The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  The big snake had lived under the shed for fifteen years or more; she did have the odd habit of climbing small bushes and trees which left her vulnerable to birds of prey. A few hours later I went out to bury her and the three pieces of her were gone, taken for a meal by some creature, maybe her killer or a passing scavenger.

  I found a turquoise bead on the lawn chair in the front yard under the mesquite tree. I saw the turquoise bead as a gift, a sign of the loving presences or energies always nearby and helping me. Later I realized it came off a piece of art I had made many years before, a gourd doll with a turquoise bead around her neck which I hung in the mesquite tree. Still it was a wonderful occurrence that the single turquoise bead should fall at that time from the gourd doll onto the center of my chair.

  All day and all night, a heavy silvery blue mist enveloped the jade green desert, along with a gentle hurricane rain, warm and blue through the early morning light.

  CHAPTER 22

  Before I walked the hills, I rode over them on horseback. In the 1960s, the National Park Service ruled the Tucson Mountain mustangs were an “alien species” and a threat to the Saguaro National Park, despite the hundreds of years the wild horses had lived here. The park rangers managed to remove the stallion and most of the mares, but a few escaped.

  By 1978 when I moved here, only three wild horses remained in the Tucson Mountains. They were nearly identical bay mares with white markings that covered their faces entirely and reminded me of clouds. They followed the same trails the deer and javelina used.

  By the mid-1980s, there were only two wild mares left and they were showing age. After one died the other did not last long.

  The Tucson Mountains are terribly rough going for horses but manageable for mules. In 1980 my quarter horse mare fell with me on the high steep trail near the top of Wasson Peak. I jumped off her as she fell but her hind hoof (steel shod of course) clipped me in the side of the head. Her hoof smashed into my straw cowboy hat which absorbed the blow and saved me.

  As it was, I lost consciousness for an instant, and my head was bleeding. When I stood up, I saw the mare had fallen and rolled twenty feet down the mountainside and lay on her side, motionless. My heart sank. We were miles from help, miles from even a jeep trail. If the mare had broken her leg, she would have to lie for hours to suffer before we’d be able to do anything for her.

  But when I reached her and examined her legs, I saw that except for one deep laceration, she had no broken bones. She was just frightened by the steep terrain and precarious footing, and felt safer lying flat on the ground. I reassured her she was o.k. and encouraged her to stand up. I walked her most of the way home, and by then she had recovered nicely while I had a pounding headache; so I rode the rest of the way.

  Months later I returned to the site of the accident to retrieve my hat. I ended up keeping the hat for a long time. The stiffness of the straw made the blow glance off and probably saved my life or at least my brain. The whole side of the straw hat was caved in and there were bloodstains. I should have saved it forever but I threw it away in one of my rare house-cleaning frenzies.

  Years later my good Arabian gelding Hudson Bay lost his footing on the Wasson Peak trail and began to fall. I jumped clear of him and watched in horror as he tumbled end over end. But he jumped up nimble as a cat without a scratch on him.

  Pansy moth

  yellow and brown.

  Last night you

  landed on the moon

  in the water.

  This morning

  you are floating

  between the

  water lily leaves.

  It’s St. Patrick’s Day, 2004. The saint drove all the snakes out of Ireland; for “snakes” read “the indigenous religions of the British Isles” which held the snake to be sacred. I have ancestors among the Scots in the Leslie clan. “From the dark rock tower” is one translation I have seen for the name “Leslie.”

  While I was working on my novel Gardens in the Dunes, Bettina Munch, my German translator, gave me a book about the archeology of the “Old European” period, five thousand years ago, and the Paleolithic cultures of Macedonia, Hungary and Latvia. The Old Europeans left behind a number of ceramic and other archeological artifacts with snakes as the dominant figures. The Old Europeans regarded the serpent as a sacred Earth being. There is even a horned serpent figure on a ceramic bowl. Well into the twentieth century the rural people of Eastern Europe kept black snakes under their floors because they regarded them as family guardians as well as good luck charms.

  The first snakes to come out from hibernation in the spring of 2005 were down by the old corrals—the big dark gray rattler that lives under the old saddle shed and the smaller lighter reddish snake that stays under the fallen saguaro behind the corrals. I wasn’t expecting to see the reddish snake so I blurted out something as a greeting as I might to a person I met suddenly on the trail. The ugly sound of my human voice upset and frightened the reddish snake. The wild beings prefer silent communication with humans.

  Around the middle of June I watched as the big reddish snake that lives under the house hugged the perimeter of the house to find its way from the west side of the ranch house. Tigger the old pit bull dog barked excitedly at the snake as it crossed the front yard. I called for her to come to me, and I brought her indoors. Meanwhile the snake then ran into the mastiffs on the east side of the house so I called them and all six came running. I locked them indoors with me to give the red rattlesnake time to move out of their area.

  Snakes remember unpleasant encounters with humans and other predators and will try to avoid further encounters if at all possible.

  Then I found a three and a half foot black masked rattler was inside Sandino and Bolee’s aviary. The snake remained motionless until I turned my back to get the macaw feed, and then it was gone.

  Later as I was watering the datura plants in the clay pots under the mesquite tree, I splashed a two and a half foot long brown diamondback that I hadn’t noticed at rest in the shade under the tree. The snake moved away but didn’t rattle because it is one of the regulars in the front yard.

  CHAPTER 23

  Cirrus: 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.
<
br />   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?”

  PART THREE

  Star Beings

  CHAPTER 24

  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.