The Turquoise Ledge

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  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.

  CHAPTER 50

  My 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:

  Cemamagi, Tumamoc

  Babad Do’ ag, Santa Catalina Mountains

  Cew Do’ ag, Rincon Mountains

  Cuk Do’ ag, Black Mountains, Tucson Mountains

  “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 m
ake 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.

  CHAPTER 51

  Late in the morning my son Robert called me outside. He’d just seen the biggest grasshopper ever in the front yard.

  Chapulin. Was it Lord Chapulin himself?

  What did he want?

  I hadn’t made many copies of his book, Portrait of Chapulin, because I was trying to complete the manuscript. He might be concerned with the delay, so he sent an emissary this morning.

  But by the time I got to the front yard, the big grasshopper was gone. In the days and weeks since, I’ve gone back to that late morning when I missed my call from Lord Chapulin’s messenger. I believe he came to tell me his people were coming to stay in my yard awhile to rest and to eat.

  This morning I found a big grasshopper in the front yard eating the leftover vegetables I put out for the wild birds. He seemed unconcerned about me but later when I looked for him, he was gone. I found two big grasshoppers together near a pot of rain lilies, but they walked away from me rapidly. They didn’t seem as friendly as Lord Chapulin and the others who visited last year. I seldom see them jump; is this because predators might spot them if they jumped?

  This afternoon another white hurricane deluge here—a cloud burst as if a giant water tank ruptured in the sky. The fat gray cloud unrolled itself then fell in a shimmering white veil against the dark basalt hilltops. A warm moist wind out of the southeast drove the clouds rapidly away so the heavy rain did not last.

  Before sundown Robert went to see how much rainwater had collected in the cistern and found a desert tortoise on the path by the old windmill well. Summer rainstorms bring out the rare desert tortoises, and one must drive carefully and help them across the road if need be.

  The tortoise was the size of a dinner plate, large enough to be sixty years old, as old as I am. I kept my distance out of respect; humans are an ugly sight and a shock to shy wild creatures. I used a soft voice because I didn’t want to frighten the tortoise. I said, “Oh you are so beautiful.” Then I slowly withdrew to get out of the creature’s path. In more than thirty years living here, we’d not been visited like this before by such an old tortoise. Truly we were blessed.

  The tortoise came to the bottom of the wire fence by the path and stopped. At first I thought the tortoise wanted inside the front yard so I took the old pit bull dog indoors. I took the wire cutters and opened a hole in the wire to allow the tortoise to pass through; he got closer to the fence and to the edge of the aloe plants but he came no farther through the wire.

  I came back before long to make sure the tortoise did not venture around to the back yard with the four mastiffs. But the tortoise had dug himself down into the damp soft sand until he was partially buried, and partially concealed by the aloes. Sunset gave way to twilight and the tortoise remained there. How odd that it came there to spend the night. There were other places on the hilltop with soft sand the tortoise might have used. Why did the tortoise stop so close to us humans with dogs?

  The following morning the tortoise was still partially covered with damp sand by the aloes. I checked on him from time to time. I wanted to see which direction he took when he left. At first he came down the path toward the front gate which I left open in case he wanted to come into the yard.

  I watched the tortoise from a distance. When he reached the threshold of the gate he turned away and went downhill a short distance then he got on the diagonal path down the side of the hill that faces west. I checked a short while later and he was gone. I followed the path I’d last seen him take, but a thorough search under the greasewoods nearby revealed no sign of him. Tortoises like to make their burrows in the banks of the arroyos just high enough to stay out of the floodwaters. I walked down the steep slope into the west ravine to see if I might find the tortoise on his way to a burrow, but he’d disappeared.

  The hummingbirds are contesting with one another for access to the feeder. They whizz around chasing one another; it seems mostly in jest, although last year I distinctly heard the sound of two tiny beaks clicking in combat. With the rain come the tiny sugar gnats that hover in the mesquite leaves; these gnats don’t bother humans. The hummingbirds zip and dart through the air and catch the gnats. That’s how the hummingbirds survive when flowers are scarce.

  Again for the fourth day in a row great dark roiling clouds, armies of ghost warriors many legions wide, rise high over the southwest horizon of the black basalt mountains. While I was out walking I saw Chapulin on a greasewood watch me as I looked for rocks, and then in the yard, another grasshopper. All this rain brings them. Chapulin might be one of the Chacs, one of the Lords of the Rain.

  The Anthropology Museum in Mexico City has a large exquisite figure of Lord Chapulin carved out of red chalcedony. The famed “Chapultepec” Gardens are the Grasshopper Gardens, where the Lord Chapulin and his Queen resided with unnumbered relatives and clans-people in the luxury of fresh running springs and a great abundance of fragrant flowers.

  In the Cantares Mexicanos, the great epic of Nahuatl literature, “grasshopper” is another name for the ghost warrior. I didn’t understand the significance of this until later in the summer when the grasshoppers changed their attitude toward me and other humans.

  Last night as we sat outside on the porch in the dark, Ratty, our archenemy who lives under the aloe patch in the front yard, came out and showed herself to us, almost as if she was greeting us or maybe taunting us—she chews up the wires in the engines of our cars and pulls the stuffing out of the old cushions on the white plastic chairs in the front yard.

  Despite the curses we hurled at her when we saw her, Ratty seemed fond of us, and wanted in her way to join us. She sat outside her nest and watch
ed us. The sound of human voices didn’t seem to upset her. I started laughing. I told Bill and Robert, “Look. Ratty is sitting with us; she thinks she’s our friend. She has no idea she’s our enemy.” I felt a fondness for her after that. She already figured out a long time ago that I wasn’t going to poison or trap her, only curse at her.

  People ask me why not get rid of the big rat nest in my front yard. The piled debris crowns the entire four by six foot aloe patch. If it were simply a rat nest, I might have considered its removal. But Ratty and her clan aren’t the only ones that live there. A number of rattlesnakes call the rat tunnels under the aloes home and so do the great desert toads.

  I know the ancient people here held the pack rats in high regard; in times of hunger Ratty’s pantry kept human beings alive. During droughts and famines, the hungry people used to raid the pack rats’ nests for the stores of seeds and jojoba nuts, dried cactus buds and fruits and any baby rats they might find.

  Pampered and well fed, we might gag at the thought of sharing Ratty’s stores of mesquite and palo verde beans and dried cactus buds. But Allen Ginsberg had a story from a Buddhist monk during the Cultural Revolution in China. He told the story to us in 1984 in China as our delegation of U.S writers invited by the Chinese Writers Association visited Buddhist shrines. The story was about hunger. One of the Buddhist priests told Ginsberg that during the Cultural Revolution, after starving for weeks, he was so hungry that when he saw an undigested leaf of mustard greens in the shit of another priest, he picked the mustard leaf out of the shit, rinsed it off in a stream and ate it.