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.