The Turquoise Ledge (20 page)

I was fourteen years old the morning Grandpa had the heart attack. We were all together that morning: my younger sisters, my parents, and Grandma Lillie. I was the only one of them who knew mouth to mouth resuscitation; in the early 1960s, Laguna Pueblo had no ambulance or emergency room. The U.S. Indian Health Service doctor lived a half hour away. I did my best, but Grandpa's jaws were clenched shut and I could not open them; I think he was already gone.

After the doctor got there, he pounded on Grandpa's chest so hard I heard ribs break. Grandpa was only sixty-nine, and had never been sick or had any symptoms or bad habits other than he smoked two packs of Camels a day. He'd never been inside a hospital in his life, so it was just as well he left the way he did that morning. His death ended the happiness of my childhood; the family slowly unraveled after that.

T
he portraits of the Star Beings gave way to what I call star maps, but maybe these are just group portraits of the Star Beings. There are billions of galaxies so I figure somewhere in the Universe there is a galaxy that matches the star map I've just painted.

The portrait of Lord Chapulin turned out very well. Could he be an associate of the Star Beings?

 

The first two pieces of turquoise stone I found on my next walk were scarcely streaked with turquoise but that meant my eye for turquoise hadn't lost its accuracy during my lay-off. The third piece I found is the size of a sparrow egg, though not so egg shaped as seed shaped.

Before the last storm I worried the buds on the jojoba might freeze but it was a warm rain with no frost. Now I see purple ajo flowers on tall slender stems across the hillsides; on the ground tiny red and white flowers form lacy mats that are fringed with tiny green leaves.

In the big arroyo I found a small piece of light gray feldspar the size of a quarter with a turquoise spot in the shape of a soaring condor.

The breeze is cool despite the sunshine of this lovely day in February. Purple blue lily-shaped flowers of the ajo, the wild garlic, are the first to push up through the soil. The hungry creatures depend on tasty little bulbs. The yellow gold desert poppy flowers are the size of hen's eggs this year but they aren't as numerous as in 1978, my first year in Tucson.

Once in a hundred years you might see the hills solid blue with desert lupines, solid gold yellow with desert poppies as they were in 1978. I had moved to Tucson only a few months before, so I had no prior experience with which to compare the lush abundance of blossoms of all kinds. Over the years I realized how singular the wild-flower bloom in 1978 was.

On the long steep hill below the Thunderbird Mine something darted off the trail to my left. A lizard. But when I reached him I saw it was a special lizard, a horned lizard the size of a half dollar, no larger, but it was the most amazing color I've ever seen for a horned lizard—an intense iridescent red orange and magenta red orange—the same red orange as the streak of iron in the limestone and clay on the hillside where the trail passes. When I moved closer to get a better look it became frightened and hurried under a gray leaf burr sage. I immediately regretted the move; next time I'll remain motionless.

I spent two days assembling the new cage for Sandino, the one-legged macaw. I covered the wooden perches with soft old towels to protect his remaining foot before I moved him into the cage. He's got a red spot on his heel. The vet warned me about sores on the remaining foot and toes. I hope it's just the new cage and new perches and not something I failed to notice sooner.

Later I walked and in the big arroyo I found a rock streaked with turquoise where I've walked many times before; only today the light made the turquoise rock visible. It's a slender outcrop of reddish brown limestone about four inches long and the strands of green blue and blue are a half inch wide. I stacked up three flat rocks on the side of the arroyo to mark the place. Was this part of a turquoise ledge?

On my walk in the big arroyo the next day I found three turquoise stones—a green blue stone, triangular and the size of a parrot egg, and two others more blue turquoise, one on a rust orange stone the size of a sunflower seed that is speckled with turquoise, and the other a tiny sliver of pure blue turquoise no larger than a grain of rice.

Here are the turquoise ledges I've located so far:

Right at the front gate to my house there is a gray basalt rock with a trace of lime or calcium carbonate with four tiny scattered deposits of turquoise. My earlier suspicions of a ledge here when I found stones in the back yard in July and August were confirmed. A week or two ago, below the house, on the steep west slope I found small pieces of bright blue calcium carbonate cabochons on a wafer thin ledge of calcite.

