High Tide in Tucson (24 page)

Buster the crab remains well, at this writing. His dominant left claw, which is much larger and purpler than his right and which he slams like a door behind him when he withdraws into his shell, is showing some wear. It's rumpled and split around the edges like an old laminated countertop. In fact, even though he has no greater adversary in his life than his own mood swings, he has recently managed to lose one of his antennae and is looking pretty dinged up. We think he may be preparing to molt. Crabs have this option: they can split themselves open from time to time and start life over with a fresh skin, complete with new appendages and even—if need be—whole regenerated eyes. The molting process itself is as astonishing as its results: the hermit preparing to shed its brittle skin will creep out of whatever seashell it's wearing at the moment, bury itself in damp sand, and inhale water (insofar as an
animal with gills “inhales”) until it has built up enough hydrostatic pressure to split its old casing and shuck it off. This is self-renewal at its fiercest and most tempting. It's the secret belief most of us carry forward from childhood, that we might have in us somewhere the capacity, like Rumpelstiltskin, to rupture and transmogrify out of a sheer tantrum of desire.

The crab's new skin is soft for a time, until it has the chance to dry and harden up like varnish. This is the brief period of its life when an edible marine crab becomes the potential delicacy known as soft-shelled crab. When the crab molts, it emerges larger; since its skin has no elasticity, this is the only way it can grow. If a newly molted hermit crab finds it can't fit back into the shell it parked nearby prior to molting, it may panic. My guidebook to hermit-crab care, written by Neal Pronek, advises that it's good to leave an assortment of shells of various sizes lying around just in case. Pronek waxes mostly pragmatic in his book, explaining for example that hermit crabs “will eat anything they find, from hard dog biscuits to a dead fish…where certain items are concerned, the deader the better,” and also warning, “Don't expect an about-to-molt crab that loses a leg on Tuesday to pop up with a new one after a molt on Wednesday.” But on the topic of hermit crabs stranded without shells, Pronek can hardly contain his alarm: “They'll start having nervous breakdowns….They want those shells, and they'll do everything in their power to make sure that they don't get cut off from them. Pinch, scratch, smash, kill—whatever.” Not something to mess around with. Since Buster started showing molting inclinations, we've sorted through our shell collections from every vacation in recent history (we knew we were saving these things for some good reason) and pulled out the cream of the crop. We believe we have got the situation in hand.

But one can't be sure. In the chapter called “Diseases and Ailments,” Mr. Pronek offers darkly: “All of their ills boil down to the mysterious croak; the crab is outwardly well one day, dead the next.” And so, while I can say that Buster remains well at this writing, around here we take nothing for granted.

 

After two days of gentle winter rains, the small pond behind my house is lapping at its banks, content as a well-fed kitten. This pond is a relative miracle. Several years ago I talked a man I knew who was handy with a bulldozer into damming up the narrow wash behind my house. This was not a creek by any stretch of imagination—even so thirsty an imagination as mine. It was only a little strait where, two or three times a year when the rain kept up for more than a day, water would run past in a hurry on its way to flood the road and drown out the odd passing Buick. All the rest of the time this little valley lay empty, a toasted rock patch pierced with cactus.

I cleared out the brush and, with what my bulldozer friend viewed as absurd optimism, directed the proceedings. After making a little hollow, we waterproofed the bottom and lined the sides with rocks, and then I could only stand by to see what would happen. When the rains came my pond filled. Its level rises and falls some, but for years now it has remained steadfastly
pond
, a small blue eye in the blistered face of desert.

That part was only hydrology and luck, no miracle. But this part is: within hours of its creation, my pond teemed with life. Backswimmers, whirligig beetles, and boatmen darted down through the watery strata. Water striders dimpled the surface. Tadpoles and water beetles rootled the furry bottom. Dragonflies hovered and delicately dipped their tails, laying eggs. Eggs
hatched into creeping armadas of larvae. I can't imagine where all these creatures came from. There is no other permanent water for many miles around. How did they know? What jungle drums told them to come here? Surely there are not, as a matter of course, aquatic creatures dragging themselves by their elbows across the barren desert
just in case?

I'm tempted to believe in spontaneous generation. Rushes have sprung up around the edges of my pond, coyotes and javelinas come down to drink and unabashedly wallow, nighthawks and little brown bats swoop down at night to snap insects out of the air. Mourning doves, smooth as cool gray stones, coo at their own reflections. Families of Gambel's quail come each and every spring morning, all lined up puffed and bustling with their seventeen children, Papa Quail in proud lead with his ridiculous black topknot feather boinging out ahead of him. Water lilies open their flowers at sunup and fold them, prim as praying hands, at dusk. A sleek male Cooper's hawk and a female great horned owl roost in the trees with their constant predators' eyes on dim-witted quail and vain dove, silently taking turns with the night and day shifts.

For several years that Cooper's hawk was the steadiest male presence in my life. I've stood alone in his shadow through many changes of season. I've been shattered and reassembled a few times over, and there have been long days when I felt my heart was simply somewhere else—possibly on ice, in one of those igloo coolers that show up in the news as they are carried importantly onto helicopters. “So what?” life asked, and went on whirling recklessly around me. Always, every minute, something is eating or being eaten, laying eggs, burrowing in mud, blooming, splitting its seams, dividing itself in two. What a messy marvel, fecundity.

