The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir

by Leslie Marmon Silko

  After I returned, I noticed the snakes out by the macaw aviaries seemed much more jumpy around me. The rattler with the big head was coiled next to the small blue plastic water tub under the small mesquite tree. But he abruptly changed position and put his back to me. Another rattler by the old macaw cage hurried away when I came with the hose. They didn’t like the house-sitters.

  I found a small owl feather with an amazing intricate pattern of small white circles mixed into the bands of silver and pale beige. Was it a silvery white barn owl or a great horned owl? Perhaps a greeting from the owls that hunt around my house at night. I put the feather in the shade cloth but when I came back it was gone. The breeze took it or it went with the breeze.

  The big heat arrived on the second day of July with the enormous sky canopy of blinding white sunlight. The Sun blazes hotter than ever because its expansion as a red giant has accelerated. I imagine the coronal mass ejections that hurl great hurricanes of solar particles at the Earth; many of the charged particles pass right through us and the Earth and continue on. I think I can feel the particles pass through me, leaving behind coded messages in my bloodstream.

  The air is so dry that 106 degrees Fahrenheit feels like 88 as long as one has shade and plenty of water to drink. The heat expands the molecules of air so sound doesn’t “travel” as readily, and with the rising heat comes an eerie silence. Birds and small animals lie low to find some relief. A slight breeze stirs and cools my body. A wind chime rings hesitantly at first and then it rings with abandon. The edges of my eyelids feel burned or parched so I think I will move indoors.

  Today the air smells like scorched paper or wood about to catch fire; it is so dry the fine mist from the hose evaporates before it touches the macaws on the high perch.

  This morning I found a lizard, dead standing up, his eyes open, so at first I thought he was alive but sick and paralyzed. It was a “sky lizard” with a brown collar, blue belly and blue tail. He was facing north. What could have killed him but not eaten him? Did he die suddenly of natural causes? Did a stray particle from a gamma ray or supercharged cosmic ray strike it dead in its tracks? Heat didn’t kill him; lizards love the heat. He had no old injuries—there were no marks or signs of damage on him.

  In the desert one seldom dies without quickly becoming a meal for another; thus we aren’t dead for long before we become part of the living creatures and plants.

  CHAPTER 31

  At five a.m. the sky over the Catalina Mountains is an ethereal mist of lavender pink. The humidity in the air above the peaks reflects the light of the sunrise blocked by the mountains. I hadn’t walked in weeks and all the lovely colors of the morning called me out. I took off my sunglasses and hooked them over my shirt in case I needed them later.

  The ant palace on the first hill was all closed up as if the ants expected rain or more hot weather. At another ant palace the entrance was open and a few ants were standing nearby as if they were about to call it a day as the sun rose higher.

  I see fewer shoe prints on the trail since the big heat descended. I found two turquoise rocks soon after I turned into the big arroyo. The startling bright turquoise was right where I’d walked many times before. Was it there before but flipped over to hide its turquoise side? The flood last month rolled it over so the turquoise was visible. The rock is a gray limestone the size of the tips of my fingers and thumb held together. The turquoise has orange brown iron spots scattered over it like dust.

  The second turquoise rock was about the same size but was a reddish brown iron-bearing stone with turquoise that resembled lichens of bright green. I put the turquoise stones in my jeans pocket carefully so I don’t lose them; I keep any broken glass or other trash I pick up in a separate pocket to protect the turquoise rocks.

  Under the mesquite trees in the bottom of the arroyo the javelina herd dug out wallows in the sand to find any dampness, any coolness in the terrible heat. When I got home from the walk I realized I had dropped my sunglasses somewhere along the way. Early in the day sunglasses aren’t as important, but later on they prevent heat radiation from entering the eyes and heating the brain.

  Rain clouds broke the heat wave in Tucson on July 5, but in the Pacific Northwest and Idaho and Montana the atmospheric high pressure intensified the heat so temperatures were higher to the north than here in the desert. Medford was 109 degrees and Boise was 108 while it was only 103 in Tucson.