In the old round corral last December I found a ledge with a bit of turquoise made visible after years of rain eroded the ground broken by horses in steel shoes. So I've learned that I'm surrounded by turquoise ledges. The water in the big arroyo means the ledges there may be larger.

 

The really huge fat red diamondback appeared this morning, the last day of February. “Dove Eater” I call it. The snake was on the move, and later, from the Weather Channel I learned a late winter storm was moving in from the north.

The desert is green and brushy from all the rain this year. The curved beak thrashers and the cactus wrens are whistling deliriously with joy; so many seeds will follow these blossoms that bud overnight in the gentle warm rain.

It rained before dawn so this morning the telephone doesn't work because the wire to the house is old and gets wet. The satellite Internet is out because of the thick clouds between the relay tower on the mountain ridge and the satellite. When it rains one should hang out wool rugs and wool clothing for a wash. I brought out both of my Guatemalan woven palm leaf sombreros which require rainwater twice a summer at least or the crowns of the hats will crumble.

I was thinking about my birthday that comes in three days, on March 5. I looked at a star map to see what stars and constellations were overhead when I was born: the planet Venus was spectacularly high in the west horizon. Also present:

Sirius, the Dog Star forty times brighter than the Sun, Hydra the Snake constellation with Alphard the solitary star halfway up the snake's neck; blue Regulus brighter and hotter than the Sun; and Pollux and Castor, bright eyes of a great serpent.

Sirius is one of the Star Beings who peeps in the west windows on long winter nights after big Venus is finished spying.

 

The wild flowers are more numerous than they've been in years. The gold yellow desert poppies are pools of color in the emerald and jade green of the desert. The white six-pointed Mojave desert stars blossom first on the purple blue outcropping of rocks and form great constellations on the dark stone. Desert chicory send up big white ruffled flowers amid the jojoba leaves that shade them. Yellow fiddle necks, taller larger purple frills, and the twin blue violet lily-like flowers of the ajo are also in bloom.

Lupines lupines lupines purple red blue—even taller than the orange poppies. Tiny yellow flowers of the goldenrod fill the air with the scent of honey. White desert zinnias bloom early and so does the rattlesnake weed with its small blankets of tiny calico red and white flowers.

Everywhere I see the tall stalks of white penstemons that cover the rocky hillsides—the pink and purple penstemons only bloom in sandy moist arroyos.

I found a small piece of white glass, polished smooth by years of tumbling down the arroyo over the sharp edges of rocks and sand until it almost looks like quartz crystal. I found a piece of reddish gray basalt with white calcite crystals in its center like an eye. I spied a bright bit of turquoise in the center of a bean-size reddish pebble.

Today, March 5, 2008 I am sixty years old. My mother and I shared this birthday and used to celebrate our birthdays together whenever we could. So I think about her today.

 

On my walk this morning I found no turquoise in the big arroyo but did find a piece of turquoise rock at the foot of my driveway, near the small outcrop of turquoise in the round corral.

On my walk this morning I kept thinking about the digital camera and taking pictures of the backlit wild flowers and saguaros as I walked. That spoils the walk. And thinking about what things on my walk I will write about later spoils the walk. No camera, no notebook on the walk. What I can't remember without a notebook, and what I can't describe without a photo, may come back to me sometime when I'm writing or dreaming.

After I'd been finding the turquoise stones for a while it occurred to me that I should have kept a record of where I found them, bagging each stone and labeling it with the location and date, so if there were a clustering of finds I could focus my search there.

Instead I bring them home and put them on my writing desk, until I write about the walk where I picked them up. I don't keep them in boxes because I like to see the turquoise rocks together, in the air and light. I can identify many of the pieces when I handle them because I wrote about them.

The walks are my cardiovascular workout so I don't break the pace of them to slow or linger over an area to try to find special stones. They have to catch my eye despite the pace; I try not to break stride when I pick up the pieces of turquoise. I find that I go into a different state of consciousness when I walk—almost like a trance in which I'm not fully aware of where exactly in the big arroyo I found them.

