked through the dickhead's private sand and gravel pit. Poor boulders! Slashed and shattered by the steel claw. One of you boulders should roll over the machine and crush that man, I thought as I passed by.

In the big arroyo, I found a fist-size stone mortar of light orange quartzite, and a little farther up the wash in the fine loose sand as I reached down to pick up a shard of brown glass, I spotted a turquoise cabochon the size of a bean.

 

The hurricane clouds look different than the usual rain clouds. They are fluffy from the strong winds that bring them, and very dense for such silvery white clouds. Usually the thunderclouds out of the southwest have to be very dark to be so dense.

Later an undulating white rain came in graceful waves down the dark basalt foothills of Black Mountain but without thunder or lightning. Now the rain mist breeze is fragrant with the yellow star flowers of the sennas and the cascades of tiny yellow blossoms on the greasewoods, the chaparral.

In a few minutes the clouds darkened and thunder rumbled; a strong wind out of the southwest drove the rain under the porch roof so I fled indoors. I'm wary of lightning; some fearsome natural forces become less threatening the more you learn about them, but lightning isn't one of them.

Lightning is able to travel twenty miles or more horizontally, to strike out of the clear blue sky. A lightning strike affects the body's ability to regulate blood pressure and body temperature, and the rate of the heartbeat. Basically lightning shorts out the body's own electrical system. Half of all who survive a lightning strike are dead within the first year from heart failure.

After the lightning and thunder had passed I went out on the porch again. The rain barrel by the porch was three quarters full. The cactus spines on the saguaro, cholla and prickly pear glittered with the light the raindrops reflected; the greasewoods and palo verdes seemed to grow bright green leaves before my eyes. Their speed in flowering and going to seed lets them take full advantage of the rainy spells.

It is possible to collect enough rainwater to run a household year round if you have a way to store the rainwater. When I first came to this old ranch in 1978, only the drinking water came from the well pumped by the windmill; all washing, bathing and toilet flushing water came from the twenty-two thousand gallon cistern in the ground out back.

It seems a pity to flush toilets with rainwater. Now there is a system which stores gray water from showers and recycles it into the toilet tank. The people who remain here after the groundwater is used up will have to depend on gray water and rain.

M
y old friends the white-eared hummingbirds are back from the mountains early this year. They have wintered around the house for the thirty years I've lived here. They often come to the feeders when we are on the porch talking, and then after they feed, they perch nearby and patiently listen and watch us.

All the wonderful rain down here lured them back. The feeders were full of sugar water but I had no takers all summer because there were so many blossoms and sugar gnats for the hummingbirds to eat. The Gila woodpeckers that usually drain the feeders were elsewhere too, eating fat larvae and bugs that thrived from the rain.

Hurricane rains' white silver mist curls down the mountainside. The moist air shimmers green, each droplet a tiny mirror of the desert leaves, the cactus skin and palo verde's green bark. The hurricane clouds keep coming—unfurled by the winds, they are heavier and thicker than ordinary August rain clouds.

Ordinary clouds move slowly with nicely rounded bellies on top, even and layered in silver gray and blue. The hurricane clouds rise and crowd close, heap up and tumble over one another with great thunder, and make their way to the Catalina Mountain peaks high above the valley. In the mountain updrafts the clouds take the shapes of blue herons and bison.

The clouds in the distance are as deep blue as the sea with frothy silver white breakers blowing over them from the south. Purple clouds rise behind the black mountains, but in the center of the western horizon through a slit in the clouds the eye of the Sun looks through for only an instant.

Later the sky cools as the Sun moves below the horizon. The purple blue bellies of the clouds spread and flatten—ocean, lake or big river—then a dark rain begins over the Black Mountain ridge. The clouds come in dark blue banks overlaid with wind-frothed silver. In the distance to the west I can see thick wide purple blue clouds as the temperature continues to drop. The wind is out of the southwest where the clouds come from.

This summer of 2008 was the coolest summer ever since I came here in 1978.

Part of the cool summer was the publication of another wonderful book of poems from Ofelia Zepeda, titled
Where Clouds Are Formed
. The poet knows the old names for the mountains in this desert:

“There are places where the clouds are formed”—I recalled Ofelia's poem of that title last summer when I felt the rush of the cool air from deep in the Earth and heard the hum; overhead I saw tendrils of newborn clouds rise into the sky.

