Winter came and so did the snow; Tlaloc sent snowstorm after snowstorm — more than an inch of snow fell here in the Tucson Mountains. People drove up from the city to show their children the snow and I reached for my video camera.
It snowed in Phoenix for the first time in forty years. There was more snowfall than Albuquerque had seen in more than forty years. Denver got buried too. The airports were shut down and the interstate highways out of Albuquerque and Denver were closed.
CHAPTER 27
Although it is late September, the days are still very warm. The other day my search for evidence of a turquoise ledge took me up the arroyo to the point where it narrows dramatically to down-cut through solid basalt and limestone. Nearby there is a spring that bubbles to the surface for a week or two after the rains come; for years a cottonwood tree lived by the spring although the location is outside the natural range for cottonwoods. The tree lived near the spring for years, but died during the early years of the drought.
Now a mesquite tree grows in its place. The tree is large and robust but it grows horizontally just above the ground across the arroyo from side to side. I had to crawl over the mesquite’s trunk to get past it.
I could see that the mesquite tree had grown vertically for many years. But then a heavy rainstorm must have come with runoff water that roared through the narrow rock gorge with such great force that the tree was flattened to the ground but not uprooted. Now it grows horizontally, safe from floods.
I continued up the arroyo. On a bar of sand and gravel I found two rocks with a few streaks of turquoise. The rocks didn’t really fit in my pockets and felt uncomfortable there but I carried them anyway.
After the arroyo passed through a ledge of the basalt, it forked. I took the right fork, which was much narrower and was overgrown with catsclaw bushes and mesquite branches with thorns that tore at my clothes. The erosion wasn’t as deep and there wasn’t nearly as much rock debris and gravel here. It didn’t look promising for turquoise so I decided to turn back. Next time I would take the left fork of the arroyo; it was wider and I knew it passed the site of an old mine shaft where water dripped from the ceiling and flowed out the shaft entrance — just the environment needed to make turquoise.
Sometimes early in the morning when I walk the trail the air is cool and faintly scented with rain. Just before the sun rises over the mountains, incandescence floods over the bright greens of the mesquite leaves and the jade greens of the tall saguaros. A breeze stirs and there is a silence as it might have been five hundred or a thousand years ago. No sound anywhere in the distance from a train, jet, car or even a dog. Here the desert is as it always was.
Up ahead a small arroyo intersects the trail. The branches of catsclaw and mesquite that overhang the arroyo make a delicate shade with shadows in diamond patterns. Suddenly I realized there was a giant rattlesnake there in the shade and shadows, stretched out twelve feet long, its body as big around as a bread loaf. I stopped in my tracks; my heart pounded. I looked again to make sure I’d not mistaken a long mesquite root in the sand for the huge snake.
Alert and motionless, the snake watched me. The eyes were pale yellow and its head was bigger than my two fists put together and at least five feet above the ground; the black forked tongue flicked out level with my chin. The rattles on the end of its tail were the diameter of a man’s thumb.
I saw the black forked tongue move more slowly, and felt the sun’s light on the right side of my face. The shadows in the small arroyo shifted and the shade receded, but I could still see the snake’s head slightly turned now as if to look back.
I took a few steps closer up a short incline and I lost sight of the snake for only an instant. But when I looked again at the intersection of the trail with the small arroyo, bright sunlight filled the space. The shade and its shadows were gone and the giant rattlesnake with them.
I didn’t notice the great ant palaces in the desert until I began my walks. The first ant palace is under a square of basalt the size of a book in the middle of the trail up the hill. The trail and the slope of the hill divert the runoff after storms from the ant palace entryway. The overhang of the square basalt protects the palace entrance from foot traffic. Why build the ant palace in the middle of the trail? Because the passers-by — human and otherwise — drop bits of crumbs or seeds that enrich the ants’ storehouse.
The second ant palace I saw was a short distance past the Gila Monster Mine and the flat grassy place where the deer and javelina dance at night after rain. This ant palace is on the low ridge that parallels the trail; I noticed it because there is a perfect circle of small stones around its entrance. The rocks look as if they landed there like meteorite fragments. I thought of the Star Beings.
Today I left on my walk much inspired by the two little notes I wrote about the ants and their mountain palaces yesterday. But as I walked I realized that I didn’t remember exactly where the book-size basalt was, except that it was on a slight ridge of rock higher than the trail. I had the camera with me the day I noticed the ant palaces but something stopped me from taking their photographs as I passed them. The rhythm of my walk determined part of it — I didn’t want to slow down. Also it was because photography or video distracts me so I prefer to remember being in the actual presence of the rocks rather than recording them electronically.
Today I discovered a wonderful ant palace in the dark basalt bedrock below the blue gray limestone; it was outlined in small stones in a semicircle. Did the ants remove the stones from their nest? Or did the ants move the rocks there to divert runoff from the palace entrance?
I thought I was more certain of the location of the ant hill with the circle of stones. I must have missed it because I was looking at the large egg-shaped rocks as big as a man’s head. One of them was cracked open by prospectors searching for geodes of silver or gold.
Today I noticed many of the ant palaces have plants growing near their entrances and I realized this was not accidental. This is a result of the ants intentionally leaving a seed out to germinate. When the plant goes to seed, the ants will only have to carry the seeds a short distance.
The ants by the gate outside the national park made a new pile of stone granules to repair the mound that washed away in the rain after horses and people trampled it. They excavated fine gravel first then formed it into a steep-sided cone to protect the ant palace entrance from floods.
Not far from the ant hill, on the left side of the path, so the morning light illuminated him, was a small silvery blue rattlesnake, maybe a Mojave and not a Western diamondback. He made no sound or move. He pressed himself flat in his pancake posture to be less visible. He seemed not to mind that I mumbled “Hello!” as I stepped around him.
This morning I walked the same path as the day before. Overnight dark rain clouds had blown in from El Golfo, and the air was damp and sweet with the smell of rain and greasewood and wet stones.
On my walk yesterday I didn’t see any turquoise stones but today suddenly almost as soon as I stepped off the trail into the big arroyo I spotted a large turquoise rock right where I’d stepped the day before. The rain brightens the turquoise color but still it seems strange that I saw the stone today but didn’t notice it yesterday. I found a tiny hard turquoise on the road to the Gila Monster Mine. Did someone bring it from the arroyo and drop it there?