That is how I became goddess of a small universe of my own
creation—more or less by accident. My subjects owe me their very lives. Blithely they ignore me. I stand on the banks, wide-eyed, receiving gifts in every season. In May the palo verde trees lean into their reflections, so heavy with blossoms the desert looks thick and deep with golden hoarfrost. In November the purple water lilies are struck numb with the first frost, continuing to try to open their final flowers in slow motion for the rest of the winter. Once, in August, I saw a tussle in the reeds that turned out to be two bull snakes making a meal of the same frog. Their dinner screeched piteously while the snakes' heads inched slowly closer together, each of them engulfing a drumstick, until there they were at last, nose to scaly nose. I watched with my knuckles in my mouth, anxious to see whether they would rip the frog in two like a pair of pants. As it turned out, they were nowhere near this civilized. They lunged and thrashed, their long bodies scrawling whole cursive alphabets into the rushes, until one of the snakes suddenly let go and curved away.

Last May, I saw a dragonfly as long as my hand—longer than an average-sized songbird. She circled and circled, flexing her body, trying to decide if my little lake was worthy of her precious eggs. She was almost absurdly colorful, sporting a bright green thorax and blue abdomen. Eventually she lit on the tip of the horsetail plant that sends long slender spikes up out of the water. She was joined on the tips of five adjacent stalks by five other dragonflies, all different: an orange-bodied one with orange wings, a yellow one, a blue-green one, one with a red head and purple tail, and a miniature one in zippy metallic blue. A dragonfly bouquet. Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation. The choice is draw the blinds and shut it all out, or believe.

What to believe in, exactly, may never turn out to be half as important as the daring act of belief. A willingness to participate in sunlight, and the color red. An agreement to enter into a conspiracy with life, on behalf of both frog and snake, the predator and the prey, in order to come away changed.

 

The Cooper's hawk has been replaced as my significant other. A few weeks ago I was married, in the sight of pine-browed mountains, a forget-me-not sky, and nearly all the people I love most. This is not the end of the story; I know that much. With senseless mad joy, I'm undertaking what Samuel Johnson called the triumph of hope over experience—the second marriage.

Hope is an unbearably precious thing, worth its weight in feathers. If that's too much to think about, best to tuck it in a pocket anyway, and make it a habit. I was stomping through life in my seven-league boots, entirely unaware of how my life was about to snag on a doorframe, sending me staggering backward, on the day I met my future mate. But the
gris-gris
charm for luck in love, given me by a fetisher's apprentice in West Africa, was in its customary forgotten place, the watch pocket of my jeans. Now I keep it in a small clay jar among the potted plants in my bedroom window. Let the vandals carry off all but this—my hope.

On the day we met, my mate and I, he invited me to take a walk in the wooded hills of his farm in southwestern Virginia. I told him I loved the woods, and he took my word for that, and headed lickety-split up the mountainside. I ran after, tearing through blackberry briars with the options of getting hopelessly lost or keeping up.

He did remember, after all, that I was behind him. When he
reached the top of the mountain he waited, and we sat down together on a rock, listening to the stillness in the leaves. A song rang out through the branches, and because Steven is an ornithologist, he was able to tell me it was a rose-breasted grosbeak.

It sang again. He listened carefully, and said, “No, that's a scarlet tanager.”

Either way, I was impressed by his ear for song. I asked him if he was sure. He said, “Yes, absolutely, that's a scarlet tanager.”

And right then, exactly as he spoke, it came and landed on a branch directly in front of us, and it wasn't a scarlet tanager, it was a rose-breasted grosbeak.

Steven looked downcast; I shrugged and said, oh, what did it matter anyway. I think we both felt a little dismayed that this bird had come out of the woods to prove him wrong.

And then, directly in front of us, in a blaze of vermilion and perfect vindication, another bird landed—the one that had been singing, after all—and it was a scarlet tanager.

I had no idea this visitation of birds contained our future. Everything: risk, belief, forgiveness, being wrong, being right, finding how precariously similar those things are. And mainly, the whole possibility of bright red, singing marvels. What luck, I remember thinking. Here is a man who listens carefully to every voice.

He also had the patience to feed a wild fox who had whelped her pups in the pokeberry thicket behind the barn. Late that evening I sat on the stone porch steps of his old farmhouse and watched these two, man and fox, in their nightly ritual. He tossed out small scraps of meat, one after another; she approached, showing none of her hand but a pair of fierce green orbs in the dark—and accepted.

Eventually he would show the same patience in seeing me through my own wild fears and doubts, all the foul things my brain can turn over in a restless spell when it scrabbles around and around its cage at night. And so I have molted now, crawled out of my old empty banged-up skin with a fresh new life, and look here, what is this? I have regenerated a marriage, precious as a new eye.

I'm still feeling fairly soft-shelled. I'm too old to look at things the way I used to; too old, in fact, to look at anything closer than my own elbow without twinges of presbyopia (or, as one of my relatives calls it, “that Presbyterian thing”); I expect my next pair of glasses will need the extra window. So if I'm not quite the Bifocal Bride, I'm on the brink. I have a midlife vision of all things, including love and permanence. My dear mate and I will get to watch each other creak into old age and fall into uneasy truces with our own limbs—that's the
best
case, presuming we cleave together as we've hoped and promised.
It's a wonder anyone does this at all
, I think from time to time, as I'm visited by the specter of all I could lose.

When I was pregnant I felt like this too. People will claim that having children is a ticket to immortality, but in fact it merely doubles your stakes in mortality. You labor and you love and there you are, suddenly, with twice as many eyes in your house that could be put out, hearts that could be broken, new lives dearer than your own that could be taken from you. And still we do it, have children, right and left. We love and we lose, get hurled across the universe, put on a new shell, listen to the seasons.

Ah, the mysterious croak. Here today, gone tomorrow. It's the best reason I can think of to throw open the blinds and risk belief. Right now, this minute, time to move out into the grief and glory. High tide.