In 1983 a hurricane came out of the east Pacific and went into the Gulf of California, headed straight for Tucson. The summer had been wet, and the earth was already saturated, and the arroyos and creeks had water. By the time the hurricane came by Tucson only a brisk breeze remained of the wind, but the churning masses of gray silver clouds poured rain from the sky for two nights and two days. The Tanque Verde, Rillito and the Santa Cruz rivers rose out of their banks and washed away condominiums and sections of interstate highway as well as three high voltage power transmission towers and two steel bridges that crossed the Santa Cruz River.

The mountains call the rain clouds; the mountains gather the rain clouds; later the rain clouds emerge in the rushing wind from caves and crevices hidden deep in the mountain peaks.

Now the sky is packed with blue clouds as in a great flood or high tide. Sometimes the storms circle around the Tucson Mountains. I hear thunder to the west in the Altar Valley where the rain clouds travel from the Gulf straight to the farms and villages of the Tohono O'Odom.

Now the clouds look like bundles of long silver tail feathers from a great silver blue macaw that gracefully curl down to meet Earth, dissolving into mists of silver over dark blue violet.

 

A cool afternoon in the high eighties lured me out for a walk. I decided to go look for unusual rocks along the bank of the big arroyo. The quartz, flint, jasper and chert rocks scattered about differed a great deal from the underlying basalt and light soil; the ancestors were on the lookout for unusual rocks and brought them back to their home. Sometimes I find a small stone with only one or two chips taken from it; maybe the ancestors experimented to see if the rock would permit them to flake a blade or point without crumbling or shattering.

I noticed it at once. This crystal quartz was translucent; it caught the sunlight like magic. It would catch the light of the moon as well. Crystal quartz is infrequent in the Tucson Mountains because the seismic activity and powerful volcanic explosions shattered the quartz crystals.

The quartz crystal I picked up had been carefully chipped to enhance its natural resemblance to a great horned owl. When I hold it under my desk lamp I can see the crystal was worked in the middle of the transparent end to make the slight triangular groove on the owl head between the ears. The eyes and beak can also be seen on the incised surface, and another incision on the right side forms the beak, neck and left wing. The quartz that forms the feet is not quite transparent and was also carved in front to separate the feet from the breast. On the owl's lower left an incision also helps form the feet.

I found another smaller clear quartz crystal not long afterward. One end is transparent, the other end translucent just like the carved owl crystal. Both crystals caught the sunlight so brightly, I wanted to see if they will catch starlight.

Today the wind was blowing from the northeast but felt good because the afternoon sun was strong and the air humid. The wind was blowing hard enough that some sounds were muffled, while others were louder: the wind through the needles of the saguaros made a loud rushing sound; the twigs and branches of bushes and tree branches clattered. I walked around the ancestors' place looking at their scattered chips of stone, and I thought about them. Did they know the last time they were here that they would not be returning? What happened? Where did they go?

Right then in the wind I heard a haunting sound that I remembered from childhood, the distinctive jingles of the ka'tsina dancers' ankle bells, the tinkle as the dancers approached. I looked northeast in the direction of the sound which seemed to come from the big arroyo near the boulder with the petroglyph. The ancestors didn't go anywhere; they are still here, right now.

A long time ago I picked up a small flat piece of white quartz with a sharp edge and the moon shape of a scraper. When I found the piece of quartz I looked for any marks left by chipping, but noticed none at the time. Today I reexamined this white quartz piece, and lo, a belated discovery. Closer examination with a magnifying glass revealed the quartz had been carefully worked with great precision. The ancestor had removed delicate tiny flakes that were almost invisible, with a very small tool that must have required much concentration and patience to prevent the quartz from shattering.

On my walk home with the wonderful crystals in my pocket, I came upon the circular imprint in the sand left by a small snake, and in the center of the circle I found a tiny turquoise stone.

I can't forget the jingle of the ka'tsina's ankle bells I heard yesterday in the wind at the ancestors' place. I will not visit there again for a while.