I read about the trance-walking the Buddhist monks in Tibet used to perform; a tall dark haired white man used to run the Tucson Mountain trails in a trance. I saw him pass by for a couple of years; the local weekly paper did an article about him and then he was gone. Maybe he was training for running in Nepal and needed to live at a higher altitude, say Santa Fe or Albuquerque.

You watch strangers for years and you begin to expect to see them but then they disappear and you wonder what happened. In communities like Laguna-Acoma and the land grant villages, the news always got around and you heard what happened to people you'd seen come and go but didn't really know. Out here in the wilds of the wider world, people disappear and you never hear of them again.

Old René was a Tohono O'Odom wood seller who came every year, sometimes more often, to sell me loads of mesquite firewood. He was from the village of Santa Ana west of Sonoita, Sonora but it was my impression that he hauled the mesquite from somewhere south of Sasabe. He and I both were happy when he became my exclusive wood seller. He always brought big loads of wood with good-sized pieces, not just small branches and twigs, the way some wood sellers did. Sometimes in the summer he'd appear without warning in my driveway with firewood because he needed cash for some family emergency. Then like now, the people didn't have a lot of cash; the gambling business of the tribe hasn't really changed that.

One time he arrived at the bottom of the hill unexpectedly while I was here alone. Right as he honked his truck horn, I was trying to glue a small cherry wood bench I managed to put together from a kit. I had no way to prop up the glued wood and I couldn't let go until the glue set a bit or it would be ruined. By the time I put down the glued wood and went down the hill, René had already left.

The next time he telephoned, and I bought a two cord load of mesquite. As he unloaded the wood, I noticed a change—he was still a big man but this time he was short of breath and had to stop each time after he threw a few pieces of wood out of the back of the pick-up. I could see his health wasn't good. He offered to stack the wood for me but I told him I wanted to stack it for the exercise. I always paid him what he asked and that day I didn't have the right change and neither did he so I told him to keep the $10. I never saw him again.

S
andino seemed to recover from the surgery. I watched him and could not decide if he was energetic or strong enough to play with the toys I had hung inside his cage with him. Sandino had always lived with a mate in a large outdoor aviary, so I had no way of knowing what was normal behavior for him indoors. But he ate well, and I kept my thoughts positive.

I watched his remaining foot closely; if anything happened to the foot a serious parrot disease called bumblefoot might set in as a result. I worried about a small red mark on his foot I noticed in February. I decided I wanted the new vet to take a look.

I called a parrot veterinarian, Dr. Samuels, that my friend Nate recommended. By great good fortune he had a cancellation for the following Monday at eleven a.m. Before he examined Sandino, I explained the owl attacks to Dr. Samuels. When he saw how traumatized and sad the attacks had left me, he was kind enough to respond with this story:

When he first moved to Arizona, he lived near Prescott and raised Amazon parrots in outdoor aviaries. Parrots began to disappear while he was away at work. He lost a number of birds and thought it must be the neighborhood children who were opening the cage doors. One afternoon he returned home early and he caught two red-tail hawks attacking a parrot, trying to pull it out of the cage. It had been the hawks, not neighborhood children, that took his parrots.

The red mark on the macaw's remaining foot was a callus and meant nothing. But Dr. Samuels weighed Sandino and found the macaw was terribly wasted despite his good appetite and high spirits. He found signs of an infection inside the site of the leg amputation. The vet said the infection inside the leg wound was “devouring” all the nourishment from any food Sandino ate.

I was sick with regret. I delayed the return vet visit so I could focus on the manuscript. Now it sounded and felt to me that my beloved Sandino, dear friend for eighteen years, might die because of my inattention.

Dr. Samuels said he felt cautiously optimistic he could save Sandino. Sandino was in high spirits; I could tell he wanted to live. I told the vet I had a good feeling about the bird's survival, to go ahead with the surgery.

