I don’t know why I had the impulse to continue walking past the corrals into the palo verde. A better use of my time would have been to go back into the house and begin to make lost parrot posters to hang in the neighborhood. The sun was behind the mountains now and everything was in heavy shadow. I didn’t think she’d gone down below the house but I searched there anyway. I found nothing near the water trough or on the roofs of the outbuildings. I walked farther behind the west side of the old corral into the palo verde trees toward the fence and hikers’ parking lot although I didn’t think she’d be there.
Then straight ahead of me on a lower branch of a big palo verde tree I saw her. It was as if the macaw brought me directly to her. All these months of training my peripheral, unfocused vision to note turquoise in all its shades had helped me spot the lost turquoise and yellow macaw despite the approaching darkness. She had chosen a palo verde tree and a low branch so the hawks and owls could not see her, but I might. She had remained close to the parking lot for the hikers where the cars and human activity would keep the predators away until night fell. She was very anxious to climb onto my arm and held on firmly. She did not try to fly away even when Bill drove up the driveway behind us.
CHAPTER 37
It crossed my mind that I might live on top of a turquoise ledge but I dismissed the thought and now here was evidence again. Recently there was the marble of turquoise where the hole for the power pole had been bored down, and then the sliver of calcite with a splash of turquoise from the ground in front of the gate to the front yard.
I was with Robert looking for possible locations for a house so I went into the old circular corral. At one time it was made the old-fashioned Sonoran way with long mesquite poles stacked and woven together as the ends. I noticed an outcrop of rock.
The rock outcrop must have been covered with dirt those years I kept horses in the round corral. I know I would have noticed the outcrop with the thin streak of turquoise across it. It took seventy or eighty years of horse and cattle hooves pounding the corral ground, which wore away the bluish gray basalt that surrounds the white layers of calcites, to expose the bright spot of turquoise. Here is another turquoise ledge.
By the end of the year I realized there were turquoise ledges right here on this hilltop — out back where I found the malachite or green chalcedony when we buried Dolly. All this time I was thinking about a great ledge of solid turquoise somewhere up the big arroyo in the mountains, while a ledge was here, right under my nose, right under my house.
On the eve of the winter solstice a magical thing: I found a small turquoise stone on the closet floor of my bedroom.
Not long afterward, I was walking down the west side slope below the house to check my trashmidden. I was looking down for trash when I spotted a caliche outcrop that was secreting turquoise of a bright deep blue — no green tones at all. The color was more pure bright blue than any of the turquoise rocks from the big arroyo. This is how the year of walks ends.
On New Year’s Day 2008 I went for a walk to the big arroyo and found more boulders and sand removed with a great deal more damage done to the big arroyo by the man and his machine. Only now, eleven days later, do I feel like writing about it.
I regretted I had not reported the original incident in July — broken foot or no broken foot. The gray basalt and quartzite boulders might have been saved from destruction and the small creatures in underground nests — the lizards, snakes, tortoises and tiny owls — might not have been crushed under the wheels of the machine.
I kept thinking if only I had said something in July; instead I gave in to my misgivings about the indifference and ineptitude of the local county government. A special buffer zone which extended out a mile from the Saguaro National Park might have protected the boulders if I’d acted.
On January 3, I made the first call to report the new damage. The Pima County Environmental Protection Agency office is part of Pima County Development Services. This alone should have prepared me for what followed.
The Pima County EPA informed me they didn’t have jurisdiction over the strip mining of desert arroyos for aggregates no matter how close to the buffer zone of Saguaro National Park. They directed me to the Floodplain Management Division.
Ah yes! I thought. Of course this damage affects the floodplain. The removal of the boulders, rocks and sand accelerated erosion — that lovely mesquite tree whose roots had helped stabilize the sides of the arroyo was about to topple in the next rainstorm because the man and machine had gouged out the rocks and sand at its base. Without the boulders, the runoff flowed faster and there was nothing to slow it — no sandbars to hold the precious rainwater so it could soak in.
A Floodplain Division hydrologist paid the arroyo a visit and reported the damage she found was “not significant.” Now I was beginning to understand why much of the landscape in Pima County looks the way it does — trashed and ruined.
As I was writing this and going about my routine on the morning of January 11, 2008, I had no idea that just outside three of my military macaws had been attacked by owls before dawn.
I had bought Sandino twenty years ago as a mate for my first military macaw, a hen named Paco. My other military macaws were birds I had rescued in one way or other. They are big wonderful birds but they are predominantly green and not as lucrative for sellers as the scarlet or blue and gold macaws. A few years ago breeders in the Tucson area had begun to get rid of them. I felt badly to see the birds go unwanted so in 2003, I bought a pair for $500, from a veteran with Gulf War illness who could no longer keep them. Prophecy Bird came with a mate but she later died.
My nickname for Prophecy Bird was the “Hello Bird” because he was able to say “hello” a dozen different ways in higher or lower tones, faster or slower. Sometimes he allowed me to touch his head or wings — he’d been a pet at one time — he could be quick with his beak but he never behaved aggressively when I went inside his cage. I called him Prophecy Bird because often I heard him talk a great deal; sometimes he conducted both sides of a conversation but I was seldom able to hear clearly what he said.
I bought the other macaws — Bolee and her three chicks — in the spring of 2004 from a local parrot breeder. Bolee’s mate had died the previous year. I really only wanted the hen, Bolee, as a companion for my military macaw Sandino, but the breeder would only sell them as a “package.” Sandino had been without a mate much longer than Prophecy Bird had. I planned to get him a new mate next.
I put Bolee in the six foot by twelve foot aviary with Sandino; and the three youngest birds, Tony, Binny and Sugar, I put in the biggest aviary, the fourteen foot octagon, to be nearby their mother, Bolee. The diameter and height of the aviary saved the lives of the three young macaws the night the owls came.
During the cool weather months I sometimes delayed feeding and watering the birds until the afternoon so I might have the morning hours to write. I went from writing and working on this manuscript to binding a copy of my new novella, Ocean Story, for my sister Wendy on her upcoming birthday January 18.
Finally at around four-thirty that afternoon of January 11, I went out to the aviaries. I noticed something was wrong right away because Prophecy Bird wasn’t there to greet me. I walked over to his aviary and the first thing I saw was a severed foot in the middle of the floor of the cage and a pool of blood. I knew at once it was an owl attack. I was heartsick.