CHAPTER 3
In the rain mists that shimmer across the shoulders of the mountain in the west wind I can make out the tall graceful forms of the shi-wah nah, the cloud beings. I was amazed the first time I saw them crossing the Tucson Mountains.
Once when the rain clouds were hurrying east over the Tucson Mountains, I watched them from my front yard. They were dark with moisture and I wished they’d give us rain, but I could tell by their speed that we’d get no rain — maybe the taller mountains across the valley would get rain. Still the clouds were very lovely — I could smell their sweet moisture and felt the coolness as I watched them move past. Behind the main group of clouds, came others and I noticed one small cloud trailing them — its belly was fat and dark blue but its edges were sunlit silver—“Ah what a beauty you are,” I said out loud, “just look at you!”
Then the most amazing thing happened: the small cloud left the path the other clouds followed and it came right over and rained down gently on us before resuming its journey behind the others.
Once I told this story at a Hopi school at lunchtime. Afterwards one of the teachers told me this: a year or so after her seven year old son died, she was outside her house when a small rain cloud stopped above her and rained a few drops before moving on. It was her son. Beloved family members and the ancestors show their love for us when they return as clouds that bring precious precipitation.
On book tour in Albany I met a young woman who’d grown up on a nearby farm. We were talking about horses as she drove me from the airport. Recently her beloved horse had died. The day after he was buried, she went down to the pasture in the evening to bring in the other horses and when she called them, off in the woods she heard the distinctive whinny of her beloved horse.
At the moment my dear old Arabian horse died, his stable mate suddenly galloped around the corral whinnying frantically and looking intently toward the south, as if he was trying to follow although he could plainly see his stable mate lying still on the ground.
After death, it may take some days for the spirit to bid farewell to this world and to the loved ones they want to reassure; so they visit us as birds or other wild creatures to let us know they are in a good place not far away.
The old folks used to keep a dish on the table and passed it around so everyone might put a pinch of food from their plates into the dish. That was to feed all their beloved family members who had passed to the other world. At the end of the meal, the contents of the dish were burned. Once when I was a small child I visited the neighbor as she cooked fried bread outdoors, and I remember how surprised I was when she flipped the first piece of fried bread from the hot oil into the hot coals and ashes. But then I realized that she’d done it to feed the spirits.
Within days of his death, my friend James Wright, the poet, made communication with me through the visit one evening of a small burrowing owl that refused to be frightened or startled by me. James especially loved owls, and he’d written about the elf owls in a poem about the Sonoran Desert. He and his wife, Annie, were scheduled to come to Tucson that April for James to read at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, but of course that was never to be.
Four or five days after my old friend Sheila died in 2004 a small grackle appeared right before dawn while all the other birds were still quiet. The species doesn’t usually venture into the desert and I’d not seen one up here before. The bird made raucous teasing squawks as it did a wild dance of joy on the top of the electric pole next to my house. I recognized right away it was old Sheila joyously on her way. I never again saw a short-tail grackle up here.
One day around noon in early 2007, an unusually large cactus wren came to the big prickly pear cactus next to my living room window and perched on a cactus pad where wrens and other birds don’t usually land. The wren looked through the window at me and tilted its head back and forth until I paid attention to it. It continued to hop back and forth on the prickly pear quite gaily as it saw me watch it. I turned to Bill and I said, “See that cactus wren? That’s strange behavior. I’ve never seen a bird look through the window before. Someone I know died.” Later that day my father called with the news my dear cousin Lana had died.
So it seems that after the passing of a friend or loved one, a few days or a week after they go, they manifest their loving energy: the wind chimes tinkle in the twilight though there is no breeze; the chimney of the oil lantern rattles by itself; the electric fan blades make an unusual sound — the realm of the spirit beings and the ancestors contact us from time to time.
Around the Arctic Circle, the Inuit people believe family and ancestral spirits get reborn again in a few generations. Howard Rock who was Inuit published the first Eskimo newspaper, the Tundra Times. He wrote a beautiful memoir of his childhood, and he published excerpts from it in the newspaper.
He recalled the time when he was a small child and his parents took him ice fishing, and he caught more fish than any of the adults. Howard was only five years old, so everyone noticed right away this was unusual, and then someone addressed Howard as “Grandmother,” because his late grandmother always used to catch more fish than everyone else when they went ice fishing. That was how they recognized that her spirit had been reborn into the little boy named Howard.
A few times I’ve had dreams in which I visited beloved family members. Once I visited my great grandfather Robert G. Marmon, who died many years before I was born. My father loved him a great deal and talked about him while I was growing up and of course, Grandma A’mooh told me about him so I felt we knew each other somehow.
Twice in my dreams I visited with Grandma A’mooh. Both times she hugged me close to her as she did when I was a little girl; when I awoke her familiar scent was still with me. But after only a few moments that memory of her scent when she held me faded into my dream consciousness.
CHAPTER 4
Human beings have lived along the Rio San José in north central New Mexico continuously for the past eighteen thousand years. Not far from Laguna, to the southeast, near State Road 6, the river descends into a gorge, and it was here in shallow caves and cliff overhangs that archeologists found hearths used thousands of years ago by the indigenous hunters who chipped elegant leaf-shaped spear and arrow points to hunt the bison and elk that grazed on the plain. Archeologists called the culture San José man, a counterpart of Folsom man, whose spear points were found in eastern New Mexico, near the town of Folsom.
When I think of the Pueblo people, I think of sandstone — sandstone rainwater cisterns, and sandstone cliff houses; sandstone was the preferred building material at Chaco Canyon and at Mesa Verde, and in the pueblos when I was growing up. Sandstone is a sedimentary rock formed chiefly by quartz particles in a cement of calcite. The calcite cement is often white but some is also yellow, red or brown depending on the iron content in the calcite. Sandstone formations ring the fossil remnants of the great inland seas of the Jurassic Age, which left behind Lake Bonneville and its survivor, the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Southern Utah, western Colorado, northern Arizona and New Mexico are crossed by the same formations of yellow, orange and red sandstone the geologists call by such exotic names as Kaibab, Chinle, Entrada, Carmel, Navajo and Wingate.
The Pueblo people preferred to live along rivers like the Rio San José, the Rio Puerco, and of course, the Rio Grande. If they did not settle by a river, they sought mesas or hilltops with expanses of light yellow or ivory sandstone, the wind-deposited cross bedded dunes laid down eons ago in the Mesozoic, compressed and petrified by overlying sediments that later eroded away. The sandstone was fine-grained and hard enough to resist crumbling under the mason’s basalt hammer, but soft enough to carve hand and footholds on the faces of cliffs. The people sought the sandstone formations because pools of rainwater collected in natural basins and cisterns in the petrified Jurassic dunes. The same formations contained long vertical seams that formed fissures in the sandstone where fossil water, artesian springs cold as ice, seeped and dripped down to form shallow pools. So it is not remarkable that the Pueblo people settled on or near the sandstone formations.