The Turquoise Ledge

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  Through circumstances beyond my control, I ended up with six of these wonderful mastiffs—all of them related to one another. I was the midwife for all of the pups Lyon and Thelma had, including the births of Macho and Osa. Snapper and Rosie are Lyon’s daughters but from Xena, also a Greco dog.

  CHAPTER 55

  I only walked three times in September. Yesterday, October 6, I walked for the first time in weeks. The dirt and the stones of the trail welcomed me back. I felt it through the soles of my walking shoes; a softness, a giving way, a gentleness that welcomed me like an old friend. I suppose the trail and I are old friends after thirty years of my horseback rides and walks. For years I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep the old house or the acreage so I tried not to become too attached to the place. But now I’ve lived with these black basalt peaks green with saguaro and palo verde years longer than I lived in my beloved birthplace of sandstone, lava hills and juniper. All along I’ve been blessed.

  The morning was cool and cloudy so I put on my Arizona Cardinals hat and I didn’t bother to wear sunglasses. The sun came out as I started up the hill and passed the ant palace of stone. I wished then that I’d worn my sunglasses. But I felt so good to be walking on the trail I didn’t mind the bright sun.

  As I approached the side trail to the entrance of the Thunderbird Mine I saw something on the ground—trash of some sort. From my front porch off in the distance I’d seen two people at the mine entrance earlier in the morning. I went to remove the trash on the side trail but as I got closer I saw it was a pair of sunglasses. They fit.

  The trail turned toward the east and I was glad for the sunglasses, and I felt such happiness for the generosity of the world. As I approached the Gila Monster Mine I was watchful for the two light beige rattlesnakes, one small, one larger, who like to nap in the middle of the trail where the sand is soft and fine.

  At the Gila Monster Mine the broken limbs and trunk of the great saguaro still lay across the trail where the windstorm felled it weeks before. Shod hoof-prints showed that riders made their horses step over the broken cactus arms and start a new path to the left of another piece of an arm.

  I passed the dance plaza of the javelinas and the deer where soft sand gets deposited from a small arroyo. Nearby I noticed a very elegant ant palace all in the base of an outcrop of orange pink granite. The coolness of the morning brought out the ants; their motion caught my attention. I forgot to look for the bright orange round rock on the hillside to the north-northeast.

  I came upon the spot where I had earlier found the opalescent tumbled glass in the arroyo sand near the trail crossing. I always look for the reflection of the sun off other fragments of arroyo-tumbled glass in the sand. From there the trail goes up the hill where I must not look or I will see the two-story abomination. Then I had a premonition that the man and his machine had done more damage to the arroyo.

  As I stepped around the mesquite at the edge of the big arroyo, I saw that the man and his machine had removed more large boulders and further destroyed the habitat on the bottom of the big arroyo. He left behind a reddish basalt boulder broken open in the middle of the arroyo as if he planned to take it next.

  All the good energy I’d felt from the walk on the trail suddenly vanished. I felt sick. I’d really hoped that the tons of boulders and rocks the man and his machine had already removed would complete the landscaping of his gargantuan yard. But alas! He intended to turn the big arroyo into his own personal rock quarry.

  Here is the catch with karma, or curses and witchcraft: they often don’t take effect fast enough. Karma may not even things until your next life.

  The Celtic curse, which the British poet Kathleen Raine had pronounced under the old tree by the sea against Gavin Maxwell, her ex-lover, took effect almost at once. Within three months Maxwell’s beloved sea otter was killed while under Raine’s care; then Maxwell’s cottage by the sea mysteriously burned to the ground. Within twelve months of Raine’s curse Maxwell developed brain cancer and was dead six months later.

  I could have called again to complain that the man was operating a sand and gravel pit in violation of the county zoning laws but I wasn’t hopeful. This is the old West and private property rights are absolute here; there’s no such thing as the common good. I’d already had two county officials from different departments tell me they couldn’t stop the man and his machine.

  I lost all my walking momentum at the site of the damaged boulders, but a short distance past I found a turquoise rock, triangular in shape and the size of my thumb. I hadn’t walked since the last rainstorm. I found another piece of turquoise stone the size and shape of a butterfly on a sandbar near the hidden place where I hear the air rush out of the Earth. The big arroyo was no less generous with its turquoise stones despite the new damage and new loss of boulders.

  This machine man strikes me as the sort who will gouge more boulders from the big arroyo each time the county contacts him, to show his contempt for the government and environmental laws.

  Each time I walk, I notice I feel better as I get farther away from the gouges and holes where the boulders were removed. The next big rainstorm and flood down the big arroyo would erode the bank and hill beneath the huge ugly house; the holes would fill in with rocks and sand. Eventually a five hundred year rain would come and carry down boulders from the slopes of the Black Mountain to jam the big arroyo at that place once again.

  CHAPTER 56

  Good news. The bees returned today to swarm in clusters over the hummingbird feeders. The hummingbirds also began to show up a few days ago. The cold spell from the north had sent the hummingbirds and bees down from the mountains where they avoided the big heat of summer.