  As I walked the last stretch of the arroyo I found two fine pieces of turquoise rock. The first was a flat orange brown rock the size and shape of a Sonoran red spotted toad or a silver dollar. On its flat side, there were seven distinct spots of turquoise as if painted with a brush to look like a spotted toad. It made a fine spotted toad fetish to bring rain.

  The second was a small nugget of turquoise I spied in the fine sand and loam deposited by the receding water. This was a nugget the size of a jellybean of solid chrysocolla-impregnated chalcedony with all the extraneous basalt and limestone worn away by the rocks and water of the arroyo. The nugget had a flat side that resembled the face and head of a coyote.

  In the breeze I made out the scent of sweet wood incense from a distant pine forest fire. Later I looked toward the city and the entire valley and sky over Tucson were filled with white smoke, and I wondered if the smoke came from the same source as the sweet wood incense I smelled earlier.

  During the heat wave the day is consumed by watering and feeding the five macaws and two cockatoos outdoors, so they are prepared to endure the heat. The mastiffs have to be fed to get them ready to spend the day indoors.

  The windows indoors are covered with shiny silver Mylar emergency blankets or “space” blankets originally developed by NASA to protect the astronauts. Tucson at the end of June and in early July is nearly as hot as the surface of Venus, so the space blankets work great, and they are inexpensive. The only problem is to find the right tape. It was so hot the duct tape I used to fix the emergency blankets over the windows wouldn’t stick, and the blankets fell down and I had to use thumb tacks to hold them instead.

  When I first came to Tucson thirty years ago I heard about eccentrics (usually older women who lived alone) who covered all their windows with aluminum foil followed by a layer of newspaper. Now I’ve become one of those eccentrics. Light is heat. The dim interior of my house in the summer saves me hundreds of dollars in electricity for cooling the air.

  Outdoors on the aviaries I have layers of shade cloth and rolls of willow fencing over the cage wire to give the big parrots the maximum shade and protection from the heat.

  I found my blue lens sunglasses on the steep hill just below the Thunderbird Mine. The glasses landed on the ear-pieces, no damage to the lenses. I saw the strange saguaro “boot” again; it looks like a mask. The saguaro forms a hard gray shell-like tissue around damage to its skin, sometimes in the shape of a boot or shoe. I spotted a second saguaro skin that looks like a mask in the debris at the side of the arroyo. I debated bringing home the two “boots” to make them into masks to hang on the wall. I decided to let them be as they are. Near the home stretch of the big arroyo I found a small nugget of turquoise in the deep sand.

  The following day on my walk, I was stunned as I approached the big arroyo near the end of the road. The graceful sandbars with the delicate patterns of pebbles and small stones were gone—gouged out and removed by the same machine that smashed the gray basalt boulder and took it away in pieces.

  The day I discovered the destruction I didn’t tell anyone. The loss and outrage I felt choked me. I knew the local authorities didn’t bother to enforce the laws intended to protect the land from damage, and that angered me even more.

  I didn’t want to write about it; I didn’t want it to be in the Turquoise Ledge manuscript. I had decided before I started the memoir that I wanted as much as possible to avoid unpleasantness and strife and politics as much as possible. But the beautiful gray basalt and pale orange quartzite boulders had been torn loose from the sides of the arroyo
and dragged out of the wash and skidded up the old road to “landscape” the yard of the preposterous house with its prison tower and prison wall.

  Small stones and rocks were gouged out of the center of the arroyo to make a level yard for the ridiculously huge house. Boulders and rocks, the fine sand and the pebbles that formed the sandbars along the edge and middle of the arroyo to slow the erosion were gone. The gaping hole left the young mesquite tree and its roots vulnerable to flash floods.

  The owner of the grotesque house could have easily afforded to buy rock and sand excavated legally from a quarry. Instead he acted out what he saw as his manifest destiny: to destroy whatever he wanted to destroy willy-nilly no matter the impact on others or himself—that’s the credo of southern Arizona, and much of the West.

