CHAPTER 33
After the rainy August dawn comes a blue sunrise — sunlight through blue violet storm clouds from horizon to horizon. Clouds that are as thick as dog fleece or goose down. They are heavy with mists, fogs and gentle rains.
I’m on the front porch with my waterproof notebook paper and waterproof pencil to watch the gentle mist, rain and fog enclose the high mountain peaks to the west.
I’ve got all the buckets out and even a deep ceramic bowl under the front porch eaves where the gutter failed along with nearly everything else that inept handyman once did here. The raindrops ring against the metal buckets and thud on the plastic.
I try to imagine the prayers the runners said along the way in March 2006 as they ran from Hotevila to the carved stone image of Tlaloc in Mexico City.
The rain in the empty metal bucket makes a strange sound, like that of a small human voice vocalizing Ahhahah Ah! Not in pain or distress but maybe in delight and celebration.
I keep watch on the twelve pails, buckets and two big plastic garbage cans I fill with rainwater. My potted plants and trees need the rainwater to wash away the salts and minerals left by the well water. As a child I watched Grandma A’mooh, Aunt Alice and so many others at Laguna who caught and stored rainwater in fifty-five-gallon barrels to drink and to wash their hair with.
The ancient ones are nearby. Sometimes late at night in the wind you can hear them sing or on a long hot summer afternoon you can hear them laughing and talking in the shade. Maybe the old ones that used the concave metates under the big palo verde trees on the hills a thousand years ago, maybe they brought the turquoise up from the big arroyo just as I have.
Six weeks away from the big arroyo and the search for turquoise stones. My eye is on the lookout. This afternoon towering mountains of cumulus clouds, remnants of a Caribbean hurricane, appeared on the horizon.
The little spiders in my studio increased as I spent more time at my desk after I broke my foot. I moved some webs but used a clean dry rag and then left it outside where the spiders might escape overnight. I transferred the spider egg sacs to the rain lily leaves where they may hatch. They seldom bite me and if they do it is because I’ve accidentally squeezed one with my elbow against my writing table.
It’s almost eight weeks to the day since I last walked before I broke my foot. The hurricane rains were lovely last night. This morning the desert is wet — so many shades of green. In the bright sunlight everything that is wet reflects a mirror light. The reds and yellows of the limestone are fluorescent. The bones in my foot feel healed and I can’t resist a walk.
The trail is a beloved friend I realize now. I didn’t know how much I missed it until I started to walk today. I intended to go left and take just a short walk in the arroyo, but my feet wouldn’t leave the trail. The fresh rain breeze in my lungs felt exhilarating. My left foot felt good to be on the trail again. Both feet in contact with the welcoming trail made me feel so alive. Oddly, it was my right ankle that I sprained when I was twelve that protested after the lay-off.
I took my time and kept walking to see what had been going on along the trail while I was laid-up. One ant was out early to see what he could find knocked down or blown in by the wind and rain last night. All around I could hear the calls for celebration and the singing by the cactus wrens and thrashers.
Water was gurgling in the big arroyo where it surfaced then disappeared again below the sand. In other places, water dripped from the rocks and filled sandy basins no larger than my hand.
I saw traces of soapy froth from yucca roots flooded by the heavy rainfall. I was the first human over the trail this morning, but the javelinas had already been down the big arroyo ahead of me. From the darting patterns of their v-shaped tracks and the damp sand and pebbles kicked loose, the javelinas had been dancing there the hour before to celebrate the gorgeous rain.
What an unexpected gift this rain! It means the arroyo may begin to transform the damages the man and his machine caused. I felt an effortless connection with every part of the trail. Even the steep eroded hill by the Thunderbird Mine seemed less rough and difficult than it had been the last time I walked here eight weeks ago.
Since the damage to the big arroyo, I no longer assumed I would find the trail as it was the last time I saw it.
I had to walk more slowly over the unfamiliar terrain left by the heavy rain and runoff. I also very much anticipated what I would see when I reached the place torn up by the man and his machine. After all these years in Tucson, I’m still not accustomed to the way untouched rocks and hills and the living creatures here can be crushed alive by these men and their machines without a second thought.
At the site of the damage the deep ruts left by the machine were partially filled with freshly washed sand and pebbles from the rain. Many of the smaller rocks damaged by the machine had been carried downstream or buried. But the holes left behind by the big boulders that were gouged out by the machine would need far more time to fill in.
I walked a short distance past the damage and found a turquoise rock on the new sandbar left by the flood. The rock fit in my hand like a triangular egg with a turquoise frog shape on it. The rainstorm water had brought this turquoise rock here. I went only a few feet farther and spied another turquoise rock; this rock also fit in my palm, but was flatter and had a layer of turquoise over one end in the shape of a bobcat’s head.
A third piece of turquoise rock I found was the size of a grape with coppery brown rock surrounding the turquoise layer which is shaped like a star.
On this walk I missed seeing the red grinding stone in the middle of the wash but thought perhaps I’d been distracted and overlooked it. I saw deer and coyote tracks at the edges.
The wide ledge of bluestone was more exposed now than ever before. Small pools and basins in the bluestone hold the rainwater. The sand that once covered the bluestone got moved by the water, and accumulated around the boulder and covered up the petroglyph. Somewhere I have a photograph of the petroglyph from twenty years ago before it got buried in sand.
The flood carried away the remains of the poor palo verde tree that had been previously uprooted by vandals, but later a home to wood bees and wood ants. The scent of the catsclaw in blossom and the damp woody stalks and barks drying in the sun give the breeze a wonderful perfume. What blessings this rain and this Earth!
I picked up bits of trash washed down the arroyo by the rain: a plastic dental floss container, a fragment of brown bottle glass, a white paper dust mask. The turquoise “mystery cabochon” I passed up on the trail by the rodent hole then turned back for was actually a wad of blue chewing gum discarded by some park visitor.
The next morning the arroyo was bank to bank with javelina tracks. The air was scented with barks and roots and sweet desert woods and was deliciously cool this second day after the sudden big rain.
Still no red grinding stone. In the runoff flood after the rain it didn’t stand a chance. It must have tumbled end over end with the other rocks and tree roots and debris. Foolishly I had thought the water would go around it and leave it be.
The big arroyo has no attachment to the way things are. The arroyo is the space the water and the boulders and other debris pass through in floods, the space that desert animals and I move through. The space that is the arroyo changes with every flood.
A distance past the old culvert, as I approached the straight stretch of arroyo, I found a turquoise rock the size of a Brazil nut and the shape of a baby sea turtle; a layer of turquoise marked the turtle’s shell.