The vet called me at home when the surgery was completed. Sandino got through the operation just fine although it was in the nick of time because the infection had nearly spread to the bone. He prescribed a different antibiotic than the first vet, and I became an expert at administering the medicine to make certain the macaw took all of it.

 

Yesterday I walked the trail for the first time in weeks since the loss of the macaws and my periodontal surgery. I was thinking about how many pieces of turquoise I had gathered, so many that they cover even the surfaces of my writing tablet and work areas, but when my eyes caught a glimpse of turquoise I had to pick up the rock. It is intensely turquoise blue green and the size of my thumb, in the shape of a scrotum.

 

Now with the rain and cooler nights, the seeds of more wild flowers are bound to swell with moisture and sprout. Spring out. The wild flowers are dancers honoring the Sun and the Earth. The white chicory wore a large white hat that honored the white light of the Sun; others were slender green dancers with purple feathery hats. The frilly full dresses of the arroyo lupines required no hats or headdresses. The desert sennas wore flowery masks of white and yellow petals.

 

Today one of the turquoise rocks leapt from the top of the fireproof file cabinet to the floor. When I picked it up I saw it was the most lifelike of any. When viewed from left to right it looked like the head and neck of a great rattlesnake; when viewed from right to left, it was the head and neck of a great ancient dragon of goodness and great good fortune revered by the old Chinese. I found this piece of turquoise rock at the foot of the driveway, near the turquoise outcropping of the old corral.

 

Oh here comes the light gray foggy rain shimmering across the hilltops in the breeze.

 

Today I went down the steep slope west of the house. I wanted to check out the turquoise formation I found at the base of the west slope and while I was looking for it, two bright blue soft stone turquoise pieces caught my eye. About twelve feet farther down the slope I relocated the ledge of calcite that is making chrysocolla right now.

The two cabochons I thought were turquoise because they are green blue and so hard turn out to be “chrysocolla-impregnated chalcedony” according to the Smithsonian book
Rock and Gem
. Chalcedony is quartz that was compressed while it was cooling so it's harder than turquoise. Also there are iron pyrites in the two cabochons so they give the appearance of coming from the same source.

 

It's late March now. Last week I found no turquoise in the big arroyo. All the lovely wild flowers with their incandescent greens caught my eyes, and they're all I could see. I got home and right at my front gate, where the path I walk every day is eroded, I glanced down and there was a bit of turquoise rock in a very hard white calcite chip about an inch long and a quarter of an inch wide.

Where the trail crosses the small arroyo with the black rock, I found a large piece of old glass that nearly filled the palm of my hand. Its edges were completely sandblasted and smoothed. In the beginning, the piece of glass must have been the size and thickness of the bottom of a mason jar. The jar came from one of the old ranch dumps from the early 1900s. The shard of glass traveled with the rainwater down the hillside from the ranch house. Once in the small arroyo the piece of glass was tumbled smooth in the arroyo sand and heated by the sun for eighty years and was transformed from transparent glass to a pale aquamarine opalescent glass that had the appearance of a natural mineral, no longer “man-made.”

 

On the trail before the Thunderbird Mine, I stopped to blow my nose and up jumped an astonished mule deer doe that stared at me wide-eyed before she vanished into the flowering palo verde forest dense with yellow blossoms.

I didn't find any turquoise rocks because the early light was diffuse. I picked up shards of broken bottle glass. Then in the big arroyo I heard rocks crashing and I stopped and turned and there she was again, the same doe, staring at me, and I at her. We both had made half a circle and met up again.

I turned and continued on to show her I meant no harm.

Backlit by the rising sun, even the dry grass stalks and empty seedpods glitter; the spines of the saguaro and cholla are incandescent in the early light. The cool air is perfumed with the blossoms of palo verde and catsclaw along the arroyo. The thick new growth and the blossoms on the palo verde obscure my view of that oval orange rock on the hillside.

Awhile later in the big arroyo, out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of turquoise; in an imprint left by a horse hoof I found a tiny bit of turquoise on a square gray limestone. Then up ahead there was a bright spot shining on the ground; I picked up a fragment of crystal quartz that blazed with the light of the sun.