  I was shocked at the damage because I thought the arroyo’s proximity to the national park safeguarded it from such damage; I thought the flow of the water in the arroyo was protected by Federal water law. I am always surprised at how easily the wealthy in Pima County can flout laws intended to protect the desert terrain and groundwater. They break the law and then pay a dinky fine to the County which allows them to leave the offending damage or structure in place for a matter of a few hundred dollars. This is the reason much of Tucson looks slightly askew and a bit trashy.

  When I approached the damage in the arroyo the next day, I tried to remain calm. I recalled my old neighbor, may he rest in peace, the author Edward Abbey who made famous a certain course of action in his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang.

  The Earth-avenging protagonist and his pals drop monkey wrenches into bulldozer gear boxes at destruction sites and unbolt power transmission towers from their pedestals. In law school they called such action “self-help” which is frowned upon by the police and the courts because it makes them irrelevant.

  But instead I resort to another kind of remedy: I begin to visualize the man with the rock-moving machine as he pulls the wrong lever one morning and drops a boulder on himself. He lives alone in the huge house so he lies squashed under the rock for a good while before anyone finds him.

  With that image of the man’s moisture squashed into the humble desert earth he violated, I think of rain—great long rainstorms from Lord Huracan far to the south who, once every thirty years, sends Tucson great deluges of rain that last for days and wash away trees and highway bridges and parts of mountains.

  The violence of the flash flood powers the redemptive process. Over the years I’ve seen floods completely change the appearance of the big arroyo.

  Just past the machine’s destruction I glanced down and found a flat stone with a deposit of sky blue turquoise in the shape of the United States and Mexico. The Earth doesn’t cease her blessings just because humans foul Her.

  The first storm clouds since June 17 appeared out of the southwest. Just in time to water us thirsty things. It broke the back of the monster heat.

  Another gathering of rain clouds.

  Our beloved ancestors return to us as rain.

  The black mountain peak above the house is veiled in fog and misty clouds in swirls of wind out of the south.

  CHAPTER 32

  I broke my foot on July 11, 2007, the sixth anniversary of my mother’s death. At about six a.m. I went to let the two mastiffs in the living room out. The three steps down into the living room were built incorrectly, too narrowly, and too close together to be safe. It was early, I was too lazy to turn on the light and I thought I was on the bottom step when actually I was on the middle step. My left foot took all the force and weight of my body as I fell from the middle step to the living room floor. As I went down I heard a loud sickening crack.

  Early on a Friday in the summer, I knew all the doctors would be gone far away from this blast furnace, off to the cool golf courses of Mission Beach and La Jolla. At the time, the average wait time in a Tucson emergency room was four hours fifty-eight minutes.

  I thought: why inflict four hours and fifty-eight minutes of the emergency room on myself while I’m suffering with a broken foot? I took two ibuprofen tablets and hobbled around to feed the dogs and parrots before the worst of the swelling and pain set in. I sat with a big cold pack on my foot and watched Sesame Street with the gray parrot.

  I knew the doctors didn’t put rigid casts on broken bones in the foot; I figured that was all they’d do for me at the emergency room after four hours and fifty-eight minutes and a charge of five hundred dollars or more. So I decided I would take care of my foot myself. I called Caz and asked him to buy me a cane and one of those ugly postsurgical sandals. My health insurance doesn’t cover anything but major catastrophes anyway. I decided next week I’d let the acupuncturist work on the foot, which was completely black now; if I went this week it would frighten her.

  My younger son, Caz, came and fed the dogs and parrots the next day so I could stay off my foot. I never thought about it until now but with one foot gone, the stress on the remaining foot and leg was shocking. I forgot; it had been years since I’d lost mobility; one cannot order the remaining limbs to take up the burden of the failed limb without much protest by the sore strained muscles unaccustomed to the sudden shift in weight. The cane left my hand and arm sore. I had to face the facts: if I ever lost my mobility permanently, I’d have to find someone to help me or I’d be forced to part with my beloved dogs and parrots because I could not feed or care for them properly.