  I wondered if the great horned owls spent the summer in the mountains as well. They might spend the days in the mountains asleep high in the tops of pine trees at nine thousand feet where it is cool. Then after dark they might glide back down into the valley to hunt for heat-dazed rodents and lost house pets.

  I think about the great horned owls frequently since the terrible attack on my military macaws in January. A week or so before the attack, I’d seen a great horned owl one morning on a power pole not far from the big arroyo. I was concerned the owl might harm itself in the power line, and made a note to call the power company to have them install a device on the pole which deters birds of prey from electrocuting themselves.

  The power pole where the owl was perched is only a short distance across the arroyo from the site of the ancestors’ place where I found the carved quartz crystal owl and the white quartz knife.

  I bought a book on owls to learn more about them; perhaps, I thought, more knowledge would give me peace of mind and more power to protect my beloved parrots from the great horned owls by night and the red-tail hawks by day. I learned a great deal about owls, and great horned owls in particular, but the knowledge did nothing to abate my awe or my fear for any being that might face a great horned owl in combat.

  The great horned owl is one of the few owl species that is not endangered. Great horned owls prey on smaller species of owls and will kill red-tail hawks and peregrine falcons. They may live twenty-eight years, far longer than other owl species.

  Hidden under their feathers, the great horned owls have long necks, so that their skeletons most resemble that of a pterodactyl. With their long sharp claws and powerful beaks, they are capable of inflicting grave injury or even death on human beings.

  The owl book noted that the great horned owl may become so fixated on its intended prey that it will dive in front of traffic and get hit. A writer friend tells of a rich gentleman from Virginia who saw a dead horned owl beside the highway a few days before Thanksgiving, and told his chauffeur to stop and pick up the owl. When they got home the man instructed the chauffeur to take the owl to the kitchen for the cook to prepare for Thanksgiving dinner. The meat was so tough and stringy that my friend managed to swallow only one bite.

  I take no chances with the owls and my remaining maca
ws. Every night we plug in a light and a radio tuned to a right wing talk radio station; my theory is the great horned owls won’t be able to concentrate on predations against the macaws in the octagon aviary if they hear the ugliness of the human voices from the radio and see a bright light.

  The Gila woodpecker is drinking from the big hummingbird feeder. The bees laid claim to the two smaller feeders. Somehow the bees manage to drink from the hummingbird feeders—I’m not sure how—unless bees have long tongues like the butterflies and hummingbirds.

  I saw a large mesquite lizard on the south-facing stucco wall of the house this morning. He seemed to be finding tiny insects in the rough surface of the stucco wall. His tail was fat. He might be a relative of the Godzilla lizard we used to watch in the front yard. Only the tiny lizards roam the front yard now; their small size makes them difficult for the roadrunner to spot.

  Today the bees are fewer and not swarming on one another nor are they as excited as the bees that came yesterday. They are from a different hive and are not as numerous as yesterday’s bees. These bees recognize me; they fly up around my face as yesterday’s bees did. Some of them landed on my legs and arms as if they also recognize me by the scent of my skin.

  CHAPTER 57

  If you focus on a certain point in the foothills on the north slope of the peak that is many hundreds of yards away, it is possible in certain light to see objects—rocks or cactus or a person—magnified or as if you were very close. More than once, when I looked west toward the peak I noticed something very odd: all light, all that is visible emanating from that point appears much larger than the surrounding terrain. A magic circle of telescopic vision which could only mean some sort of discontinuity of space-time due to a hidden mass or density with a strong gravitational pull within the volcanic peak or ridge of basalt.

  The gravity of a parallel universe very near to ours might cause refractions of the sunlight so that objects would appear oddly different in certain spots on the peak’s north-facing slope.

  Or perhaps the gravity source is a tiny black hole smaller than the smallest subatomic particle, “a Hawking hole” exerting awesome gravity on all matter or energy that strays too close and falls into its gravity, one so powerful that light slows down noticeably from that point, and everything appears much larger.

  After a rainstorm on the slopes of the peak, I’ve seen the walls of stone palaces built into the sheer sides of the mountain shimmer golden in the late afternoon light as the sun descends into the west. I glanced in the direction of that place on the slope of the mountain peak where things appear much larger than the surroundings, and for an instant that point expanded so everything in it appeared much larger in the golden light.

  The small mesquite lizards are almost black; the darkest brown striated with dark gray that mimics the rough dark bark of the mesquite. They stay close to the mesquite tree this time of year. Perhaps this is because the gnats and other tiny insects that reach maturity now remain close to the mesquite leaves for moisture.

  Inside the bottle of hummingbird sugar water are many small flying bugs of a metallic iridescent emerald gold. The Gila woodpeckers wait for these gold bugs to soak up the sugar before the woodpeckers gobble up the candied delicacies. I always think of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold-Bug” whenever I see these little flying gold bugs although Poe’s bug resembled a scarab beetle.

  Here is my new favorite Dickinson poem:

  Bee! I’m expecting you!

