Today, March 5, 2008 I am sixty years old. My mother and I shared this birthday and used to celebrate our birthdays together whenever we could. So I think about her today.
On my walk this morning I found no turquoise in the big arroyo but did find a piece of turquoise rock at the foot of my driveway, near the small outcrop of turquoise in the round corral.
On my walk this morning I kept thinking about the digital camera and taking pictures of the backlit wild flowers and saguaros as I walked. That spoils the walk. And thinking about what things on my walk I will write about later spoils the walk. No camera, no notebook on the walk. What I can’t remember without a notebook, and what I can’t describe without a photo, may come back to me sometime when I’m writing or dreaming.
After I’d been finding the turquoise stones for a while it occurred to me that I should have kept a record of where I found them, bagging each stone and labeling it with the location and date, so if there were a clustering of finds I could focus my search there.
Instead I bring them home and put them on my writing desk, until I write about the walk where I picked them up. I don’t keep them in boxes because I like to see the turquoise rocks together, in the air and light. I can identify many of the pieces when I handle them because I wrote about them.
The walks are my cardiovascular workout so I don’t break the pace of them to slow or linger over an area to try to find special stones. They have to catch my eye despite the pace; I try not to break stride when I pick up the pieces of turquoise. I find that I go into a different state of consciousness when I walk — almost like a trance in which I’m not fully aware of where exactly in the big arroyo I found them.
I read about the trance-walking the Buddhist monks in Tibet used to perform; a tall dark haired white man used to run the Tucson Mountain trails in a trance. I saw him pass by for a couple of years; the local weekly paper did an article about him and then he was gone. Maybe he was training for running in Nepal and needed to live at a higher altitude, say Santa Fe or Albuquerque.
You watch strangers for years and you begin to expect to see them but then they disappear and you wonder what happened. In communities like Laguna-Acoma and the land grant villages, the news always got around and you heard what happened to people you’d seen come and go but didn’t really know. Out here in the wilds of the wider world, people disappear and you never hear of them again.
Old René was a Tohono O’Odom wood seller who came every year, sometimes more often, to sell me loads of mesquite firewood. He was from the village of Santa Ana west of Sonoita, Sonora but it was my impression that he hauled the mesquite from somewhere south of Sasabe. He and I both were happy when he became my exclusive wood seller. He always brought big loads of wood with good-sized pieces, not just small branches and twigs, the way some wood sellers did. Sometimes in the summer he’d appear without warning in my driveway with firewood because he needed cash for some family emergency. Then like now, the people didn’t have a lot of cash; the gambling business of the tribe hasn’t really changed that.
One time he arrived at the bottom of the hill unexpectedly while I was here alone. Right as he honked his truck horn, I was trying to glue a small cherry wood bench I managed to put together from a kit. I had no way to prop up the glued wood and I couldn’t let go until the glue set a bit or it would be ruined. By the time I put down the glued wood and went down the hill, René had already left.
The next time he telephoned, and I bought a two cord load of mesquite. As he unloaded the wood, I noticed a change — he was still a big man but this time he was short of breath and had to stop each time after he threw a few pieces of wood out of the back of the pick-up. I could see his health wasn’t good. He offered to stack the wood for me but I told him I wanted to stack it for the exercise. I always paid him what he asked and that day I didn’t have the right change and neither did he so I told him to keep the $10. I never saw him again.
CHAPTER 39
Sandino seemed to recover from the surgery. I watched him and could not decide if he was energetic or strong enough to play with the toys I had hung inside his cage with him. Sandino had always lived with a mate in a large outdoor aviary, so I had no way of knowing what was normal behavior for him indoors. But he ate well, and I kept my thoughts positive.
I watched his remaining foot closely; if anything happened to the foot a serious parrot disease called bumblefoot might set in as a result. I worried about a small red mark on his foot I noticed in February. I decided I wanted the new vet to take a look.
I called a parrot veterinarian, Dr. Samuels, that my friend Nate recommended. By great good fortune he had a cancellation for the following Monday at eleven a.m. Before he examined Sandino, I explained the owl attacks to Dr. Samuels. When he saw how traumatized and sad the attacks had left me, he was kind enough to respond with this story:
When he first moved to Arizona, he lived near Prescott and raised Amazon parrots in outdoor aviaries. Parrots began to disappear while he was away at work. He lost a number of birds and thought it must be the neighborhood children who were opening the cage doors. One afternoon he returned home early and he caught two red-tail hawks attacking a parrot, trying to pull it out of the cage. It had been the hawks, not neighborhood children, that took his parrots.
The red mark on the macaw’s remaining foot was a callus and meant nothing. But Dr. Samuels weighed Sandino and found the macaw was terribly wasted despite his good appetite and high spirits. He found signs of an infection inside the site of the leg amputation. The vet said the infection inside the leg wound was “devouring” all the nourishment from any food Sandino ate.
I was sick with regret. I delayed the return vet visit so I could focus on the manuscript. Now it sounded and felt to me that my beloved Sandino, dear friend for eighteen years, might die because of my inattention.
Dr. Samuels said he felt cautiously optimistic he could save Sandino. Sandino was in high spirits; I could tell he wanted to live. I told the vet I had a good feeling about the bird’s survival, to go ahead with the surgery.
The vet called me at home when the surgery was completed. Sandino got through the operation just fine although it was in the nick of time because the infection had nearly spread to the bone. He prescribed a different antibiotic than the first vet, and I became an expert at administering the medicine to make certain the macaw took all of it.
Yesterday I walked the trail for the first time in weeks since the loss of the macaws and my periodontal surgery. I was thinking about how many pieces of turquoise I had gathered, so many that they cover even the surfaces of my writing tablet and work areas, but when my eyes caught a glimpse of turquoise I had to pick up the rock. It is intensely turquoise blue green and the size of my thumb, in the shape of a scrotum.
Now with the rain and cooler nights, the seeds of more wild flowers are bound to swell with moisture and sprout. Spring out. The wild flowers are dancers honoring the Sun and the Earth. The white chicory wore a large white hat that honored the white light of the Sun; others were slender green dancers with purple feathery hats. The frilly full dresses of the arroyo lupines required no hats or headdresses. The desert sennas wore flowery masks of white and yellow petals.
Today one of the turquoise rocks leapt from the top of the fireproof file cabinet to the floor. When I picked it up I saw it was the most lifelike of any. When viewed from left to right it looked like the head and neck of a great rattlesnake; when viewed from right to left, it was the head and neck of a great ancient dragon of goodness and great good fortune revered by the old Chinese. I found this piece of turquoise rock at the foot of the driveway, near the turquoise outcropping of the old corral.