  The broken foot forced me to sit on the front porch and observe the sky and the gathering of clouds.

  More rain

  good rain

  all love and gratitude to the clouds who come

  from white shell houses afar.

  In the swirling mist

  cloud breath beings sweep

  along the slopes of the dark peak.

  For eleven days straight, the rain came into Sinaloa and Sonora along the Sierra Madre and the Sierra Madre Oriental fed by the twin tropical storms named Cosmo and Dalia.

  Thirteen nights after I broke the bone in my left foot, it was healing nicely thanks to the benevolent energy of the Nine Lords of the Night who wished to see me back on my feet so I could continue painting their portraits, and thanks to the little needles my acupuncturist used twice a week, beginning the tenth day after my fall.

  On the fourteenth day after I broke my foot, I was up watering plants in the front yard when I caught a glimpse of a piece of turquoise rock I had picked up long ago on a walk probably in the big arroyo. It was in the dirt in an old flower bed. I had to smile. This was the second time since my injury the turquoise rocks came to me. I have them to write about even if I can’t walk far, and of course I have the big rains to write about.

  A few days later on a rainy Saturday, I used my special waterproof notebook paper with special waterproof pencil to sit outside on the front porch and write during the rain because a breeze would blow the raindrops onto the porch from time to time.

  The following day I hobbled out to water the fig tree in its pot of dirt and lo and behold I saw a turquoise rock the size of a pea. How did the little rock get there? Was it in the soil from this hilltop or was it one of the rocks I picked up years ago and tossed into the pot? This nugget was on the ground in the back yard where the erosion is loosening the pebbles and gravel in the layers of white caliche dust. I realized then how old all this rock is, how the turquoise ledge may have been very large—as big as a mountain ridge—when it was blasted to smithereens by the big volcanic eruption millions of years ago and its turquoise was scattered all over the area.

  The turquoise pieces I’ve found since I broke my foot came to me so I could keep writing about the stones even while I couldn’t walk in the big arroyo.

  CHAPTER 33

  After the rainy August dawn comes a blue sunrise—sunlight through blue violet storm clouds from horizon to horizon. Clouds that are as thick as dog fleece or goose down. They are heavy with mists, fogs and gentle rains.

  I’m on the front porch with my waterproof notebook paper a
nd waterproof pencil to watch the gentle mist, rain and fog enclose the high mountain peaks to the west.

  I’ve got all the buckets out and even a deep ceramic bowl under the front porch eaves where the gutter failed along with nearly everything else that inept handyman once did here. The raindrops ring against the metal buckets and thud on the plastic.

  I try to imagine the prayers the runners said along the way in March 2006 as they ran from Hotevila to the carved stone image of Tlaloc in Mexico City.

  The rain in the empty metal bucket makes a strange sound, like that of a small human voice vocalizing Ahhahah Ah! Not in pain or distress but maybe in delight and celebration.

  I keep watch on the twelve pails, buckets and two big plastic garbage cans I fill with rainwater. My potted plants and trees need the rainwater to wash away the salts and minerals left by the well water. As a child I watched Grandma A’mooh, Aunt Alice and so many others at Laguna who caught and stored rainwater in fifty-five-gallon barrels to drink and to wash their hair with.

  The ancient ones are nearby. Sometimes late at night in the wind you can hear them sing or on a long hot summer afternoon you can hear them laughing and talking in the shade. Maybe the old ones that used the concave metates under the big palo verde trees on the hills a thousand years ago, maybe they brought the turquoise up from the big arroyo just as I have.

  Six weeks away from the big arroyo and the search for turquoise stones. My eye is on the lookout. This afternoon towering mountains of cumulus clouds, remnants of a Caribbean hurricane, appeared on the horizon.