  Was saying Yesterday

  To Somebody you know

  That you were due—

  The Frogs got Home last Week—

  Are settled, and at work—

  Birds, mostly back—

  The Clover warm and thick—

  You’ll get my Letter by

  The seventeenth; Reply

  Or better, be with me—

  Yours, Fly.

  Halloween. The first day of the Celtic New Year. Yesterday morning the bees came for water and suddenly died. The wind was blowing the filthy dust from Tucson all across the valley, high into the sky.

  Once the wind stopped blowing, the bees stopped dying. Later the local TV news reported that dozens of people went to hospital emergency rooms and urgent care centers for respiratory ailments.

  Years ago in the mid-nineties, a mining supply company that sold chemicals used in smelting copper illegally dumped toxic wastes into the city sewers. The sewage treatment plant at Roger Road released a cloud of toxic gas that traveled six miles, into the Tucson Mountains, and woke me up at four in the morning.

  It knocked Sandino to the floor of the aviary and required an emergency visit to the vet for cortisone to save him. The four baby military macaws in the nest with Sandino and Paco were killed.

  Over a hundred people from the area around the mining supply company were rushed to hospitals. People were outraged and demanded the county shut the company down, but instead the company cleverly filed for Chapter Eleven bankruptcy which prevents company shut-downs even for environmental reasons. Copper is big business in Arizona, the Copper State.

  My small red plastic writing table barely has space for the notebook or the manuscript because it is covered with pieces of crystal quartz I picked up here and there. The crystals range from opaque to translucent, even in a single piece. I noticed all the pieces of crystal quartz I found at the ancestors’ place were translucent. The figure of the owl carved out of crystal quartz has a translucent head and wings.

  I spotted the bits of crystal quartz easily because they were surrounded by darker jaspers and cherts that formed a half-moon pattern around the crystals. The crystals were in the same area, within a few feet of one another, among the chips and pieces of white quartz and flint struck off for arrow points and knives. The flints, cherts and jaspers the ancestors gathered to chip stood out plainly on the pale gray volcanic soil. I found the white quartz knife not far from there.

  The first quartz crystal I picked up was unlike any other stone in the area; it was so bright next to the darker rocks. Clearly it was carried to this spot by human beings. The quartz crystal is the size and shape of my thumb. One end is white quartz with many many tiny crystals amassed so they can’t be seen individually; this mass of crystals is called a “massive specimen.”

  Before I saw a photograph of a massive specimen, I mistook the patterns of the quartz crystals as fractures caused by pressure or explosion. However the reason the quartz crystals grow in a mass may be due to pressure or an explosion that occurs during the crystals’ formation.

  I imagine the crystals on full moon nights would catch the light and glitter—hence their value to medicine people, and to sorcerers.

  CHAPTER 58

  On my walk this morning I could see the machine man’s intentions for the other boulders and rocks. He’d already removed the sand and smaller rocks around them that held them in place. I feel sick when I think about it because nothing can be done to stop the harm.

  Once past that place I felt better. The arroyo is undiminished in spirit. I found a turquoise rock that fits in my palm. It is a light sienna orange, an iron oxide stone with delicate outlines in chrysocolla that accentuate the rock’s trapezoidal shape. The warm orange red and yellow oxides show off the chrysocolla’s beauty. It is one of the loveliest turquoise rocks I’ve found in a while.

  A short distance later I bent over to pick up a fragment of brown bottle glass and I spotted a tiny spot of blue so intense I thought it might be a bit of plastic or more spent bubblegum the color of turquoise.

  It was a nugget of chrysocolla the size of the end of my little finger though thinner than my finger. It is very solid and hard, though I don’t think it has chalcedony with it. When I licked its surface, it seemed almost impermeable but very soon the moisture on the surface of the nugget was gone, absorbed by the chrysocolla and the dry air in the room.

  I happened to turn on National Public Radio while Irene Pepperberg was a guest, talking about her new book, Alex and Me.


  I had followed her research into animal intelligence with the famous African gray parrot Alex. I bought the book she published with Harvard University Press in 2000 on her laboratory research work over twenty years with Alex. She compared the results of her work with the gray parrot to that done on language acquisition by the great apes, dolphins and human infants. Alex had the same level of ability to communicate as the great apes and the dolphins.

  Today on NPR, Pepperberg talked about her time in Tucson when she was at the University of Arizona. She lived west of Tucson in the desert. One afternoon she brought Alex home with her from the lab where he usually spent the night. She’d gotten a nice cage and stocked it with Alex’s favorite foods and toys. But once in the cage, Alex looked out the window where two tiny desert screech owls were nesting in a mesquite tree. Pepperberg said Alex immediately started to say “I wanna go back! I wanna go back!” Pepperberg pulled the curtains shut so the parrot couldn’t see the nesting owls, but Alex knew they were still there, and Alex kept saying he wanted to go back until finally Pepperberg drove the parrot back to the lab and his cage.

  Her work with Alex inspired me to raise my African gray parrot as if she were a parrot child and not a bird. Pepperberg had to follow strict protocols to be able to call her research “hard science.” I had no such impediments. I wanted my parrot child to learn language as a human child does, in the context of a household, and here that means big dogs and other parrots.